Word: acsr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...entrances to University Hall. But this year, after having anesthetized student discontent with the rhetoric of open letters and imposing progress reports of its review of corporate activity in South Africa, the Corporation for the first time faced dissent from within--from its Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR...
...Corporation created the ACSR in response to student demands that Harvard divest its stocks in Gulf Oil, seen by the students as a powerful supporter of Portugal's colonial government in Angola. The Corporation charged the ACSR with the task of advising it on the moral and ethical implications of Harvard's investments. In the seven years that followed, the ACSR began to do just that--and its advice coincided with the Corporation's actions almost blow by blow...
...during this year's proxy season, the ACSR recommended that the Corporation support four shareholder resolutions chiding management and seeking reform. It placed the Corporation in the unfamiliar and embarassing dilemma of having to choose between opposing the resolution, or turning a cold shoulder to the body it created to gather information and offer advice on investment decisions. The Corporation balked, taking the safest way out of the dilemma by abstaining on the four resolutions. But the ACSR's renegade votes showed that, far from disappearing, the South Africa issue continues to irritate the Corporation--a thorn...
This spring the ACSR chose to energize the legalistic and noncommittal jargon of the Corporation's case-by-case review policy by chiding companies that fail to operate in the interests of South African Blacks. Marking this new commitment, it changed a decision of a year ago and supported a resolution requiring Caterpillar Tractor to investigate the transfer of machinery from the private to the military sectors in South Africa. The Corporation, noting the sudden change of the ACSR, abstained on the resolution and said it would not reconsider the vote until the ACSR accounted for its new conviction. Detlev...
...late April, a similar decision proved equally unsettling to the Corporation when the ACSR voted in favor of a proxy calling on International Business Machines (IBM) to curtail its computer sales to South Africa. It noted that computers may be used to maintain the records for the country's passbook system and other aspects of apartheid. But the Corporation abstained once again, noting that IBM's computers could go just as easily to hospitals and school as to the supporting network of apartheid...