Selling the Overseers Short

A Latin term that anyone even remotely connected to Harvard can translate is veritas. A more useful term for the Harvard Board of Overseers might be caveat emptor let the buyer beware.

At this Saturday's meeting of the Institutional Policy Committee, a subcommittee of the Board of Overseers. President Bok and Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner '54 will act like the travel agents who came to your high school trying to sell you a trip for spring break. Instead of trying to unload a rip-off vacation, though, Bok and Steiner will be trying to push the University's South Africa investment policy.

Hopefully, you were wise enough to assume that most of those vacations, described as "fun-filled excursions at a luxurious four-star resort" were actually five cold, damp nights in a cheap plastic tent on mosquito-infested swampland. And hopefully the Board of Overseers will treat the administration's advice with the same skepticism.

FOR months now, the Board of Overseers has been trying to develop a position on divestment. This weekend a select committee of the Board will meet to decide whether the committee-as-a-whole has the power to vote on the matter at all. Instead of ensuring that this issue gets the deliberation it deserves, Steiner helped create an agenda front-loaded with lectures from pro-administration officials, leaving scant time for discussion among Board members.

According to a draft agenda, released by pro-divestment Overseer Peter Wood '64 earlier this week, the meeting is divided into three parts: a two-hour "review" of the University's investment policies, a 90 minute "review of the Harvard's educational activities relating to South Africa," and a mere 90-minute "discussion of the above issues with members of the committee."

The most striking problem with the committee's draft agenda is that it is remarkably one-sided. President Bok will help present both reviews, accompanied by five men whose policies reflect his own. There is absolutely no time allotted for opposing views. There is not a single South African speaker on the agenda, nor a single Black.

The absence of anyone qualified to articulate a pro-divestment position is an insult to the intelligence of the Board of Overseers and a shameful reflection upon a University that prides itself upon the free exchange of ideas.

Equally offensive is the inclusion of Professor Alan Heimert '49, director of the South Africa Fellows Program, on the agenda. Heimert lost the credibility to speak with any moral authority on Harvard's relations with South Africa when, along with Steiner, he designed the ill-fated internship program to send Harvard students to teach in South African schools. After coming under attack from Black South African leaders for failing to include Blacks in the decision-making process and for not reaching Black South Africans with the internships, the University scrapped the program.

At the upcoming meeting the administration will again subvert the cause of Black South Africans, by including a review of Harvard's educational programs on South Africa. The educational program seems to be a sound one, having received the approval of Black South African notables such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Their approval, however, has been contingent upon it not being used as a smokescreen to divert attention from the question of divestment and that is exactly what the administration will be doing by bringing it up on Saturday.

As Wood said in a critical letter to Tom O'Donnell '47, the chair of the Institutional Policy Committee, "it is particularly important that the separate matter of Harvard's laudable (if small and long-delayed) scholarship and exchange efforts not be confused with divestment. The latter issue is of an entirely different magnitude, since fully 100 times as much money is involved."

AT last December's Overseers meeting, Wood proposed a divestment resolution, which the Board tabled for further consideration until last month. Then last month the issue was further stalled when the Board sent it to the subcommittee for preliminary consideration. Prior to the December meeting, Steiner and Secretary to the Governing Boards Robert Shenton went on a tour of the country, visiting the Overseers at their homes and offices, explaining why they should not vote on the divestment resolution--skewing the process even more.

This Saturday's meeting is a scary time for the administration. It's one thing to have a couple of dozen students sleeping in shanties in the middle of campus. In dignified financial circles, that can be written off to misguided youthful idealism. But to have your own Board of Overseers, distinguished business and political officials among Harvard's most prominent alumni, tell you your investment policies are misguided and immoral is another matter. Whether or not the Overseers' legal authority to force the University to divest is accepted, their moral authority cannot be ignored.