ACSR Report: Is It a Sham?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Judging from the account in the Crimson's January 26 issue, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility seems a curious thing. The ACSR argues that introducing shareholder resolutions to companies operating in South Africa should be a "last resort" action because, in the words of one of its members, "More good comes from working with companies than in shooting off a rocket and having nothing left we can do." In order to identify the proper way to take such a momentous step as a shareholder resolution, the ACSR distinguishes between "action" and "information" resolutions. The ACSR considers the former, which asks companies to take steps to further racial progress in South Africa, "relatively ineffective." The latter type--considerably more effective we are to infer, and thus the ACSR's preferred type of shareholder resolution--merely asks for more information from companies operating in South Africa about what they're doing there. But the ACSR hasn't told us what it plans to do with all this information which it will accumulate.

In fact, its distinction between "action" and "information" resolutions suggests that it never plans to do anything. However, one would think that the idea of shareholder responsibility meant asking a company to stop doing something that one doesn't like or asking it to do something that one thinks it should do. But the ACSR isn't about to shoot off a rocket. Imagine, the ACSR turns out to be a group charged, in the name of shareholder responsibility, with the solemn task of endlessly gathering information from obliging corporate officials. Perhaps it is high time for us to conclude that the people on the ACSR, wittingly or unwittingly, are conducting what amounts to an elaborate, if entertaining, sham. They certainly don't seem to think that there is any such thing as shareholder responsibility.

And neither should we. The ACSR is right--it is "relatively ineffective" to ask companies operating in South Africa if they would mind desegregating their lunchrooms, as per the Sullivan Principles. For one thing, the South African government won't let them do it. For another, a desegregated lunchroom doesn't do away with a vicious migrant labor system which confines hundreds of thousands of black South Africans to miserable shantytowns located at a discreet remove from South Africa's modern cities. Nor does it prevent a regime from charging black South Africans tuition for a sub-standard education while providing white South Africans with a decent education free of charge. It will never give black South Africans the political, civil, and social rights which the regime systematically denies them.

If there is no such thing as shareholder responsibility, and given that the University is on record as saying that it abhors apartheid, what should the University do? Divest. Why? First, because black South African leaders have asked corporations to withdraw. The University points to the silence of a few black leaders on this issue as evidence of support for corporate presence in South Africa. This overlooks the fact that South Africa has made it a capital crime publicly to demand corporate withdrawal.

Second, South Africa is significantly different from the other brutally repressive regimes of the world. No other regime has built a system which denies basic political, civil and social rights to the vast majority of its people merely on the basis of skin color. Third, people in the United States have a special obligation to respond to those black leaders in South Africa who have risked jail, torture, or death to speak out against the regime's monstruously irrational and inhumane politics.

The fact is, until only about 15 years ago the United States practiced its own form of apartheid. The experience of dismantling our home-grown version (a task as yet incomplete) obliges us to act on the appeals of those black and white people in South Africa who are struggling to undo the injustices with which they live every day. What Harvard and all colleges and universities in this country can do to help is to divest from those corporations which operate in South Africa. Richard Valelly '80   Third-year graduate student in Government