Word: conways
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Secondly, Mr. Conway's argument naively presupposes the potential effectiveness of any shareholder pressure that Harvard might attempt to exert: the historical record contradicts this assumption. In 1977, only four of 350 corporations had withdrawal resolutions put forth by shareholders, and the average vote in favor of the Corporations' withdrawal was less than 3 percent. Moreover, since management has control over 80 percent of shareholders votes by proxy, and shareholders' resolutions are, by law, nonbinding requests, any resolutions that might appear are doomed to defeat. In fact, this has been the case each year, even resolutions calling merely for study...
Similarly ridiculous is Mr. Conway's insinuation that Harvard should continue to support and reap profits from apartheid so that its students can remain concerned about South Africa. Whether or not Harvard divests, students who are sincerely concerned about human rights violations will find time to address them wherever they occur--in South Africa, in Central America, in Soviet Russia--and in the United States, for that matter...
...Conway also argues against general corporate divestiture from South Africa who is intimately involved with the situation in that country and whose sympathy lies with the majority Black population. As such he proceeds to blast students and scholars for "self-righteously" advocating divestment, which, he claims, would "help entrench apartheid" and lead to "increased Black poverty." By mentioning that we do this "from the lofty citadels at Harvard," he insinuates that we are very far removed from the situation in South Africa--perhaps too far to make an intelligent judgement about what is best for its people...
That the Harvard community is indeed far from the South Africa scene is obvious: that we cannot make reasoned suggestions about what might benefit its people is much less clear. Yet one thing is certain: neither Robert Conway nor anyone else has the right to assume that they know better how to solve the problems of Black South Africans than do the Black South Africans themselves. Unfortunately, this is apparently what Mr. Conway has done, since nearly every Black leader, liberation organization, and anti-apartheid group in South Africa has unequivocally advocated divestiture of U.S. corporations and banks from South...
...student of Afro-American history I find Mr. Conway's short-sighted patemalism disturbingly reminiscent of that of many Northern whites of the early nineteenth century. Claiming to represent the interests of Black people, these men fought the abolition of slavery because they felt that the resulting freedmen would be worse off than they had been as slaves. The parallel becomes still more striking when one remembers that in the meantime, ex-slaves such as Frederick Douglass fought vehemently for abolition. Just as these Northern whites chose to ignore Douglass (no doubt feeling that they knew better than...