Diversifying After Divestment

THOSE who are making protester-bashing au courrant on campus may make for lively dinnertable conversation, but they don't make much sense. My editorial colleague Jeffrey C. Norhaus is a case in point.

In a recent column, "Divesting of Divestment," Nordhaus chides Harvard's activists for failing to keep up the fight even though Harvard has not fully divested and apartheid is still in force.

Nordhaus' explanation of this paradox just doesn't hold up. He suggests that when the "sun stopped shining on the divestment issue," protesters--who "lack moral conviction"--"dropped their beliefs" and moved en masse to "a newer and more chic cause," namely the drive of Harvard clerical and technical workers to unionize.

Give it a break, Jeff. Protesters are not "like birds ... who like nothing more than to flock together," and who flit from issue to issue in search of the chic-est cause. Activists are thinking people who, for the most part, ascribe to a broad left-wing agenda. Their personal political concerns may range from union organizing, to feminism, to national self-determinism in the third world, to civil rights struggles here at home.

IN ADDITION to misrepresenting activists, Nordhaus woefully misunderstands activism. The primary impulse for activism is to gain results, not chicness. With protesting as with voting, people become active when they believe they can make a difference.

The divestment movement spread like wildfire across the country for this simple reason. It brought together thousands of students and other people, not only because of the moral force of the issue, but because it promised a chance to affect change.

The divestment issue offered a clear-cut moral issue along with a clear-cut populist strategy. Dramatic campus protest generated media interest and catapulted the issue into the national consciousness.

And the movement was highly successful. It did not bring down apartheid, but many universities, including Harvard, divested from companies that did business in South Africa. Many companies did, in fact, pull out of South Africa. The U.S. Congress imposed economic sanctions, and many state legislatures divested pension funds.

Today, the South African regime has made some minor reforms, and remains under world-wide criticism.

HOWEVER apartheid has not died, although the movement has. This is not because activists got bored and moved on to the next sexy issue, but rather because campus protest became ineffective. Once some universities and corporations divested and pulled out, campus protests understandably cooled and then faded from the news. Unfortunately, the old media-grabbing tactics had failed to produce the broad-based student support that would have been necessary to perpetuate a campus movement in the absence of TV cameras.

After the Duke Kent-Brown incident here last year, activists, under fire from the administration, and increasingly unpopular with students, realized that they were banging their heads against a wall. So they stopped.

They did not "quickly drop their beliefs." Nobody has forgotten about South Africa. But for the moment, former divestment activists are working elsewhere--from the Dukakis campaign, to the Redcliffe Women's Center, to the Tent City support group, to the AIDS forum, to, yes Jeff, the clerical and technical workers' union drive.

Divestment protesters have split up only to work on other, equally vital issues, where they believe they can make a difference. Many of them aren't working any less hard than they were before, although their chicness may have suffered.

Perhaps one day, American students will see a way to do more to end apartheid. Until then, concerned students will have to satisfy themselves with helping homeless people, raising AIDS awareness, fighting for the empowerment of Harvard's clerical and technical workers, and electing a Democratic president. And these are not paltry causes.