Voting for Freedom

IN RECOMMENDING that Harvard abstain on a resolution asking Exxon to form a "broad-based committee" to study the implications of proposed Angolan oil investment, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility last week turned in the most distressing performance of its debut season. Though the resolution raised issues which clearly call for deeper study, the ACSR's current reservations failed to address the purpose of the resolution or the urgency of the Angolan issue.

In submitting its committee proposal, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Churches and Fellowships of North America was asking for an investigation of ways in which Exxon's proposed investment might help Portugal to control her rebellious colonies militarily. According to U.N. figures, Portugal's 1971 military budget in Angola was approximately $68.5 million. Portugal was expected in 1972 to net roughly $50 million from taxes and royalties paid by foreign investors in Angola.

The ACSR objected that the proposed committee's membership would be too one-sided to produce an objective study of Angolan investment. ACSR Chairman Stanley S. Surrey, Smith Professor of Law, said, "A committee [such as this] just tends to confuse management's responsibility."

First, because of management's and investment banks' control of stock, such resolutions never attract 50 per cent of the shareholders' votes -- a fact the churches clearly understand. The ACSR, in objecting to the committee's composition, was objecting to the details of a proposal meant to be considered in a far broader political context. Resolutions such as these are intended to raise issues -- in this case, to pressure Exxon to establish a responsible study group. Any study committee that management would voluntarily establish in response to such pressure would no doubt be more "balanced," in the ACSR's sense, than the group proposed by the churches.

Second, rather than confusing management's responsibility, a study committee might eliminate false distinctions between economic considerations and their political, social and moral implications.

Third, in recommending an abstention on the shareholder resolution, the ACSR exerted the least possible pressure on the Harvard Corporation to address the political questions raised by colonial rule in Angola. By recommending that the Corporation send advisory letters to the churches and to Exxon management, the ACSR exaggerated the risk in endorsing a shareholder resolution as a demonstration for an incontestably just political cause.

It is true, as the ACSR said, that the criteria for judging resolutions "calling directly for withholding of corporate investment because of the nature or policies of the government of the particular country involved" require intense study. But it hardly requires intense study to recognize that Angolan independence, and not simply one company's committee, was the issue at the heart of the churches' resolution. The ACSR's statement obscures that issue and relegates to the background the very social and political problems which are the most in need of exploration.