Workers Install Plaque to Engelhard

Workers Friday put up a controversial plaque commemorating Charles W. Engelhard in the Public Affairs Library at the Kennedy School of Government.

The black, engraved plaque states that the library is given by the Engelhard Foundation in memory of Charles W. Engelhard. Engelhard was an American industrialists with heavy investments in South Africa.

K-School administrators had originally promised to name the library after Engelhard, but never officially named it.

Students had protested the proposed naming since the dedication of the new K-School building in October. They said Harvard should not honor a man who had made public statements condoning apartheid in South Africa, and demanded that the K-School renounce publicly any connection to Engelhard, rescind its agreement with the Engelhard Foundation, and return the foundation's $1 million donation.

Graham T. Allison Jr. '62, dean of the school, said the wishes of the Engelhard Foundation and family had to be respected in the negotiations. When students and the foundation agreed that the library should be named in Engelhard's memory but not after him, Allison went along.

The students who negotiated the compromise "had no ambition to harm the donor, the donor's interests, the school, or the students who had made the original protest and consequently came to regard all sides of the proposition, even though they may have felt the protestors' demands were the appropriate resolution," Allison said last week.

"The resolution recognizes the concerns of the students while rejecting their demands," he added.

He said that the plaque would prominently and honorably display Engelhard's name