Transcript of Faculty Meeting

The following text is a transcript of Monday's full Faculty meeting, where 11 Faculty members discussed University policy toward its South-African-related investments. The first part of the transcript appeared in yesterday's Crimson.

JOHN BOHSTEDT:

I would like to address similar themes. I would like the Faculty to consider for a moment what lessons Harvard is teaching its students by its policies on South Africa. It seems to me that the lessons we are teaching our students may have more lasting impact than even any effects we may be able to have on South Africa. I begin by assuming two principles which I think have been amply demonstrated. The first of these is that the presence of United States corporations in South Africa does materially support and reinforce the regime and apartheid. The second premise is that there is no evidence that the Sullivan reforms have had any appreciable impact on apartheid, indeed, it is difficult to see how such reforms can have any impact. In light of these premises, the present policy of the Harvard Corporation seems to be one of empty and ineffective gestures towards reform, gestures which, however well-intentioned, cannot have any impact on apartheid. The crucial lesson that I think this policy teaches our students is that the Harvard Corporation will go hand-in-hand with other corporations, that the Harvard Corporation is so bound up with our economic system that it cannot deviate from the corporate consensus, that it cannot rock the boat, criticizing or by advocating change, that the Harvard Corporation is, in effect, continuing to join with other corporations in doing business as usual, with apartheid.

Now it has been said that Harvard is only a tiny investor. But in the sphere of public opinion. Harvard is a whale, capable of generating tremendous currents for change. Harvard is a leader in curricular reform, Harvard is a leader in investment policies. A whale trying to act like an ostrich looks silly at best, and at worst, evasive. And that is the lesson we are teaching our students.

Some say the University must preserve its neutrality, so as not to endanger its academic freedom, so as not to provoke political or economic retaliation. Now not only is it impossible for the University as an investor to be neutral, but also I do not think that academic freedom is best preserved if we shrink from exercising it. I do not think academic freedom is best preserved if we deny the social consequences of our investment policies. I would have thought that academic freedom meant finding and speaking and acting the truth regardless of the consequences. I would have thought that in this case. Harvard ought to act on the merits of the case, without fear of retaliation. I would have thought that academic freedom would mean that the University would throw its considerable weight as an investor, as a leader of public opinion, into the field against apartheid. That is the lesson I would like to give my students.

I would like personally to disassociate myself from the lessons the Corporation has been teaching these past 18 months. I would like the Faculty to reconsider what lessons you believe Harvard ought to teach our students. I hope you'll agree that Harvard ought to press the corporations in which it hold stocks to cease doing business in and with South Africa.

DOUGLAS HIBBES:

Mr. President, unlike my colleagues from Afro-American Studies, I plan to be here for the next 35 or 36 years, if I survive through the half-life period, so I feel I have a special stake in Harvard's posture on this issue. Now, let me refer to something my colleague Prof. Mansfield said. I don't think this is a question that necessarily should divide us along left-right lines. I think I feel very strongly about the Soviet Union as well, but I think the issue here is that because of the compostion and special character of the South African apartheid system, what goes on there resonates in a special way with American society and American values. And that's why I think we've recognized it as a special case. Harvard already enjoys, perhaps suffers, a reputation as a place largely populated by bleeding-hearts, or worse, perhaps among the uninformed, and this gives us the opportunity occasionally, to live up to the reputation.

Now I'll try not to repeat earlier arguments. Let me just say as I see it, the source of dissatisfaction among those who are very concerned about this issue is not that Harvard has not adopted a policy of immediate and blanket withdrawal, divestiture, excuse me. Indeed, many think that's probably unwise. I think what unites people is the concern that the direction of Harvard policy is pointed the wrong way. This I think is illustrated very clearly in the ACSR reports of last March and this January. I think what we're looking for is a more aggressive, forward posture on behalf of the University, toward this issue, one that makes it clear to the corporations that the burden of proof rests on them to show their activities actively promote, actively serve to undermine the South African apartheid system.

I think that in the long run most of us are concerned about the standing of Harvard in the sense of that word, and perhaps in the medium and short run as well, the standing of Harvard will be better served by taking an aggressive posture on the question.

HARVEY C. MANSFIELD Jr. '53:

Mr. President and colleagues, we are being asked this afternoon by our friends on the left to take a symbolic action or make a speech which is a kind of speaking out against an undoubted evil, the evil of apartheid. Apartheid, however, is not as evil as genocide, and we've had a recent instance of genocide in Cambodia. So our speaking out on the question of apartheid would be in the context of our silence on the question of genocide.

What could justify this? I do not think that the question of stock ownership can justify this, can justify our silence on Cambodia because the Harvard Corporation doesn't own stock in companies doing business in Cambodia. Sir, forgive me, it takes a high sense of personal drama for a person to look on the receipt of stock proxy as an inescapable moral intanglement. Such a person with such a fluttery heart should stay in bed at day and leave his mail in the mailbox. He should certainly stay away from Harvard Square, where he will be accosted by every kind of moral and material beggar.

If it isn't the question of stock ownership, what can justify this disproportion? I think there were two answers given in the debate last time given by Professors Walzer and Higonnet. Prof. Walzer said he would have emphasized rather more the particular cruelty and the particular degradation that was involved in singling out a nation or a religious group or a race for systematic oppression. Why did my friend say "nation, religious group, or race" and not say "class"? Isn't genocide also the genocide of a class? I beg leave of good Dean Bowersock to translate the word "genus" in genocide as the killing of a class as well as of a race. Isn't the oppression that we've see in the world since World War II been carried out by oppressors mostly on the basis of class?

Secondly, Prof. Higonnet said what made South Africa more of a problem than Auschwitz or Cambodia was precisely that South Africans were very bourgeois, were very much like ourselves. Their crimes were bourgeois crimes and the evil that went on in that nation was the kind that we found tolerable, perhaps at a different level. So Prof. Higonnet recognizes the problem of equating apartheid and genocide. But apply his doctrine to Prof. Cudjoe. Notice that he doesn't say we are like the South Africans because we are white, but because we are bourgeois. Prof. Cudjoe is undoubtedly a bourgeois, or at least a petit bourgeois, by virtue of his Harvard salary. Is he supposed to hate himself because he so much resembles an Afrikaner?

I think the serious point being made here is that the American people and the South African people have both been guilty of crimes against blacks. But there I think the resemblance ends. And even if the resemblance didn't end there, isn't it irrational to limit your moral concern only to those crimes which you have committed? These are the two arguments I've found to specialize the question of apartheid over the question of genocide. I'm left in admiration for President Bok's two open letters and in particular for his notion that the University has, not a moral neutrality, but a special mission that gives its own morals, and even its own politics to convey.

PETER LANGE:

Mr. President, it seems to me that in this debate, at least among those who have declared themselves to be in general agreement on the question of the singularity of South African repression, that there is one lesson that overrides all the others, which is the lesson of powerlessness. I have heard, and I think it is shared by many of us, even many of us who have signed the letter, the open letter which was submitted, that there is not a great deal which we can do in an immediate sense to change the character of the South African regime. Nye's long chain is a real long chain, and I think none of us, or least not I, would deny it. I would also not deny at the end of that long chain, as I think Nye also pointed out, there is an enormously evil regime. So we thrust around for morally correct options in face of the recognition of relative powerlessness. Never an easy position, at least if one takes one's morality as seriously as one takes one's powerlessness.

We seek a position, it seems to me, an option, if you want, an option for the University, which recognizes that morality is bound up in this case both with the ends and the values which we are pursuing, which have to do, as I'll come to in a moment, and with the means by which those ends are to be pursued. We do not get up here and say that we wish to clean our hands of the case, because we recognize that the means reflect on the moral stance which we take. We also seek morality, or an option which will express the morality, related both with the moral standing of the University as an educational institution, and with the effects which our position might have on blacks in South Africa.

Now, the position of the open letter which has been submitted to you, seeks, and I believe strongly does do so, to reconcile these concerns, these differing, balanced understanding of a moral position for the University to take in the face of the South African regime and our own investments of stocks in that regime, in companies with stock in that regime. It is a moderate position, it is not a position of washing one's hands, although some have characterized it as such, it is not a position of self-righteousness. It is a position which seeks to come to terms with the various dilemmas and difficulties of balancing which I sketched earlier. It is a moderate position and it is an articulated position--a position arguing for an articulated strategy which would provide the University with guidelines which are not only morally efficacious, but also at least politically efficacious within the bounds of our understanding of powerlessless, as I suggested at the beginning of my remarks.

Now, why is it such? Because it lays out a series of articulated, escalating steps to be taken in the face of the corporate investments of the University, a set of articulated, escalating steps, each one of which is intricately related both to the preceding and the following steps. And here I would like to return to a point which Prof. Hoffmann made in his remarks, and which I think is of fundamental importance, in the sense that it reflects both on the moral efficaciousness of our stance with respect to our own standing as an educational institution, and with our ability to affect, within the restraints of powerlessness, or relative powerlessless, the corporations.

If we proceed with a policy that does not make clear to the corporations that there are potential consequences to follow upon their failure to respond to earlier demands or positions taken by the University, if, in other words, at the end of our chain of articulated steps, there exists no exit, only a kind of crying in the wind, then we fail in the end, either to communicate our moral stance or to exercise what little power in the most efficacious way that we have in this situation.

PRESIDENT BOK:

I wonder, since we have only five minutes, if I might make two observations. One of them is that this meeting is, I hope, an opportunity to share just how frustrating and difficult a situation we confront, where we all share very deeply a sense of outrage against a whole set of practices which are deeply inhumane. But nonetheless, the situation is very difficult. One of the difficulties, of course, is that the ultimate step of divestment, to give up the threat of real penalty to a corporation, is not necessarily that at all. Unfortunately, various corporate executives have indicated to me that they would be delighted if people who don't like their policies would simply sell their stock, and get out of their hair at shareholders' meetings. But even here. I think, the notion that holding the threat of divestment over their heads will be a threat is an empirical proposition which perhaps we should try to check. It is by no means a clear one, on the basis of conversations I have had.

The last thing I would like to do simply not because I can vouch for it, not because I necessarily agree with it, because it is indeed a criticism of our policy, just to lay one more strand of complexity before you. I would like to quote from a letter that has just recently come from a man called Howard Shomer, who was formerly a dean of the Divinity School at Chicago and now is head of the Social Responsibility in Investments for the United Church Boards in the United Church of Christ. He says, he's writing to Tony Lewis of the New York Times, who as you know devoted two articles to this subject. He says, "I wonder if you have any information which we lack concerning the political and physical possibility of any foreign firm actually withdrawing its assets from the Republic of South Africa. On March 30, 1977, the South African Finance Minister stated in his budget speech to the Parliament that foreign controlled South African enterprises will in the future only be allowed to transfer profits to foreign countries out of profits earned in the preceding two years. This has been interpreted to me by the editor of the Financial Mail as meaning that any applicant for a license to export assets more than 24 months old may be authorized to do so only in the form of South African bonds, treasury or parastal, or security rands, both of which the world market commonly discounts at 25 to 40 per cent. Since the most recent two or three years have seen many deficits and limited profits in U.S. subsidiaries in South Africa, it would seem that a sizable share of the proceeds of any sale of assets there would be dealt with by the South African Foreign Assets Control officials as old profits requiring such a license. I understand that security rands are not currently legal tender in South Africa, and that the government bonds in question are likely to be of the 15 to 30 year category. If all this is accurate, it would seem that without drawing such attention to it as to depress foreign investor interest, the South African government has effectively rendered the withdrawal debate sterile. Even if a foreign company were to succeed in disposing of its assets in South Africa for a fair, rather than a forced sale price, translating them into loans to the South African government would hardly be an act of disengagement. Indeed, church stockholders who have led the proxy battle to stop U.S. bank loans to the South African government and state-controlled corporations, in the hypothetical case of their succeeding and persuading some company operating in the Republic of South Africa to sell its assets there, only to find it had to trade the proceeds for long-term South African bonds, would surely find themselves in an intellectually incoherent and morally untenable position. All this would appear to be true whether the purchaser of the U.S. or other foreign corporate subsidiary were a friend of apartheid or a resister. Since it is doubtful that any resister would care to acquire an operating company in South Africa at the present time, it would seem more likely that the acquirer would be a firm that could live with apartheid more comfortably than the seller. Obviously, the question would be pertinent in either case: What has the change in ownership accomplished for the liberation of the oppressed majority? If the answer has got to be nothing, or even less, how would the seller's soul be saved, a reference in your message to Pretoria too."

I don't read that as a personal statement at all, but simply because we've heard so many arguments on different sides, but many of them have to do with withdrawal. It seemed to me that statement from . . .at least, I was going to say, throws further light, increases the complexity of our situation.

I do want to express my appreciation to everyone who has spoken. I'm sure this will not be the last time we will speak. But I very much appreciate the spirit in which the discussion has gone on, and the way in which we have tried to think together about how we will approach a horrible situation, instead of simply castigating one another simply because we take different approaches to a common end. Being six o'clock. I think we should adjoin the meeting, unless there is some urgent business to come before us.