ACSR to Consider Corporate Issues; Topics Will Include South Africa, CIA

The Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) will discuss shareholder resolutions in April on issues ranging from involvement in South Africa to storage of nuclear waste in Illinois.

The committee will vote on 35 to 40 resolutions this spring at annual meetings of companies in which the Corporation owns shares.

The ACSR recommends which way the Corporation should vote, Detler F. Vagts, chairman of ACSR, said yesterday.

The series of ACSR meetings begins March 31 when the committee will consider a resolution from shareholders of the Peabody Tractor company calling for the creation of a review committee to oversee machinery sales to the South African government.

The Peabody supporters of the resolution fear the military police of the South African government may use vehicles produced by the company in the oppression of the Black population, Terry D. Meyers, head of the Investor Responsibility Research Center, a Washington-based consulting firm, said yesterday.

The committee will also consider resolutions involving the sale of technology by IBM to South Africa and to communist countries.

Although ACSR recommended opposition to the same resolution last year, Vagts said if the committee receives new information, it may decide differently this time. The committee "is generally sympathetic that there were abuses there," Vagts added.

Although ASCR determined in January it was appropriate for Harvard to initiate a shareholder resolution, "there has not been a call for the invocation of recommendations," Lawrence F. Stevens '65, secretary of ACSR, said yesterday.

Two resolutions ACSR will consider in April call for the Standard Oil Company of Indiana and the Philip Morris Industrial Paper group to disclose information on its hirings of minorities to the entire body of stockholders and to the general public.

"Certain conservative shareholders" have proposed resolutions to companies that would prohibit contributions to universities that "do not cooperate with the Central Intelligence Agency," Vagts said, adding the policy Harvard has initiated toward the CIA is "notorious." "It has been Harvard's position for some time that professors should not make contact with the CIA secretly," he added.

"Shareholder resolutions typically never pass," Meyers said, adding that a vote of 3 per cent in favor of the resolution the first year it is introduced is usually considered a victory