Word: bok
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Former University President Derek C. Bok, who led Harvard from 1971 to 1991, will serve as interim president effective July 1, according to a University press release...
Nearly 26 years ago, University President Derek C. Bok wrote that “any policy that encourages the University to engage in boycotts...will have grave disadvantages for the institution.” Yet several events in the past year, including Harvard’s selling its shares of PetroChina, Michigan’s termination of its contract with Coca-Cola, and Stanford’s, Yale’s, and Amherst’s divestment from all companies doing business in Sudan, indicate that this debate is anything but a closed case. And divestment remains in the news?...
While Harvard has a long tradition of morally responsible investing decisions—including its decisions to divest from Angola’s oil industry, apartheid South Africa, and tobacco stock—all these decisions were made on an ad hoc basis. This “Bok system” has several problems. First, the “exceptional circumstances” criteria for divestment forces the ethical responsibility debate to be rehashed from scratch each time a questionable investment is discovered in Harvard’s portfolio. Second, the current system means that reviews often do not occur...
Furthermore, the biggest check in the Bok system is the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR). Comprised of professors, alumni, and students, the ACSR was a concession made by the University to student activists demanding institutional checks during the campus debate over investments in apartheid South Africa in 1972. While the ACSR research was valuable in prompting the PetroChina decision, they hold little real power—they can only make recommendations and primarily focus on shareholder votes, not screenings of investments. Overall, the Bok standard of ad hoc ethical decision-making—adopted in reaction to student protests...
...Pusey’s vision of a systematic and proactive social investment strategy was wide-ranging and called for senior administrative posts at the University to be dedicated to maintaining a socially responsible endowment. Yet Pusey’s recommendations were never implemented and replaced with the Bok system that is still used today...