South Africa

However transitory it might have been, it seemed like a muted reprise of the activism of a decade ago: a late April week that included protests against indirect South African investments and "institutional racism," an intercollegiate conference on arms control and disarmament, and a senior symposium on "The Future of Our Social Order: Freedom or a Controlled Society?"

It was heady stuff for one junior who extolled "the promise and the wisdom I felt in the air" and a freshman who found the goings-on in strange contrast to "old Dartmouth, apathy capital of the northeast."

There were familiar names from the days of Vietnam war protest and troubled times of more recent vintage. Daniel Ellsberg, who was in town along with William Sloane Coffin and Adam Yarmolinsky for the disarmament conference, spoke also to some 120 participants in a rally climaxing the week-long protest about College investments in companies doing business in South Africa. No one went so far as to occupy any buildings, as similar groups did at Wesleyan and at Princeton, nor did the protest attract such support as the 3,500 who marched at Harvard, but it had a familiar ring.

Target of the protest was the Board of Trustees meeting in Hanover for the weekend; the aim was to persuade the College to divest itself of holdings in firms operating in South Africa - holdings which the protesters reckoned at $38 million and the College, counting stocks but not bonds, at about $26.5 million. At a meeting earlier this year, the Trustees declared their support of the Sullivan Principles, which commit American companies doing business in South Africa to nondiscriminatory practices in pay, employment, and facilities. At the same time President Kemeny announced that the College owns no stock in firms either located in South Africa or doing their principal business there.

Opinion is mixed about the effectiveness of the Sullivan Principles, as it is about divestiture. Some feel that companies operating under the principles can influence the lot of black South Africans, others that the presence of American firms implies at least a tacit approval of apartheid. Similarly, one view holds that divestiture would remove whatever leverage colleges and similar institutions might have on companies now doing business in South Africa, another that the only moral position is to withdraw from such firms.

Although there was apparently no move toward divestiture, it was announced after the April meeting that the Trustees had directed the College's proxies be voted in favor of stockholder resolutions asking 1) the Manufacturers Hanover Trust to make no further loans to the South African government, 2) Union Carbide to make no further investment or expansion in South Africa, and 3) U.S. Steel not to expand its operations there. They directed the College to abstain, on more or less technical grounds, from voting on resolutions asking Mobil Oil and Standard Oil of California to cut sales to South Africa, and they directed that Dartmouth's proxies be voted against shareholder resolutions in two other cases, on grounds of their being badly drawn or lacking in evidence.