Cynical Charity

ANTI-APARTHEID activists would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more damning reductio ad absurdum of Harvard's policies toward South Africa than the University's new South African Internship Program. The program is ill-conceived, poorly planned and, as it currently stands, will actually hurt Black South Africans--the ostensible beneficiaries of the new internships. It was conceived out of short-term political expediency and claims to benign results for malignant activities.

The 50-page report released last week by the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC) provides an exhaustive indictment of the internship program. Harvard officials have been caught with their pants down. The committee designing the program did not solicit the views of Black South Africans and ignored protests from Black South Africans at Harvard. Five of the nine Harvard internships now available would send students to elite, white private schools in the racist state. Two of them are in the illegally occupied territory of Namibia and are associated with a company that engages in illegal mining activities and has been internationally condemned--by the United Nations and the Catholic Church, among others--for a variety of workplace and business practices. The final two internships are with the racist government-run school system in Johannesburg.

Of all the groups that need help in Southern Africa, this is all Harvard could come up with. What would you have thought if the University of Capetown had sent interns to Andover during the fifties to help southern Blacks in the civil rights movement? Of course, Harvard Vice President Daniel Steiner '54, chairman of the program's steering committee, points out that the current list of nine internships is provisional. But the University clearly intended to send students to at least some of them. In fact, according to SASC, South African officials of at least two of the programs were led to believe they would definitely get interns.

What is puzzling about this whole affair is why the University has rushed ahead with the internship program and made such foolish mistakes in the process. One would like to give the program's organizers the benefit of the doubt. They didn't really intend a social service program for South Africa's elite white business class, did they? And why would they want to aid in the illegal occupation and economic exploitation of Namibia? But if their intentions were not evil, how could they have been so naive as to embark on the present program?

THE REASONS FOR the University's unfortunate and premature commencement of the internship program become clear when you consider the traditional timing of divestment protests on campus. What better way to preempt spring protests than to implement a program to give students the opportunity to practice what they preach. When bombarded this coming spring with indignant slogans, Harvard administrators will be able to say: We're doing something concrete while you're just waving signs--if you really want to do something, why don't you sign up for internships?

Certainly there is no love lost between Steiner and the divestment movement over his misguided labours. As well as chairing the internship committee and overseeing the new program, he has long been the University's point man on the divestment issue. He has frequently derided student protests and is usually the University's spokesman and troubleshooter on touchy corporate issues. Students, in turn, have frequently blamed him for a variety of the University's evil-doings--from investment policy to a pre-Cambrian attitude toward labor relations. SASC directed its report at "the Steiner Committee," and it seems obvious that that committee's activities were conceived with student protests in mind.

Rushed timing is not the only indication that Harvard has been trying to use internships against the divestment movement. Dolf Berle, who went on an Eliot House-funded internship last June, wrote a veritable propaganda piece in the Harvard Gazette last month toeing the University's line on corporate involvement. He was also sent by the University to a student conference on South Africa during January. The conference invited students from other universities by sending letters to their deans asking for students interested in the anti-apartheid movement or student government. However, Harvard officials never notified SASC of the conference and sent Berle instead, who is no longer even a student. At the conference, Berle was an outspoken supporter of corporate involvement in South Africa and argued for internship programs like Harvard's, both of which positions were overwhelmingly opposed by other delegates.

There are ways for Harvard to help Black South Africans. The first and most obvious is divestment, which has been endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Blacks in South Africa as well as most major Black leaders in that country. Conversely, Harvard's internship program has been denounced by representatives of the United Democratic Front, the African National Congress and the South West African Peoples' Organization as well as South African student leaders.

Maybe the intership program need not be totally scrapped. But to rush along the existing internships to aid the privileged establishment in South Africa under the false label of reform is at best a cynical ploy against student activists and at worst another brick in the wall of the apartheid state.