Harvard and The Low-Down On Investments

First there was the Corporation subcommittee. Any day now there should be an ACSR. And Thursday Harvard joined nine other colleges and several foundations in the Investor Responsibility Research Center (IRRC), which will help institutions gather information on their responsibilities as shareholders.

Stephen B. Farber '63, special assistant to President Bok, will be the chairman of the IRRC's board of directors. Farber suggested the establishment of the organization last June after a Spring of protests here and at other universities against controversial investment policies.

The demands of one such protest were more than met Thursday when Cornell president Dale R. Corson announced that Cornell no longer holds Gulf Oil stock. Black students at Cornell, as at Harvard, had occupied a building to protest Gulf's involvement in the Portuguese colony of Angola.

But Robert T. Horn, Cornell's associate treasurer, said Thursday that the major reason for selling the stock was that "we thought that it was a very good time to sell from financial standpoint."

Cornell is one of the nine schools in the IRRC, which Farber said Wednesday also has provisional commitments from several other colleges, many of them small institutions not rich enough to finance much information-gathering of their own.

The new organization's staff of four will issue reports on the issues in proxy fights or other matters of concern to members, but it will not make recommendations, and each member will continue to make its own decision: