Word: acsr
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Although I was the reporter who covered the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility's activities this spring, the ACSR did not receive a single mention in the article to which Smith refers. The ACSR's actions enter into Harvard's shareholder decisionmaking in only a peripheral way. Smith's statement that "the Harvard Corporation takes the ACSR very seriously and leans heavily on it for advice" is utterly ridiculous. To support this statement, Smith is forced to ignore some funamental facts about the composition and bias of the ACSR, as well as to mislead the reader in discussing the record...
...particularly telling that Smith, the member of a group which is suppose to advise Harvard, feels obligated to defend Harvard's shareholding practices. His defense is simply indicative of the true nature of the relationship between the ACSR and Harvard. Smith writes that "unlike at Hampshire College, where students have not had any input into the investment or proxy decisions of the college, Harvard since 1972 has had a committee set up solely for this purpose, the ACSR." Both Smith and the Harvard Corporation may believe the ACSR mechanism legitimates Harvard's socially irresponsible shareholding activities, but they are wrong...
...ACSR advised the Harvard Corporation to vote in favor of shareholder resolutions demanding that businesses--including Mobil, Polaroid and Gulf--either cease operations in southern Africa or drop plans for expansion there, depending on whether the committee was convinced the corporation in question was trying to improve both the situation of its black South African employees and blacks in southern Africa in general...
...Harvard Corporation has refused to accept the ACSR's recommendations, and instead has voted to abstain from the shareholder resolutions...
George Putnam '49, Harvard treasurer and a member of the Corporation subcommittee that determines the University's votes on shareholder resolutions, has said in each case the committee was not convinced that the corporation was acting as badly as the ACSR believed...