Word: internship
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ANTI-APARTHEID activists would have been hard-pressed to imagine a more damning reductio ad absurdum of Harvard's policies toward South Africa than the University's new South African Internship Program. The program is ill-conceived, poorly planned and, as it currently stands, will actually hurt Black South Africans--the ostensible beneficiaries of the new internships. It was conceived out of short-term political expediency and claims to benign results for malignant activities...
...page report released last week by the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC) provides an exhaustive indictment of the internship program. Harvard officials have been caught with their pants down. The committee designing the program did not solicit the views of Black South Africans and ignored protests from Black South Africans at Harvard. Five of the nine Harvard internships now available would send students to elite, white private schools in the racist state. Two of them are in the illegally occupied territory of Namibia and are associated with a company that engages in illegal mining activities and has been internationally condemned...
What is puzzling about this whole affair is why the University has rushed ahead with the internship program and made such foolish mistakes in the process. One would like to give the program's organizers the benefit of the doubt. They didn't really intend a social service program for South Africa's elite white business class, did they? And why would they want to aid in the illegal occupation and economic exploitation of Namibia? But if their intentions were not evil, how could they have been so naive as to embark on the present program...
...REASONS FOR the University's unfortunate and premature commencement of the internship program become clear when you consider the traditional timing of divestment protests on campus. What better way to preempt spring protests than to implement a program to give students the opportunity to practice what they preach. When bombarded this coming spring with indignant slogans, Harvard administrators will be able to say: We're doing something concrete while you're just waving signs--if you really want to do something, why don't you sign up for internships...
Certainly there is no love lost between Steiner and the divestment movement over his misguided labours. As well as chairing the internship committee and overseeing the new program, he has long been the University's point man on the divestment issue. He has frequently derided student protests and is usually the University's spokesman and troubleshooter on touchy corporate issues. Students, in turn, have frequently blamed him for a variety of the University's evil-doings--from investment policy to a pre-Cambrian attitude toward labor relations. SASC directed its report at "the Steiner Committee," and it seems obvious that...