The Clock is Ticking

"YOU know something, we're going to be free. And when we get to the other side of this liberation game," South African Archbishop and Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu said at Harvard in 1986, "we would like to be able to say, `You know something, Harvard was with us.'"

The time is fast approaching when Bishop Tutu and his fellow Black South Africans will be unable to say that Harvard was on their side. The University's refusal to allow the Board of Overseers to vote on divestment assures that Harvard will not be taking up Tutu's challenge soon.

In Tutu's Kennedy School speech, he said, "What you do reverberates around the world, especially what Harvard does." As it stands now, some two years after Tutu's challenge, Harvard is still sitting on its hands. Divestment as a tool to overturn apartheid and as a symbolic affirmation of freedom should still be expected of Harvard. The University can still have an impact in the United States and South Africa, and may even be able to take a leadership role by pulling out of South Africa-linked companies.

BUT the actions of the Board of Overseers and the University administration in the last few months amount to a grand stall tactic, or a massive expression of spinelessness, or both. While the President has every responsibility to argue for or against divestment in the abstract, it is cowardly for him to prevent the Board from issuing its opinion in a similarly clear way.

Yet that is exactly what has happened. The pro-divestment slate on the Board pushed for an up-or-down vote on the question. Bok's top advisor, Vice President and General Counsel Daniel Steiner '54, was dispatched to lobby Overseers on why such a vote would be ill-advised. Then the University managed to find an even better plan: to divert the question to a joint committee of the Corporation and the Board. Scheduling difficulties should ensure that the committee's reccomendation on the issue will not be made until next fall.

Reasons that would justify forming yet another committee to look into the issue convince no one. The University already has two separate committees which keep a watch on investment policy. Divestment has been the major topic of debate on campus for at least the last decade. President Bok has publicly declared his own views on the matter. What more is there to discuss? By now, with divestment, you are either for it or against it, and if you don't have a position, you certainly don't belong on the Board of Overseers.

BUT President Bok and the Corporation seem to want a Board filled with opinion-less members. In addition to preventing a vote on divestment, the formation of the new committee is designed to prevent Overseers from taking any initiative in University policy. Paranoid that the Corporation could lose the upper-hand in governing the University, President Bok and his associates in the administration are willing to sacrifice serious consideration of divestment on the altar of preserving the governing hierarchy.

At last Sunday's meeting, a motion for an informal vote on the issue was debated for an hour before failing to pass. Bok and his advisers have decided to address this pressing moral question by resorting to procedural wrangling. But while the meaningless arguments continue, the efforts at obfuscation increase, and the gamesmanship goes on, in South Africa as Transafrica's Randall Robinson said at Harvard, "the clock continues to tick."