Keeping Score

Divestment totals creep up

All spring on campus, if the fuss was familiar, so was the issue: divestment. At Harvard, students boycotted classes for a day and picketed the trustees. So did students at Brandeis. At Columbia they staged guerrilla theater protest shows; at Yale, angry students confronted the university's governing corporation. As they have for years, demonstrators here and there around the U.S. were demanding that their colleges sell all stock in South Africa-related industry. Their charge: the $1.75 billion (17% of South Africa's foreign capital) invested by 350 U.S. companies in the apartheid nation and the actual presence of Americans doing business there amount to indirect support of racism.

Surprisingly, in view of the oft repeated objections of college presidents and boards of overseers that U.S. divestment is unlikely to affect racism in South Africa, the tally of divested dollars has been slowly mounting. A few boards of trustees have voted full divestiture. Among them, according to the Washington-based Investor Responsibility Research Center: Hampshire College (of $39,000), the University of Massachusetts (of $631,000), Ohio University (of $38,000), Michigan State (of $8.5 million), and the University of Wisconsin (of $11 million). Other colleges have chosen partial divestiture, or selling stock selectively in those companies that fail to observe the Sullivan principles, a set of guidelines established by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, a black civil rights activist and General Motors board member, which outline affirmative-action policies. Among them: Amherst ($1 million), Smith ($680,000), Columbia ($2.7 million), Boston University ($7 million), Brandeis ($350,000), Yale ($900,000), Vassar ($2.2 million), Ohio State ($250,000).

Divestment remains a muddled issue. Even U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Andrew Young is not in favor of American companies withdrawing from South Africa, and he believes that they should use their leverage to encourage reforms. Student demonstrators and sympathetic trustees, though, see the issue as moral rather than practical or monetary. When Yale's Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility recently recommended that the college sell $900,000 of stock in the Morgan Guaranty Trust Co. (which lends money to the South African government), the committee's statement put the case with remarkable candor: "We recognize that divestiture is of little practical consequence and hence is almost entirely symbolic. Still, symbols and gestures are important in the realm of moral and humane concerns."

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