Divestment Activists Stymied at Meetings

Divestment advocates turned their attention and activity toward the Board of Overseers this year only to discover that the democratic governing body--elected by the University's alumni--makes its decisions behind yet another set of closed doors.

A proposal asking Harvard to divest from its stocks in all companies doing business in South Africa reached the floor of the Board in December, was diverted to a committee meeting in February, and prompted the creation of an unprecedented joint panel composed of overseers and members of the seven-man Corporation in April. The Board has yet to vote on the proposal itself.

And with the creation of that special committee, the Board will not vote on divestment for at least year.

The series of maneuvers to avoid an Overseers' vote on divestment has in many ways demonstrated the wide gap between the University community--whether student protesters, faculty dissenters or overseers--and the inner core that makes most major policy decisions. The gap is especially evident to those divestment activists who hoped to use positions on the Board of Overseers to force the University to sell its South Africa holdings.

"There have been several major issues going on on campus this year in which the decision rested with the president or the [Overseers] Executive Committee, and these have revealed in some ways the way in which power is centralized in the University," said Overseer Gay W. Seidman '73, who was elected on an alternative slate of pro-divestment candidates.

"Nothing has changed," she said, "it is just more obvious how little the administration is responsible to anyone outside a very small group."

Beginning three years ago, Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Against Apartheid (AAA) used petitions to offer candidates against the traditional University-sponsored slate of 10; five overseers are elected each year, for six-year terms. Seidman was elected in 1986. Last year, Peter H. Wood '64 and Consuela M. Washington of the HRAAA slate joined Seidman on the Board.

In a much-anticipated move, Wood presented a proposal calling for total divestment at the Board's December meeting. After the meeting, Board President Samuel C. Butler '51 said that the Overseers would likely consider the proposal for total divestment at the February meeting.

The idea of a direct vote on divestment met with strong disapproval from several overseers, administrators and members of the Corporation--the body which sets the University's investment policy--who said that an unsolicited recommendation to the Corporation from the Board was improper.

This question about the propriety of an independent Overseers vote on divestment is but the latest phase of a continuing discussion about how Harvard is governed. (Technically, every action of the Corporation must be approved by the Overseers, although in recent memory the Board has acted as a rubber-stamp body.)

Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner '54 and Secretary to the Governing Boards Robert Shenton flew around the country in the months before the vote--visiting nearly 20 of the 30 overseers--to raise their concerns with a direct vote on the issue and to propose possible alternatives. The agenda for the February meeting, set by the Executive Committee of the Overseers, did not include a vote.

Instead the Board charged one of the body's permanent committees to decide how the Overseers should consider the question of divestment. In March, the standing committee decided that board members should present their views at the April meeting of the Board but not take a vote--formal or informal.

According to board members present at the meeting, although most overseers participated in the discussion there was no consensus reached on how the Board should act. The University currently practices "selective divestment," handling each investment on a case-by-case basis. Harvard has approximately $200 million invested in companies that do business with South Africa.

In addition, the Board's Standing Committee on Institutional Policy recommended to the full Board that a special panel be formed of Corporation members and overseers to investigate the issues raised by divestment and report back to each of the governing bodies.

After the Board agreed to these recommendations in April, Butler said that he would accept nominations for the joint committee; although the Executive Committee--chaired by Butler--retained ultimate decision-making authority. The three petition candidates nominated each other and Overseer Gerald E. Thomas '51, a visiting scholar in the Southern Africa department at Yale University.

The committee--chosen at the beginning of May--does not include any of the four, prompting the petition candidates to charge that the Executive Committee was not receptive to their suggestions. Butler responded by saying he did not think the petition candidates--or Thomas, who favors divestment--were in a position to take a fresh look at the issue.

On the question of divestment, the five overseers on the joint committee--who will be joined by three Corporation members--roughly break down to two in favor of divestment, and three opposed, according to Butler. The Corporation members all oppose divestment.

Though divestment activists were disappointed by the composition of the committee, they hope that it will decide in favor of divestment. "Even though I am a little skeptical about the purpose and membership of the committee, it can do some good," said HRAAA Executive Director Dorothee E. Benz '87. "Who knows? Maybe they will even make the decision finally to divest."

Recently, ativists have sought access to the committee. Seidman, who is a sociology doctoral candidate researching a dissertation on South Africa, said she hoped that either she or Thomas would have the opportunity to make a presentation to the joint committee. Seidman said if they were not invited, the panel should hear from South African exiles. "It's upsetting to me that there's no one on the committee who knows anything about South Africa or about the region. They're going to have to learn a lot of basic things."

Several of the divestment overseers and activists on campus are also pushing for the joint committee to hold open hearings on campus. Noah M. Berger '89 said that he and other members of the South African Solidarity Committee (SASC) wrote a letter two weeks ago to Geyser University Professor Henry Rosovsky, the Corporation co-chair of the joint committee.

In a written response to SASC, Rosovsky refused to meet personally with the students or to discuss their demands, but said he would forward their letter to the full committee when it next met. Berger said that his organization would contnue to push for access to the joint committee if it failed to act on the letter.

The difficulties in having the Board vote directly on divestment has prompted the petition candidates themselves to look for more long-term means of opening up Harvard's method of governace. Seidman said that she is disturbed by the power of the nine-member Executive Committee, which sets the agenda for meetings and makes special decisions such as choosing the membership for the joint committee.

The Executive Committee is made up of the president of the Board and the chairmen of the standing committees, who are chosen by the president and the other committee members. There is no real opportunity to nominate new members to the committee, Seidman said, adding that she thought this process leads to a closed committee with few women and minorities.

Overseer Jane C. Bradley '49, the only woman currently serving on the Executive Committee, said having that key committee reflect the ratioes of the Board as a whole is an important long-term goal. "I think that the University is quite considerate of women and minorities in every decision it makes, but you have to keep pushing," she said.

The Executive Committee also does not include any overseers who have publicly expressed support for the divestment movement. The committee's agreement on divestment is made more striking as the Board becomes more preoccupied by Harvard's links to South Africa.

"As the number of overseers with dissenting opinions is increasing, the decision not to include them is becoming more obvious," said one overseer, who asked not to be identified.

Wood said that not only the Executive Committee but the entire Board should be more open. The Gilbert Committee on the Structure and Function of the Board of Overseers, which met in 1978 and wrote that the role of the Overseers was to reflect "the considered judgements of an enlightened society."

But the reality does not meet this ideal in Wood's view. "Meeting with these people is like riding through the peasantry of Paris, going to Versailles and sitting down with a group of courtiers who are not in touch with the commoners," he said.

Wood stressed that a more open Board would not be contrary to the basic principles under which it was created. "There is no real reason to be so closed as to be really out of touch," he said. "There is nothing that precludes us from taking votes, nothing that says that the minutes of the meeting can't be public."

The problem of a closed Board could be changed by an increase in the electorate, Wood said. Currently only about 25 percent of the alumni vote in Overseer elections. If this percentage were increased, Wood said, it would make the Board more liberal and would give the overseers a feeling of resposibility to the community as a whole.

"I'm sure that there are hundreds of potential voters who are alienated to the right, but for every one of these there's got to be 10 to the left," Wood said. "Now the candidates are primarily nominated from within the University, and they feel no real responsibility to the outside community. They are filled with gratitude rather than responsibility."