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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1986)
corporationii. I would think 'Indianu doesn’t want us around’.” Indiana's trustees voted in 1978 to divest the stock of companies that had not signed the Sullivan Code. (Eli Lilly is a signatory in good standing > But last November they rejected a call for total divestiture. "We wanted to keep our shareholder interest because we suw it as the most effective way to communicate our (anti apartheid ] beliefs.” says Harry Gonso, vice president of the univer sity’s board. But the trustees may also have been thinking of its "Campaign for Indiana,” n $100 million-plus fund-raiBing drive that will rely heavily on corporate gifts. Whatever the case, Gonso reports that even partial divestiture has created more than its share of problems "Where do you draw the line with corporate relations?" he asks. "Do you terminate your shareholding or do you totally sterilize yourself—not accepting scholarship money or faculty funding?" Even schools that have voted for full divestiture have not committed themselves to refusing gifts from corporations with ties to South Africa, and still accept their research contracts. Nor have they severed their links with organizations also declined to give her lost name. "They’re too absorbed in their privileged white world. Sometimes I question what I’m doing here, and feel I should be out there in the townships with my people.” By South African standards, UCT is not inexpensive: a year there costs almost $3,000—far more than most nonwhites can afford. The university offers scholarship grants called bur saries; 35 percent of the school’s grants go to nonwhites. "The most disadvantaged should get the most help," says James Moulder, UCT’s director of pub lic relations. "But we’re always short of money.” that invest in companies with South African holdings. One promi nent example is TIAA-CREF—the largest retirement program for college faculty and administrators. That one pension plan alone holds $6.5 billion in securities of companies with South African connections. Divestiture has also caused problems for students who wonder what they can do next. Activists at Columbia, whose trustees agreed to full divestiture last October, have been reduced to picketing a local branch of Citibank, South Africa’s largest American lender and underwriter (Citibank is also one of the institutions that pushed South Africa into its current eco nomic crisis.) During last spring’s three-week blockade of Hamilton Hall, Columbia president Michael Sovern reminded students that if they were really serious about pressuring companies with South African operations, they might consider boycotting Colgate Palmolive. A New York weekly newspaper, The Village Voice, promptly labeled his remark the "Toothpaste Manifesto." But it could just as well have been called the "Soft Drink Manifesto," the "Personal Computer Manifesto” or the "Tampon Manifesto.” Feisty: Skateboard from a sign (left), tray tobogganing Some help is coming from the United States, thanks to a new organization called the Univer sity of Cape Town Fund. With support from the likes of CBS and Exxon, the fund raised $209,000 in its first year. UCT turns down 150 qualified stu dents each year because they can’t pay their way, says execu tive director Anne D. Moran, and "we’re very, very anxious to fill that gap." American uni versities have also become in volved. Tufts and Princeton are actively raising money for UCT scholarships, and MIT earmarks its contributions es pecially to train engineers. Perhaps not surprisingly, the hard-line antiapartheid activ ists don't want UCT to have such aid, calling it an escape valve for the Pretoria regime. It's not certain whether UCT can win its fight for the right to decide who will teach and who will study, but its determina tion is symbolized by a plaque on the wall of Jameson Hall, which notes, in Latin, that a 1959 education act deprived UCT of academic freedom. There remains an empty space on the plaque, which "will re main blank until the act is abol ished,” says UCT vice chancel lor Dr. Stuart Saunders. "On that day we shall truly regain our academic freedom.” Nancy Coop it r with Put hr Y o ii n o h t's b a n d m Cape Town