Student ACSR Recommends Support for Angola Resolution

The Student Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility recommended unanimously Friday that Harvard support a shareholder resolution to have Exxon establish a broad-based committee to study the implications of its proposed investment in Angola, for the company and for the Angolan people.

Exxon plans to look for oil off the coast of Angola, the Portuguese colony on the west coast of Africa, north of Namibia. Activists--including black students who occupied Massachusetts Hall for a week last Spring in an unsuccessful attempt to force Harvard to sell its stock in Gulf Oil--have accused American corporations with investments in Angola of helping to maintain Portuguese rule there.

Harvard owns about $20 million worth of Exxon stock. Exxon's annual meeting is May 17, and the company's shareholders will vote on the Angola resolution--sponsored by the Church Project on U.S. Investments in Southern Africa, a coalition of Protestant denominations--at that time.

The student-faculty-alumni Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) and the Corporation's sub-committee on shareholder responsibility, which votes the University's stock, have yet to take a stand on Angola.

"We supported the resolution for the same reasons we'd like American firms to get out of Namibia," Joel W. Motley '74, the chairman of the Student ACSR, said yesterday. "We don't think the interest of the corporation always coincides with the public interest, so we'd like them to look into their impact on the Angolan people."

The Student ACSR is the elected group which chose the two undergraduate representatives to the full ACSR. Its recommendations are binding on the two undergraduates, Martin J. Auerbach '73 and John J. Hogan '73.