No Donations Without Representation

It happens every year. As seniors begin the transition from students to alumni, the attitude of the Harvard Corporation towards its graduating class shifts from casual indifference to solicitous warmth. This year's Senior Gift drive marks the beginning of the Corporation's interest in the Class of 1983. From here on out. Harvard will expect each one of us to give, regularly and generously, to its endowment fund. The irony here is that, during our undergraduate years, the President and Fellows have systematically denied us any say in the way Harvard money is spent--and invested.

After six years of student protest. Harvard continues to invest almost $500 million of its endowment in companies doing business in South Africa. This is an intolerable disgrace, and for more than one reason.

Intolerable, for the most part, because Harvard investments support the most despicable system of oppression in the world. The civilized world has long since declared the white supremacist regime an international outlaw, and for good reason. Non-whites comprise 84 percent of the population of South Africa, yet, under apartheid, they cannot vote. The entire Black population is being forcibly removed to the so-called bantustans, barren wastelands which together constitute only 13 percent of the land in South Africa Blacks are only permitted to leave these "native homelands" to work at unskilled factory or mining jobs, at one-tenth the average wage of whites. Blacks must live in single-sex barracks, or in ghetto townships deprived of electricity and running water. All political dissent is punishable by indefinite detainment, life imprisonment, or death.

Apartheid cannot survive without investment from the West. As most of the international community cuts its ties with South Africa. Pretoria is becoming increasingly desperate for foreign capital and technology. A few multinational corporations equip South Africa with the technology necessary for both a streamlined economy and an efficient police state. American corporations bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign exchange, sustaining South Africa's delicate balance of payments, and allowing the regime to buy still more weapons and manufactured goods from abroad.

Several universities, including Hampshire, University of Wisconsin, and University of Massachusetts, have completely divested their holdings in South Africa. Yet most universities are waiting to follow Harvard's lead on divestment. From curriculum reform to affirmative action, Harvard policy traditionally defines the norm for American universities: South African investment is no exception. Harvard's self-proclaimed role a leader of the academic community makes its complicity with apartheid all the more scandalous.

Harvard's complicity in apartheid has another dimension. Harvard's support for apartheid is an outrage in itself, the Corporation's refusal to divest represents an intolerable affront to the Harvard community. For six years, the Administration has ignored, co-opted, or defied every demand for divestment, in spite of an overwhelming student consensus against ties to South Africa.

In 1978, 3500 students marched by torchlight to protest Harvard's complicity in apartheid; the next year, two-thirds of the student body went on a one-day strike against South African investments. With national media attention focused on the divestiture movement, drawn by the march. President Bok was careful to insist on Harvard's "abhorrence" of apartheid. Yet Bok refused to divest, promising instead a case-by-case review of its portfolio to determine whether a given corporation contributed more to apartheid than it provided in benefits to its Black employees.

Since 1978, any claim the Corporation might have had to sincerity on South Africa has been destroyed While frustration and cynicism has dissipated the student movement. Harvard has moved to renege even on the minimal promises it made under the pressures of 1978: The Corporation has never begun a public case-by-case review of its portfolio, and it has not divested from a single South African operation. In 1979, Harvard abandoned its commitment to voting for progressive shareholder resolutions, reaching the correct conclusion that no resolution opposed by management would be likely to pass. Instead of taking the more effective step of divesting its holdings, however, Harvard has been content to keep its shares in South African operations and let management run the show.

The worst examples of Harvard's bad faith have come in the last two years. In 1982, the Corporation quietly moved to rescind its ban on investing in banks loaning directly to the South African government, in an explicit violation of one of Bok's promises of 1978. It took several student marches, and an angry open meeting with the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), to force the Corporation to back down. The core of Bok's 1978 defense lay in the "Sullivan Principles" for corporate behavior in South Africa. Bok pointed to this set of token reforms, like integrated washrooms, as evidence that corporations can play a progressive role in South Africa. Five years later, the Corporation still invests in at least seven companies which have not even signed the Sullivan Principles. The Corporation has refused to divest from Carnation Corporation, a Sullivan signatory which has been found in violation of the minimum Sullivan standards for three years running.

For six years, the Corporation has denied any effective student participation in its decision-making hierarchy. The only official access point for student opinion is the powerless ACSR, where a single undergraduate sits on a committee dominated by Harvard-appointed faculty and alumni. On the few occasions, when students engineer a majority on the ACSR--as they did in recommending divestiture from Carnation last year, the Corporation routinely ignores the ACSR vote. This year, 82.4 percent of the undergraduates voted for immediate divestiture from Carnation: the corporation did not bother to respond. For six years, students have been marching, signing petitions, attending open meetings, and voting to get Harvard out of South Africa, and the Corporation has treated us like a distracting nuisance.

And now they want our money. The Senior Gift drive serves an important symbolic purpose for the Corporation, getting graduating seniors used to the idea of contributing to Harvard.

The Senior Gift can also serve an important symbolic purpose for us. By boycotting all donations to the University until the Corporation divests from South Africa, we can get Harvard used to the idea of student participation in its decision-making process.

At first glance, the boycott of the Senior Gift may seem like sheer ingratitude. After all, Harvard is filled with people, from the professor to the dining hall worker, who genuinely care about students, and who have truly enriched our "Harvard-Radcliffe experience". But with an endowment of over $2 billion, the Corporation does not need money to pay our professors' salaries. Donations to the University will have the net effect of increasing Harvard's capacity for expansion: even money earmarked for scholarship funds will only displace endowment money for use elsewhere.

We don't have to tolerate University investment in South Africa, but as long as we play by the Corporation's rules, there is little chance that Harvard policy will change. One of the main reasons for the decline of student activism has been the widespread feeling of powerlessness in the face of Corporation intransigence. But by boycotting the Senior Gift, we can finally speak to Harvard in a language it can understand.

Harvard owes us a voice in the way our money is used. Until the Corporation listens to student protest and divests from its holdings in South Africa there is no reason for us to become personally complicit by contributing to apartheid. As long as the President and Fellows ignore us, we will owe them nothing.

Michael T. Anderson '83, a philosophy concentrator, is a member of the Southern African Solidarity Committee (SASC).