Pull Out From ACSR

Students who forced the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) to hold an open meeting on April 19th last year need to follow up that and other efforts to force Harvard to withdraw its investments in companies that operate in South Africa. The call for a boycott of the ACSR is especially timely.

In the first place, last spring the ACSR voted to a deadlock of 6 to 6 on the question of total divestment. The ACSR's internal division is a good excuse for the Harvard Corporation to ignore the ACSR. Pragmatically speaking, further efforts in such a deadlocked situation are futile. The 12-member ACSR is appointed by president Bok--four students, four faculty and four alumni.

The second point about last spring is that the ACSR did vote for divestiture from companies that do not abide by the Sullivan Principles, a minimal code of ethics for firms doing business in South Africa. According to ACSR representative Claude Convisser '84, the vote was 12-0, not 10-2 as reported in the Gazette. Still, Harvard did not divest from companies that have not signed the cosmetic Sullivan Principles, so that even if the ACSR were to gain agreement on the more significant issue of total divestiture it is unlikely that this would work to make the Corporation divest. In fact, Bok repeated at South House recently that Harvard would never divest.

Indeed, Bok's intransigence is the reason that the ACSR had to even vote on the Sullivan Principles. By March 24, 1978, a few months after Reverend Sullivan formulated his code of "ethics" for business in South Africa, the ACSR had already recommended Harvard's enforcement of the Sullivan Principles. On page seven of his open letter of April 1978, Derek Bok said the Harvard Corporation would uphold the Sullivan Principles as recommended by the ACSR. The reason that the ACSR had to make that same recommendation again in 1983 is that Derek Bok had lied. The Harvard Corporation never actually carried out the ACSR's recommendation as promised by Bok.

In the spring of 1983, I accidentally discovered that Harvard has and has had investments in companies that did not even sign the Sullivan Principles. There are at least nine such investments totalling $45 million out of $46 million invested in apartheid.

Briefly, the role of the ACSR delegate is to be appointed by the Corporation; to engage in secret meetings; to vote for the first time on total divestiture in 1983; to be deadlocked; to be manipulated by Derek Bok; and to make recommendations concerning the Sullivan Principles--recommendations ignored by a crafty Corporation that always hopes to ride out harmless candlelight marches. Practically speaking, the ACSR is a cooptation of the anti-apartheid movement.

At least since the days of SDS in the late '60s, students have demanded divestiture--most forcefully when some Pan-Africanist students took over Massachusetts Hall in 1972. By now everyone should recognize that the Corporation is intransigent--so intransigent that Derek Bok merely reprinted his statements of 1978 in the Gazette in the spring of 1983. If students are serious about divestiture, they are going to have to exert power by boycotting the ACSR, by supporting the Endowment for Divestiture, by holding protests at alumni fund drives on campus, by gaining alumni endorsements, by boycotting classes, by picketing administration buildings and by otherwise being as uncooperative as possible. If Harvard really intends an ACSR that is more than a smokescreen, it will have to give in.

Henry C. Park is a senior, affiliated with Quincy House.