Forced to withdraw
While Harvard generates liberal thought, it also generates cold hard cash. Harvard’s endowment surpassed the billion-dollar mark in 1970 and has increased twenty-fold since. The University’s practice of aggressive and creative investment, though, has often garnered criticism from the liberal-leaning student body and faculty. Protests and divestment campaigns began in the 1960s when the University founded the Harvard Management Corporation and diversified its assets into stocks and property. The campaigns have ranged from a 20-year, public effort to force the University to divest unconditionally from companies with ties to the apartheid government in South Africa, to innumberable small campaigns for the University to divest its holdings in companies like Playboy and in military contractors.
Currently, students and professors are calling for Harvard to divest its holdings in a Chinese oil utility, PetroChina, that does business with the government in Sudan. Historically, Harvard has dragged its moneyed feet on divestment; in fact, a campaign has never actually led to full divestment. But Harvard has responded to pressure to divest from irresponsible assets, such as holdings in tobacco companies.
Desegregation:
Student civil rights activists suggest that Harvard should divest its $590,000 of Mississippi Light and Power Company bonds and its $12 million in Middle South Utilities Company stock, as both companies have segregated facilities and discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. The University rebuffs the suggestion, leading to student condemnation of President Nathan M. Pusey ’28. Students also protest the University’s holdings in General Motors and several utilities companies accused of polluting.
Rights in Nigeria:
Hafsat D. Abiola ’96, daughter of the democratically-elected president of Nigeria, calls on President Neil L. Rudenstine and the Undergraduate Council to support a campaign for the University to divest from Nigeria. The UC, dozens of professors, and several student organizations support her efforts. Abiola calls for divestment when the Nigerian military junta, which seized the country in 1993 and imprisoned Abiola’s father, hangs 11 activists, including Nobel Peace Prize nominee Ken Saro-Wiwa. Harvard keeps its holdings in Nigeria, including $35 million in Shell Oil, a participant in business with Nigeria’s military junta and a knowing pollutant in many countries in West Africa.
Israel and Palestine:
65 Harvard faculty members, including two house masters, sign a petition to President Lawrence H. Summers, calling on Harvard and M.I.T. to sell their $620 million in the stocks of companies that do business in Israel. 300 Harvard professors sign a petition that urges President Summers to continue to invest in Israel. In October, Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz accuses Winthrop House Master Paul D. Hanson, who signed the divestment petition, of anti-semitism and challenges him to a debate on the subject; Hanson declines and Dershowitz calls him a bigot in front of a group of 200 students in a Winthrop common room. President Summers calls the divestment plan “anti-Semitic in [its] effect if not [its] intent” and refuses to entertain the idea of divestment.
Environmentalism:
Responding to criticism of Harvard’s holdings in General Motors, which uses discriminatory hiring and has a poor environmental record, President Pusey establishes the University’s first committee on shareholder responsibility. In response to protests over Harvard’s investments in 1972, President Derek C. Bok establishes the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ASCR) and the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR). The ASCR includes members of the faculty and student body and delivers a yearly report to the CCSR, which decides the University’s proxy shareholder votes and advises on divestment.
Anti-Apartheid:
Students first call for the University to divest from Angola and South Africa, beginning 20 years of continual protests of Harvard’s investment in companies that support racist governments.
In May, 1972, 34 members of the Pan-African Liberation Movement stage a takeover of Mass. Hall in protest of Harvard’s holdings in Gulf Oil, which supports the military regime in Angola. The takeover galvanizes the South African divestment campaign. In 1977, 2000 students block the entrance to University Hall in protest; in 1986, 200 divestment activists erect a shanty town and a symbolic ivory tower in the yard. The ACSR petitions for divestment from South Africa regularly between 1972 and 1990.
In 1979, the Corporation denounces the South African apartheid system as “repugnant and inhumane” but announces that it will employ a system of proxy voting for partial divestment, asking the companies in which it invests to withdraw from South Africa. The Corporation rules out complete divestment as a “relatively ineffective means of pursuing ethical ends”; President Bok expresses reluctance to use the endowment as a political tool. The fight over divestment extends to the Board of Overseers and the Corporation, Harvard’s governing boards; professors, student groups, and alumni associations petition for the election of pro-divestment members.
The University receives wide-spread criticism when Nobel Peace Prize winner and South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu publicly endorses three pro-divestment candidates for the Board of Overseers in 1986 and tells the Boston Globe that he will return his honorary degree if the University does not divest. Tutu resigns from the board in 1992.
Sudanese Genocide :
A Crimson news article on October 25 reveals that Harvard invests in a Chinese oil company, PetroChina, with ties to Sudan. In response, Benjamin B. Collins ’06 and Manav K. Bhatnagar ’06 start a divestment petition, online at www.harvarddivest.com, asking for the University to dump its PetroChina stock.
Collins and Bhatnagar write in an email, “Harvard needs to take the lead in putting financial pressure on the Sudanese government to stop the genocide in Darfur. With the largest endowment of any University in the world, when Harvard invests, people listen. The message of legitimacy Harvard sends by investing in a company like PetroChina that does business with the Sudanese government is not one we want our University to be sending.”
Collins and Bhatnagar believe that there is a “clear and overwhelming” moral case for divestment and cite Harvard’s commitment to socially responsible investing. “We also hope that the petition will help raise awareness not only about the local issue of Harvard’s responsibility to invest ethically, but also about the $90 billion that private American citizens, mutual funds and institutional investors currently have invested in companies linked to the Sudanese government.”
In the two weeks the petition has been online, over 40 faculty members and 200 students have signed.
Start Your Own Campaign
Idealism won’t get you far in convincing Harvard to divest. The University already has an internal watchdog to ensure that Harvard invests in responsible companies and presidents since Nathan Pusey have balked at the idea of politicizing the endowment. But for persistent idealists, try these steps.
1. Rally public opinion and get your facts in order.
Enraged students, enraged professors and a call for action are the primary ingredients in a successful divestment campaign. But know whether other endowments or shareholders have divested and whether Congress has raised the issue. Find a specific, compelling reason why Harvard should divest rather than express its concerns in shareholder proxy votes (e.g., your money supports a white supremacy).
2. Gain publicity, legitimacy, the ear of the president.
Make the issue an issue by gaining the support of the public and publicly respected Harvard professors. Intellectual celebrities help legitimize and strengthen students’ complaints in the eyes of the bureaucrats upstairs. (For example: Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu wants you to divest, too. We’ll sit in this doorway until you notice.)
3. Get the Committees to agree with you.
The Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR) issues an annual report on Harvard’s holdings and decides Harvard’s vote in shareholder proxy meetings. Every year, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), a 12-member panel with four student members, issues a report to the CCSR, recommending proxy votes and raising ethical issues. The CCSR often disagrees with the ACSR’s recommendations. But raising an issue via the ACSR, created as an outlet for students to voice opinion on the endowment, is the best way to catch the attention of the people who control the cash.
4. Make Harvard divest!
Get professors, public intellectuals, students and Committees on your side and the University just may divest.