Advisory Committee Considers Divestiture of Tobacco Stock

The Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) seriously considering recommending that Harvard sell its stock in the Phillip Morris Company committee members said last night.

Following a closed session, members said the committee--which advises the Corporation on ethical issues it must face in managing the endowment--discussed the propriety of the University's owning stock in the cigarette manufacturer, which has marketed tobacco products aggressively in the Third World.

"Smoking, as the Surgeon General says, is the chief preventable cause of death in our society," alumnus Herbert P. Gleason 50 said, adding that Harvard ought to sell its share in the company.

But Gleason added that the position of the full committee "is still being formulated."

Harvard owns $18 million worth of stock in Phillip Morris, according to the University's most recent financial report.

Last spring the University had to consider a shareholder resolution asking the company to set up a special review committee to investigate the company's activities in overseas markets. While the ACSR and the Corporation abstained on the resolution, committee members were angered by the firm's adamant contention that "no conclusive clinical or medical proof of any cause and effect relationship between cigarette smoking and disease has been discovered."

It was "the irresponsibility of the management's response to the resolution which spurred the ACSR to reconsider the appropriateness of investing in Phillip Morris," under-graduate representative Jonathan G. Cederhaam `83 said.

Another committee member, Education School lectures Noel F. McGinn, said the main obstacle to taking a definitive action is the committee's desire to draw up a position the Corporation will take seriously.

ACSR members wanted to make sure the Corporation did not dismiss the committee's arguments as poorly reasoned, he said. "What they're trying to do is take a position from which the Corporation can't took down." he said.

The advisory committee has once in its 10-years urged stock divestiture of any kind to the Corporation. That was last spring, when the committee recommended that the University sell its shares in the Carnation Co, because of its failure to meet minimum standards of employment for Black workers in South Africa. The Corporation has not acted on that recommendation.