“Students find corporate reforms absurd”: Bryn Mawr Student’s Mobilization for Divestment from Apartheid South Africa

Abstract

In 1986, Bryn Mawr College’s endowment held $8 million or 8.33% of its $96 million endowment in investments tied to Apartheid in South Africa. In line with other major US institutions who believed they must act moral in the face of violent and exploitative system of racial discrimination, the Board of Trustees, the governing body that oversees college operations and finances, proposed a plan in 1985 to divest from subsidiaries of their stock in South Africa if Apartheid was still in place 24 months later in 1987. This came at the tail end of the international movement to oppose and end Apartheid through economic pressures. Bryn Mawr students would reject this plan, occupying buildings and mobilizing campus to disrupt Board meetings. Students said they would not rest until full divestment. Their movement held a shared commitment to ending Apartheid in South Africa and to ending racism in the United States. This paper narrates how the social and economic movements against Apartheid panned out at Bryn Mawr College in the 1980s. Based on my original primary source research at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges’ special collections, I uncover the tactics and frameworks of the student movement to divest as well as the college’s response. Inevitably, the administration took partial measures to accommodate some of the demands of the student movement for divestment. The nexus between the student movement for divestment and the college administration took new heights in 1986. In this year, the students rejected the college’s newly presented plan for divestment, as they understood it as a mere palliative measure in the face of the violence and racism of Apartheid. To understand the student zeitgeist at the time , I illuminate the historical context of the movement against Apartheid by situating it in relation to the preceding anti-War and Civil Rights movements. The later era of activism precipitated into the New Left movement, which was a radical student movement grounded in ideas of political and economic democracy. I provide readers with a primer on the foundations of ethical investment in South Africa. The college’s plan embodied the corporate responsibility ethos of the 80s, which sought to maintain capitalism and pacify very popular alternatives through modest reforms. These principles undergirded Bryn Mawr College’s eventual divestment strategy, which sought to maintain profit and to make a statement about their opposition to the political system of Apartheid. To make this argument, I draw on archival discussions of corporate responsibility politics and the theory of change they espouse which forwarded reform through pressuring the companies they held stock in. I engage in an analysis of discourses emerging from a school-sponsored trip to South Africa in the winter of 1986, which was dubbed a “Peace Mission Fact Finding Trip.” This analysis is essential to understanding student and faculty perspectives, as there was not a consensus on the subject. In the end, Bryn Mawr adopted a divestment plan that was in the name of corporate responsibility. They wrote letters to the corporations they held stock in who had subsidiaries in South Africa, and asked what they were going to do to end Apartheid. The school sold $651,558 in 1986 of stock from the 5 companies, a mere 0.67% of the total endowment.