Word: exxon
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Last week I and other members of the Student Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility tried unsuccessfully to meet with you about Harvard's position in the Exxon-Angola proxy fight. We were told that those matters were out of your hands and that Hugh Calkins, Fellow and chairman of the Sub-Committee on Harvard's shareholder responsibility, was the man to see about specific issues. When we later requested a discussion with you on more general questions about Harvard's performance in this area, we were told that you had no time until school closed for the summer or reopened...
...weaponry for the war in Indochina, or even to have companies set up study committees on such problems as conversion to peacetime production or apparently dangerous conditions in a company's coal mines. Setting up committees, the Corporation explained only last week, when it abstained on a resolution on Exxon's proposed investment in Angola, "would interfere improperly with management's decision-making process...
...submitting its committee proposal, the Unitarian Universalist Association of Churches and Fellowships of North America was asking for an investigation of ways in which Exxon's proposed investment might help Portugal to control her rebellious colonies militarily. According to U.N. figures, Portugal's 1971 military budget in Angola was approximately $68.5 million. Portugal was expected in 1972 to net roughly $50 million from taxes and royalties paid by foreign investors in Angola...
...shareholders' votes -- a fact the churches clearly understand. The ACSR, in objecting to the committee's composition, was objecting to the details of a proposal meant to be considered in a far broader political context. Resolutions such as these are intended to raise issues -- in this case, to pressure Exxon to establish a responsible study group. Any study committee that management would voluntarily establish in response to such pressure would no doubt be more "balanced," in the ACSR's sense, than the group proposed by the churches...
Third, in recommending an abstention on the shareholder resolution, the ACSR exerted the least possible pressure on the Harvard Corporation to address the political questions raised by colonial rule in Angola. By recommending that the Corporation send advisory letters to the churches and to Exxon management, the ACSR exaggerated the risk in endorsing a shareholder resolution as a demonstration for an incontestably just political cause...