The Good Hands People

GEORGE F. BENNETT '33, the University's retiring treasurer, reportedly owns no life insurance. "I prefer to put my capital on the stock exchange," he explains.

President Bok's announcement last week that George Putnam '49 will replace Bennett as treasurer brings to an end the involvement of the last vociferous holdover from the early years of the Pusey Administration--the years when principled conservatism ruled Harvard's roost--in deciding what Harvard's responsibilities as a shareholder entail.

Coming at the end of the inaugural year of Bok's machinery for achieving shareholder responsibility--a student-faculty-alumni ACSR, advising a four-member Corporation subcommittee--the announcement is nicely symbolic. For the shift in Harvard's shareholder policy, purportedly stemming from the creation of the ACSR and rooted in black students' occupation of Mass Hall last April, actually goes back to Bok's first year in office and therefore indirectly to an earlier militant action, the April 1969 seizure of University Hall that led to Harvard's greatest strike and hastened Pusey's departure.

Harvard first voted its stock for insurgent proxy resolutions last Spring; the Bok Administration's interpretation of what had been Harvard policy, officially at least, since the 1971 Austin Report--not to "remain passive in the face of substantial evidence that the company is acting in an antisocial way"--became clear at that time. Harvard would support disclosure resolutions, especially resolutions asking for information on corporate support for South Africa that met its exacting--some would say ridiculous--standards of what was "reasonable." It would generally oppose resolutions with whose specifics it disagreed--even if it professed support for the principles involved. And it would oppose or abstain on most substantive resolutions to have companies withdraw from or start affirmative action programs in white-ruled areas of Africa, to have companies stop supplying the weaponry for the war in Indochina, or even to have companies set up study committees on such problems as conversion to peacetime production or apparently dangerous conditions in a company's coal mines. Setting up committees, the Corporation explained only last week, when it abstained on a resolution on Exxon's proposed investment in Angola, "would interfere improperly with management's decision-making process."

The limited support Harvard has occasionally offered resolutions this year thus dates back to last Spring, before there was an ACSR or a Corporation subcommittee.

And though Mass Hall probably inspired the establishment of the ACSR and the subcommittee, both of them are in keeping with the Bok Administration's philosophy of institutionalizing protest--unlike the Pusey Administration, which ignored it on principle--without granting the protesters any real power.

THE ACSR IS by no means a radical group. It includes more Boston businessmen than undergraduates. But it has shown itself to be relatively sympathetic to complaints about corporate activities. So some activists who credit Afro with having forced the University to take these issues seriously have channeled their energies this year into accepted, institutionalized lobbying activities--especially through the Student ACSR, a group of undergraduates chosen in House elections last Fall.

The South House Committee boycotted the elections, charging that the ACSR had been granted no real power and would therefore serve principally to disguise and legitimate an undemocratic process. As the South House Committee predicted, power remained in the hands of the Corporation's subcommittee, whose members come not from any of the ACSR's or the University's subcommittees but from the same world of high finance they are supposed to pass judgment on: in at least one case this Spring, a subcommittee member had to disqualify himself from voting on a resolution directed at a company of which he is a director.

This doesn't mean that the subcommittee feels free to disregard the ACSR entirely. The most it has done this Spring is to move one notch from the ACSR's recommendations--abstaining on some resolutions the ACSR endorsed, and opposing some resolutions the ACSR urged abstention on. Bennett, who flatly opposed most of the resolutions, has suggested that some of his colleagues are sometimes less than sincere in taking stands that agree with the ACSR's. It seems likelier that his colleagues' concern that protest be effectively institutionalized through the ACSR--and perhaps their fear of militant actions like Mass Hall--influence their opinions without any need for insincerity.

The effective institutionalization of protest is not the same as University democracy, because power remains in the hands of the same people who always held it. But by sucking protesters into the system, institutionalizing protest helps defuse demands for University democracy. Nobody seized Mass Hall this year. It seems unlikely that any of Bok's administrators lack life insurance. They prefer to play it safe.