Word: acsr
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...money to the South African government and its public corporations brings up serious questions about the performance of those firms responsible for making decisions about investing Harvard's $1.5 billion endowment. At times that decision-making structure, which includes the Treasurer's office, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), the Corporation, and independent investment firms, seems designed mainly to spread the responsibility for Harvard's morally bankrupt investment policy and to provide a justification for maintaining the investment status...
Clearly the University must take a stand on the larger issue of investing in any corporations helping to uphold the apartheid system, but it seems naive to expect any significant anti-apartheid decision to emerge from the ACSR, the group entrusted with advising the Corporation on social implications of investment policy. The ACSR has been meeting since October to discuss the South African issue, and although it has made slow progress in reaching a decision on the issue, it is trying to meet an unofficial mid-March deadline for hammering out a policy towards companies with ties to South Africa...
...ACSR's history tells us anything it is that the decision, if and when it finally occurs, will be too little. It is already too late. Many campus groups, most notably the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee, have called on the University to sponsor shareholder resolutions for companies in the portfolio that operate in South Africa to withdraw from that country. The deadlines for this year for sponsoring such resolutions in many companies have already passed or will soon pass--usually a shareholder must initiate a resolution 90 days before the annual company meeting in April...
...ACSR is working, under an unofficial mid-March deadline, to come up with an overall policy on University investments in firms operating in South Africa; the SASC will probably step up its activities as the time for decision-making winds down...
There is no indication that the protest affected the ACSR meeting at all, but the weather may have Only seven of the 12 ACSR members showed up for the discussion...