Helping South Africa Through Education

To the charge that Harvard's South African internship program will help stifle change by fostering a Black elite, Master of Eliot House Alan E. Heimert '49 sardonically replies, "What's Harvard here for?"

Heimert, the president's special aide on South African affairs, believes that the recently implemented internship program, which would send Harvard students to South African educational institutions, is a logical extension of the university's philosophy of unencumbered scholarship to that nation. For the past five years, the Cabot Professor of American Literature has headed Harvard's South African fellowhip program, which sponsors Black South African scholars at Harvard. In that postition he travels to South Africa several times a year and makes contacts with educators there.

So it seemed to make sense when a committee that is chaired by Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner '54 and controls Harvard's $1 million South Africa aid fund, viewed Heimert as the expert on South African education and sent him there in November to publicize the internship program.

"Most of us don't have a clue about South Africa. We were depending on Professor Heimert for information," said committee member and Lecturer at the School of Public Health Richard A. Cash.

But Heimert's November journey became the center of controversy earlier this month when a report written and researched by the student divestment activist group, the Southern African Solidarity Committee (SASC), lambasted the educational institutions which responded to the professor's solicitation of organizations interested in interns. The report also charged that Heimert failed to meet with Black South African leaders while there.

Yet Heimert says he met with Blacks, but he disagrees with SASC on whom he should meet. Heimert says he consulted with Black educators informing them about the program, pointing to a meeting in Cape Town with Black professors and a meeting with members of the Soweto Parents Council, a community effort to educate Blacks in that segregated township. "I meet with educators," when involved in an educational project, not politicians, Heimerts argues.

"I have very strong questions about seeking the blessing of political organization," Heimert says.

"Heimert unlike many other Americans tried to listen rather than prescribe to us what our political views should be," says James Moulder, director of Public Relations at the University of Cape Town of the master's trips to South Africa.

"It is enormously to Alan Heimert's credit that instead of being an imperial, colonial-minded American by interfering in our politics, he consulted with Black and white South Africans about what Harvard can do," says Moulder, who arranged Heimert's meetings in Cape Town.

Harvard officials view the involvement in South African education as an issue of protecting academic freedom, "It is a dangerous notion to say you are not going to have anything to do on an educational level with other countries," Steiner says.

One concern of several fellow committee members is that the internship program would divert funds from more worthy projects such as expanding the fellowship program. But Heimert, who currently is in South Africa on fellowship business, says anybody who argues that the fellowship program will loose funds "doesn't know a crock of shit."

Heimert avoids expressing his personal opinion on the internship program or or other issues such as divestment by only discussing the facts of his involvement. The professor says the SASC report misconstrued his journey as one planned around visits to only a few, set institutions. He says he merely distributed literature in the hopes South African educators would become aware of the program.

Indeed Heimert claims he didn't personally contact all of the organizations which sent their interested responses to the Office of Career Services (OCS). A list cataloging institutions interested in having Harvard interns that was made available to students at the OCS sparked the SASC report.

Ironically, Heimert has a gripe about SASC, and when he discusses the activists he becomes very adamant. He claims that members acted "unethically" in not identifying themselves when they called him for information about the program. And he says they illegally photocopied a report by a student who worked at a South African private school available in the Eliot House library. "I thought it was illegal to take reserve material out of library," Heimert says of the activists' actions.