The Endowment What's Good for GM

THE General Motors controversy, like most of Harvard's other problems, is what the University likes to term a misunderstanding. As George F. Bennett '33, Treasurer of the College, jockeyed around the issue last week, you could almost hear the sigh ringing under his breath: "If you kids knew what we knew."

There is little doubt that in the matter of Harvard's $1 billion endowment. Bennett knows more about investment and proxies than any student in the college. With appropriate savoir faire, he pulled out figures on General Motor's research and social awareness that sound convincing at first. But beneath Bennett's confidence that his decision to vote Harvard's 287,000-share proxy with the management next May is the right one, there are a few clanks in the ringing rhetoric.

Bennett insists that the Nader-supported challenge to GM pits an over-publicized auto-safety crusader against a little understood big business-GM. On the public relations front, we are to believe, as James Shattuck, Harvard's assistant treasurer, said, "Corporations have communicated what they have done about pollution very poorly. This doesn't mean that they haven't been making any effort. They just didn't think anyone was interested in reading these reports."

With an advertising budget last year of $240 million (more than ten times its research budget), GM should have little trouble spanning the PR gap. Nader has been after them for five years trying to get the GM management to emphasize safety and environment in their research and public image. Perhaps the problem is that GM itself wasn't interested in reading its reports.

Of the $125 million GM said it devoted to research and development in the last three years, a company spokesman admitted about half went to a research staff of 500 working on new discoveries in those years.

Most of GM's actual research goes toward devising "gadgets" to curb hydro-carbon and carbon-monoxide emissions on the company's internal combustion engine. Automotive experts have admitted that the internal combustion engine will always be a pollutant and will have to be replaced before the air can be cleaned. But GM and most of the other leading auto companies have committed themselves to it-understandably, since it's their current product. Only a very small part of their research budget has gone, to date, into developing alternative engines to replace it.

Based on a nifty little PR job itself-the GM annual report for 1969-Bennett has repeated time and again his "trust" in the GM management to handle the environment problem. When you get into statistics, however, it's a little hard to play the game with a straight face. GM has long had the worst record of the Big Three in 1) auto safety (they brought you the Corvair); 2) pollution control (35 per cent of the nation's entire-not just automotive-pollution tonnage comes from GM); and 3) hiring of minority workers (of GM's 13,000 national new car franchises, only seven belong to non-whites).

THE supporting argument Bennett dredges out is one of the responsiveness of the market: GM must be doing a pretty good job, otherwise people wouldn't buy so many of their cars. What Bennett forgets is that there aren't a whole lot of alternatives. When a company shells out $240 million on advertising, they do as much to mold the buyer to the car they're offering as they do molding the car to the buyer. The market-especially the automotive market-has become so much a Pavlovian responder to Detroit-dictated style consciousness, that only the source of the problem can change the public's expectations by offering new safer models.

And, in the case of GM, only this stockholders' challenge can strike a chord of response in the company that for three years has continually opposed and delayed public efforts to make cars safer and healthier.

Bennett disagrees, of course, not only with the Campaign GM criticisms of management, but with the whole tactic of a stockholders' challenge on social issues. This is the first proxy challenge of its kind that he has been forced to vote on. Although a legitimate business maneuver. Bennett simply doesn't approve. "As a matter of procedure, we can be more persuasive by being friendly than by getting into a proxy fight and trying to snap the corporate whip." he said.

As a matter of procedure, he may be right. But Harvard is one out of 15 million stockholders, and GM's past record makes one seriously question what effect Harvard has previously had on the company's policies through friendliness.

Supporters of either side of the GM proxy fight may well question what effect Harvard's 287,000 shares will have on a proxy vote involving 284 million shares. Campaign GM does not, realistically, expect to win its fight with the management. Their nine resolutions, though feasible, are intended as a demonstration of the scope of GM's opportunities in the funtre rather than as an immediate program of action. What they want to show, and what Harvard now has an opportunity to help point out is the way GM should be thinking in the '70's.

If Harvard joins the proxy hold-outs, it will not risk its financial security by decreasing its dividend returns. It will pave the way for all Ivy colleges, who together own over 600,000 shares of GM stock, to also join the hold-outs. A Harvard vote against the GM management could provide the impetus necessary to push GM into a more responsible attitude toward the public. It may, after the shock passes through Massachusetts Hall, even be good for GM. And, after all, what's good for General Motors is supposed to be good for the country.