C O It EG F L I F F
NATIONAL AFFAIRS
Should U.S. institutions cut their
investment ties to protest apartheid?
In Northampton, Mass., 200 Smith College students occupied
an administration building for six days to send a message to
Pretoria. In Providence, R.I., four Brown undergraduates
conducted a nine-day hunger strike to demonstrate their
"personal revulsion” for apartheid. "We don’t want to contin
ue our normal routine while genocide in South Africa goes on,”
said sophomore Paul Zimmerman. And in Madison, Wis., 200
students camped out in the capitol rotunda to demand that the
state’s Investment Board rid itself of $2 billion of investments in
companies with ties to racist South Africa.
Dramatic scenes like these have been playing repeatedly across
the nation since the first National Divestment Protest Day was
declared on April 4,1985. Clearly, the drive to divest has become
the broadest, most passionate crusade on American campuses
since the movement to end the Vietnam War—belying the notion
that the conservative campuses of the ’80s are frozen in apathy.
Why this cause? Why this stunning degree of support? For one
thing, compared with the confusing nuances of Central American
politics or the mind-numbing complexities of a nuclear freeze,
apartheid is relatively easy for students to comprehend—and
abhor. "It seems like a morally unambiguous issue,” says Berkeley
sociologist Todd Gitlin, an authority on protest movements. "It
touches on race issues, which are still a sore point to America.”
And, rightly or wrongly, the perception that their schools have a
stake in South Africa persuades students that this time, they,
personally, can influence foreign policy.
Thedivestiture bandwagon is still gaining momentum. Shanties
that symbolize the living conditions of South African blacks have
been cobbled up at campuses from Brandeis to Stanford, and
organizers around the country have planned a continuing fusil
lade of antiapartheid demonstrations, teach-ins, marches and
blockades this month, tied to the anniversary of the assassination
of Martin Luther King Jr.—who had appealed for an end to
American investment in South Africa as early as 1962. There are
also, however, some signs of a backlash. At Dartmouth, a cadre of
Facts ol distant: Smith College student (above), Wisconsin
sit-in fills the capitol rotunda in Madison (below)
conservative students took sledgehammers to the shanties on the I
campus green; unidentified vanduls destroyed the structures on l
Stanfords White Plaza And some activists are growing discour- <
aged over what they see as heedlessness among their trustees '
(page 12) But most insist that they’ll soldier on "We’re educated
on the issue, and it won’t slip away," vows Matt Case, a sophomore
at Colorado College
With rare exception, trustees share the students distaste for
South Africa's legally mandated racial discrimination Many ar
gue, however, that divestiture is more complex than students
believe To the limited extent thut actions by college trustees can
punish t he South African economy, they contend, the impact will
fall disproportionately upon blacks. It would be morally irn*spon
sible for constructive forces to retreat from the South African
scene,” says Jess Hay, chairman of the board of regents of the
Fatting tor chango: Brown students Mike Antonucci, Paul
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Jniversity of Texas system. "It’s the right thing—the righteous
hing—for American companies to be there trying to effect
hange, trying to make working conditions better for the blacks,
vhich in fact they are doing.”
Beneath the rhetoric, the reality is that American corporations
lold only 4 percent of South Africa's total investment, and Amen
’an universities hold only a small fraction of those shares. As a
result, says William Foltz, director of the Yale Center for Interna
:ional and Area Studies, the economic impact of the divestiture
movement is "impossible to find.” The campus movement has
little effect on the fortunes of corporations themselves, if a univer
sity decides to sell its South African stocks, someone else must buy
them Thus, many trustees argue that it is more effective for
universities to hang on to their shares and pressure management
to abide by humane business practices.
Moral issues aside, says MIT political-science Prof Robert
Rotberg, the economic logic of divestiture "depends on a
hypothesis that if all universities divest, then corporations
will [pull out of South Africa] and therefore South Africa will
change.” This hypothesis is based on a number of doubtful assump
tions, says Rotberg, and besides, the process takes too long.
The fact is that the South African government is already under
fierce economic pressure—not so much from American universi
ties as from profit-minded multinational banks. The crisis began
last summer while South Africa was in the midst of a seven-year
depression The country was just emerging from a crippling four
year drought, and the prices of gold and coal—its leading export
commodities—were down sharply. To combat an inflation rate
that was running at 15 to 16 percent, the South African Reserve
Bank pushed domestic interest rates to record levels, forcing
businessmen to borrow huge sums abroad, where they could find
far more favorable rates. ,
As always, the hardship landed most heavily on South Africa s
oppressed majority Violent new riots erupted among the hungry
and unemployed of the segregated black townships, leading Presi
dent P W Botha to turn to the military and police to keep the
•The process of dumping Mocks is known as divestment or divestiture; when
companies leave South Africa, thut is known as disinvestment
C HRIS I KBW EL
Urging a pullout: Colorado College demonstration