Worthy Goals At Odds

The genocidal crisis in Sudan stirred remarkable student action this year. Campus groups worked tirelessly, not only to raise awareness—a commendable feat in itself—but to effect change in University policy regarding its investment holdings. While we have not always agreed with various student groups’ methods of calling for Harvard’s divestment from companies like PetroChina—a Beijing-based oil company with strong ties to the Sudanese government—we have always staunchly agreed with their intentions. And as the Harvard Corporation announced in April that it was withdrawing its holdings in the company, a seemingly unachievable goal was achieved. Yet while calling for divestment from PetroChina was certainly appropriate in this situation, there were other times this year when divestment seemed to be the catchword—the cure-all—for Harvard’s complicity, however tangential, to a grave world problem.

Last semester, two Eliot House juniors, Manav K. Bhatnagar ’06 and Benjamin B. Collins ’06, began an online petition for divestment which collected thousands of signatures from students and Faculty. Their efforts stimulated much-needed awareness of genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, where state-sponsored murders are responsible for an estimated 400,000 deaths. A couple of months later, two Harvard seniors launched a controversial campaign, Senior Gift Plus (SGP), and the divestment debate was in full swing.

In a Feb. 18 e-mail, Matthew W. Mahan ’05 and Brandon M. Terry ’05, former presidents of the Undergraduate Council and the Black Men’s Forum respectively, implored the Senior class to consider the gravity of genocide and to do something to stop it. They asked their peers to withhold their donations to Senior Gift, a traditional donation to the Harvard College Fund (HCF) by the graduating class, until the University divested from PetroChina. Their group—called Senior Gift Plus (SGP)—argued that by holding these investments, the University was indirectly complicit for the deaths in Darfur. Thus, any money that students contributed to University coffers was also indirectly supporting the Sudanese genocidal regime.

The seniors who worked so determinedly for SGP had their hearts in the right place; however, their undeniably noble goal worked to the detriment of another great cause—that of ensuring financial aid for future Harvard undergraduates. By treating the two goals as mutually exclusive, the group was effectively forcing Harvard’s graduating class to decide between the two.

Much of what is donated to the HCF goes towards financial aid; indeed, most seniors choose this end specifically. It is imperative that the HCF remain healthy and replenished, as the future of progressive financial aid initiatives—not to mention financial aid itself—depends on it. We discouraged students from withholding their donations from Senior Gift; giving to SGP unfairly hindered the future of financial aid.

However, despite the controversial efforts of groups like SGP, the overwhelming majority of student activists agreed on one thing: Harvard should divest from PetroChina. And, setting aside their differences to join the United Front for Divestment, their ultimate goal finally came to fruition on April 4, when the Corporate Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CSSR), a subcommittee of the Harvard Corporation, announced its plans to divest its more than $4 million holdings in the company. This illustrated what cooperative, organized student efforts can achieve.

But on the heels of such a great victory, we were disappointed with some students’ seeming inability to step down from the spotlight or recognize that hasty calls for further divestment or full disclosure of Harvard’s investments were misguided and counterproductive.

Such students wanted the University to give full disclosure of its overseas investments so that students and Faculty could scrutinize Harvard’s holdings and perhaps pinpoint other companies from whom the University should divest. We disagreed with their demands, as we believe that the Corporation’s decision to divest should give us some faith in their “new spirit of scrutiny” and that we should trust them to “police themselves.”

Demands that the University divest from Sinopec—another Chinese company with ties to Sudan—as well as the formation of Burma Action Movement (BAM), which called for divestment from Unocal, seemed to lack necessary research. The ultimate goal of the groups was clearly a righteous one, but instead of properly investigating the true ties between the respective companies and the oppressive regimes, they seemed to latch onto the success of the divestment campaign. Students should not be overly hasty in their calls for divestment; simply because it was appropriate in the case of PetroChina does not make it so across the board.

Even after Harvard’s pledge to divest, student groups have continued to work diligently toward ending the genocide in Sudan. One notable effort, the “Swipe for Darfur” campaign, was instituted at the close of the semester, allowing students to donate their Crimson Cash to support peacekeepers in Sudan with a “swipe” of their ID card. These measures prove that campus activism is still alive and students can make a difference, as long as they are not too hasty to protest.