Word: acsr
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...divisions among the ACSR's members often displayed more complex and deep-rooted foundations than this simple liberal/conservative split suggests. The liberals on the ACSR seemed to share a healthy mistrust of the motives of large corporations and a belief in the primacy of moral considerations. The conservatives, in contrast, almost reflexively supported corporate objectives and seemed to view ethical concerns as just one among a number of equally weighty factors. But beyond these general points of agreement the individuals in each groups approached the issues with many different commitments and distinctive moral vocabularies...
...youth. Some of the conservative members of the Committee knew only the language of cost-benefit analysis. In their strictly utilitarian calculations secure profits often weighed equally with considerations of simple justice. Other conservative members favored casting the issue in terms of revolution versus gradual change. Debates on the ACSR, then, often became fruitless clashes between incompatible moral jargons...
Some persuasion, however, did take place. After the meeting with the CCSR, the ACSR broadened the scope of its inquiry from the question of screening investments to the University's South Africa policy as a whole. As the Committee spent more time on the issue and examined more evidence, several members who had balked at the rigid use of the Sullivan Principles as the standard of corporate behavior and at the establishment of fixed limits on correspondence with the managements of delinquent companies accepted these positions. General divestiture became a viable topic for debate...
Student projects--the Endowment for Divestiture and the week-long fast by a dozen undergraduates--had little impact on the ACSR's discussions. Some members laughed off the hunger strikers as fanatics or brats--one member ignorantly suggested that the hunger strikers were probably all women interested in losing weight. But if they had little effect on the outcome of Committee deliberations, the fasters at least heightened most of the members' awareness of the gravity of the issue being discussed...
...external event that probably had a noticeable effect on the Committee was the Open Meeting held near the end of April. Before an audience of 150 the ACSR heard 16 speakers describe in excruciating images and cold statistics the horrors of apartheid and call for an end to Harvard's involvement in South Africa. When a Black South African lawyer, who could face criminal prosecution leading to a death sentence when he returns to South Africa in the fall, finished a moving appeal for total divestment more than half the Committee joined the audience in a standing ovation...