In Darfur Prelude, Calls for Apartheid Divestment

A group of students marches through Harvard Yard. Holding placards, they walk from the steps of Widener Library to an administrative building where University officials are discussing investments in Africa. A humanitarian crisis is occurring on the continent, and a group that advises the Harvard Corporation must decide whether divesting from corporations with ties to repressive governments in Africa does more harm than good. The students hope to convince Harvard that divestiture is the only moral option.

The scene could be 1978. Or it could be today.

Administrators and Corporation members have changed since the Class of 1982 first arrived at Harvard; the advisory group is no longer the Advisory Committee for Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), but the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility; and apartheid-era South Africa is gone, bringing attention instead to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.

Yet in both eras, students enthusiastically—and largely unsuccessfully—fought University administrators over the politics of their school’s endowment.

Jonathan H. Chute ’82, a pastor and a former member of the Philips Brooks House Association, says these protests showed a broader concern with South Africa at the time.

“It was the kind of thing you could have a conversation about at dinner every night of the week. People did talk about it and think about it, and it was in The Crimson every day of the week,” he says. “It was part of the fabric of that season, of those years.”

‘A VERY CONSERVATIVE INSTITUTION’

South African apartheid was in its 40th year when the Class of 1982 arrived at Harvard in 1978.

But the tone of the racial conflict had reached a new peak the year before, when Steve Biko—the 30-year-old activist behind the “Black Consciousness” movement—was killed in police custody.

The charismatic leader’s death sparked outrage from Soweto to Harvard Yard, and during the spring of 1978 and the ensuing years, students began to demand that the University withdraw its investments in companies who worked in South Africa.

Groups such as the South Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC) organized nighttime protests, including one on April 27 in which over 3,000 students marched through Cambridge streets carrying torches. The next day, students surrounded University Hall and refused to move, shutting out Harvard administrators for the day.

Members of the Class of 1982 recall an administration that was often unwilling to hear their complaints.

J. Lorand Matory ’82, now a Harvard professor of anthropology and of African and African American studies, remembers the University’s intransigence and the general lack of campus outrage as highly discouraging.

“Most of us had grown up the sixties, and we assumed some measure of goodwill by the 1970s. It was just astonishing to me that such as esteemed institution of intellectual people could stick to its guns for so long,” he says. “I left with the idea that Harvard was a very conservative institution.”

“My sense was [administration officials] were taking it personally; they didn’t like being criticized,” says Bradford C. Mank ’83, who was the SASC president at the time and is now a professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Law. “They thought they were in the right place, and these crazy students were pestering them about something when they were in the right.”

And Chute says that he thought the administration at the time saw divestment as low on its list of priorities.

“At the time, it felt like it was not taken seriously, that there was a degree of dismissiveness and maybe even derision on the part of the administration,” he says. “The South African issue was as plain as the nose on our face; it was a bad situation, and it needed help and attention, but I can imagine how the administrators felt they had other things to be worried about than that.”

REFUSING TO SELL

Student calls for divestment during the early 1980s proved to be largely unsuccessful; besides a pittance in Citibank holdings, the University refused to sell its investments in companies such as Carnation Co. and the Manufacturers Hanover Trust bank.

Then-University President Derek C. Bok, who returned to Harvard last year as interim president, created the ACSR—a group of faculty members, administrators, alumni, and students—during a similar divestment debate over Angola in 1972. The 15-member committee was meant to advise the Corporation on the ethics of its investments.

In 1978, the now-12-member ACSR rejected full divestment from companies operating within South Africa, instead arguing that a “case-by-case” evaluation would allow the Corporation to see how directly a company was supporting the apartheid system.

Bok defended his decision in a series of open letters over the following two years, saying that by maintaining a financial stake in such companies, the University could pressure them to release more information on their operations in South Africa and to provide wage equality among their South African employees.

In addition, Bok wrote that Harvard’s holdings in these firms was too small to have any sway over the behavior of the firms’ executives, and that using the school’s funds to make a political statement endangered the intellectual freedom of the University.

However, in the following years, many criticized Bok’s position as immoral and untenable.

In a May 1979 faculty discussion of the divestment issue, Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley Hoffmann took issue with Bok’s argument.

“Even a small contribution to injustice is something which is not terribly easy to tolerate in a case like this,” The Crimson reported Hoffmann saying.

In the same meeting, Sultan of Oman Professor of International Relations at the Kennedy School Joseph S. Nye, Jr. said that the University’s unwillingness to act on its beliefs about apartheid impeded its educational mission.

“We teach by what we do, as well as by what we say. And if we showed no concern in a circumstance where there was even a thin causal chain to events and values which are antithetical to those we hold, we would in fact not be doing an effective job of teaching,” Nye was reported as saying in The Crimson at the time.

Discontent grew larger when the ACSR seemed to renege on its one concession from 1978—that the Corporation would not invest in any banks making loans to the South African government directly—less than a year afterwards, when news emerged that the University had maintained its investments in Manufacturers Hanover trust.

MISSING THE TIDE

Despite faculty support, students involved in the protests recalled that enthusiasm for the divestment issue had hit a lull in the early 1980s after its 1970s peak.

“There was moderate success, but to be truthful, it wasn’t the great movement to sweep everything before it, which was disappointing,” says Mank, the SASC president. “I missed the tide, and the next tide wouldn’t take off until I was in Law School at Yale in the mid-eighties.”

“Part of our idea was to keep this thing alive for students after we graduated, which we kind of did and it took off a year or two after we graduated,” he adds.

Michael J. Abramowitz ’85, a former president of The Crimson who covered many divestment-related stories, agreed that the early 1980s were a quieter period in South Africa divestment protests.

“I don’t recall wild passions about [divestment] on campus,” he says. “I think there were a group of people who were really into this, and they had I imagine the support of the student body.”

And Matory, the Harvard professor, says that his classmates were as career-minded as undergraduates today.

“It was no longer the sixties and many of us were as grade-conscious and professionally oriented as your generation is now,” Matory says. “We were quite distant from a 1968 campus.”

—Staff writer Nicholas K. Tabor can be reached at ntabor@fas.harvard.edu.