Abdication On South Africa

ALTHOUGH THE CORPORATION'S responsiveness to opinion in the University community remains dubious at best, tonight's Corporation open hearing on South African investments should at least provide a useful forum for pointing out the gross shortcomings of the recent report on the issue released by the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR). The report, issued after nearly five months of highly secretive deliberations by a committee which ostensibly represents the University community, can only be viewed as a holding action by a group unwilling to establish the guidelines of social and moral responsibility needed to bring an end to Harvard's financial support of apartheid in South Africa.

The Corporation has understandably been quick to praise the ineffectual and noncommital ACSR for its "thoughtfulness" and "willingness to compromise" in an investment report that itself called for "caution, restraint and tolerance." But it remains highly doubtful that the Corporation is even considering committing Harvard to a public demonstration of real shareholder responsibility. Indeed, one must question the motives of the Corporation in calling a public hearing which only two of the seven Corporation members even plan to attend. The cavalier, no-show attitude of the individuals who have the final say on investment decisions belies the Corporation's claim that it takes seriously student opinion on this crucial issue.

Nevertheless, members of the University community should attend tonight's hearing to speak their minds, educate themselves, and drive home to the token Corporation presence that Harvard's participation in the oppression of South Africa's blacks, through investments in more than 60 portfolio companies, is absolutely unconscionable.

In its report, the ACSR does little more than present the alternatives the Corporation may choose to adopt in dealing with portfolio companies operating in South Africa. By refusing to urge Harvard to help speed the withdrawal of these companies from South Africa, the committee turns a deaf ear on the will of the majority of Harvard's undergraduates--a will clearly expressed through a variety of petitions, demonstrations, House, freshman and organizational votes. Harvard students are joined in their demands by a host of national and international groups, ranging from the NAACP to the Congressional Black Caucus to the U.N. General Assembly. Most reprehensibly, however, the ACSR has chosen to consciously ignore the will of South Africa's black population itself; almost every black student organization and leader not yet banned from South Africa--and those remaining are the moderate groups by almost any standard--has called upon U.S. corporations to leave South Africa now.

The ACSR report makes recommendations that for several reasons fall far short of any reasonable, justifiable stand against companies supporting apartheid. First, the report focuses on the support U.S. firms give the apartheid system through the labor practices they employ in South Africa. While racist labor policies certainly constitute a significant aspect of American corporate complicity in apartheid, they divert attention from the bigger issues of U.S. corporate involvement. U.S. corporations employ a total of less than 1 per cent of the South African black labor force, so any improvement in American labor practices will have virtually no effect on the great mass of South African blacks. The ACSR almost completely disregards the larger, more overarching ways in which these companies provide crucial support to the Vorster government, by supplying strategic materials, technological know-how, tax revenues and much-needed foreign reserves.

Instead of committing itself to any set of criteria for gauging the support Harvard's portfolio companies give to apartheid, the ACSR only suggests that such criteria be established in the future and that the right of companies to stay in South Africa be judged against such guidelines on an individual basis. This crucial evaluation is to be done by non-existent staff with non-existent resources employing non-existent criteria. The whole point of an advisory committee on shareholder responsibility is to make evaluations of this sort--not merely to state that someone, somehow, should undertake the task. The ACSR report only pushes the question off into the future, allowing the Corporation to do little or nothing concrete this time around to help move U.S. firms towards withdrawal. The report amounts to little more than an abdication of responsibility by the ACSR, freeing the Corporation to adopt any course of action it desires.

WHILE THE ACSR CONTINUES only to call for still further study, South African blacks each day face arbitrary arrest, torture, poverty-level wages and the complete and systematic denial of fundamental civil and political liberties. Meanwhile the white supremacist South African minority, under the tutelage of the reprehensive Vorster government, daily grows more entrenched. Harvard students, faculty, alumni and employees opposed to apartheid must now redouble their efforts in the face of Harvard's carefully contrived institutional intransigence. The Corporation appears ready once again to second-guess its advisory committee in adopting a policy even more socially retrograde than that recommended. The University community must express its rejection of Harvard's dilatory tactics, which amount to nothing more than ongoing complicity in South African repression.