Corporate Cowardice

THE DECISION of several Harvard Corporation members to "reconsider" the University's total ban on investments in banks that loan money to South Africa is an unfortunate and ugly retreat from one of the University's only ostensible attempts to combine morality with high finance.

By altering the policy to permit loans to South Africa for "humanitarian" purposes, the Corporation's now inadequate policy would become totally inapplicable in all situations. The South African government, well aware of the storm of protest its loan requests create, would certainly only dare ask for loans for the most humanitarian of purposes. These "humanitarian" loans would then free South African credit for other, more sinister purposes.

The Corporation's supposed change-of-heart comes only weeks after the three-year-old investment ban first resulted in a sale. The Corporation's readiness to "reassess" a policy it has invoked only once sadly implies that the University never intended the policy to be used in the first place.

The Corporation's recent rumblings of retreat--combined with its willingness to abstain on South-Africa-related shareholder resolutions because of petty qualms about language and feasibility--reflect a larger, even more disturbing trend. Apparently, the Corporation is attempting to seize the opportunity afforded by a lull in student activism to withdraw the sole concessions it made under fire in 1978, when more than 3000 students took to the streets to demand divestiture.

If members of the Corporation are as committed to majority rule in South Africa as they say they are, they should not look backward, but ahead--to what new, more stringent limitations they can impose on Harvard's investments in apartheid. If Harvard cannot support "generally desirable" shareholder resolutions introduced by other groups because of what one Corporation member described as "poor wording," then perhaps Harvard should introduce some resolutions of its own.

Corporation members may say they need a reassessment because the present policy fails to differentiate between loans to the police and military and humanitarian loans, which it would be morally wrong to oppose. Not only were Corporation members aware of this difference when they first adopted the policy to appease student protesters, but they knew all to well that money loaned to South Africa cannot possibly be "differentiated."

Corporation members recently claimed to be unable to provide an estimate for how much money Harvard lost on its Citibank sale. "You simply can't trace a single dollar through Harvard's portfolio," Lawrence F. Stevens '65, secretary to the Corporation's Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, said last week.

So it is doubly ironic that these same Corporation members now say they can trace dollars through South Africa's portfolio. The Corporation should take the only honest and "humanitarian" step--complete divestiture of stock in companies that do business in South Africa.