Chapter 5 Stanford University Pursuing Objectivity

Resurrecting Institutional Programs

In late spring 1977, Keith Archuletta and Chris Coleman participated in a sit-in at the Old Union Station of Stanford University. The purpose of the sit-in was to call attention to and protest Stanford’s investment policy in apartheid South Africa. They were not alone. Throughout the day, over nine hundred students rallied at White Plaza. During the sit-in, Archuletta and Coleman were joined by 293 other Stanford students, all of whom were later arrested.3 The sit-in was the culmination of a multiyear organizing process around divestment, a process that had generated broad support within the Stanford community. Coleman and Archuletta collected over three thousand student signatures, eighty faculty signatures, and backing from twenty campus groups, including the United Stanford Employees labor union, the Stanford Church, the YWCA, the Stanford Daily, and the student government.4

While the anti-apartheid movement served as the political inspiration for the actions of Archuletta and Coleman, the planning, organizing, and research for the demonstration was a direct product of the programs that grew out of student activism at Stanford in the 1960s. In drawing on institutionally sponsored programs, the anti-apartheid movement at Stanford resurrected an older dilemma that emerged on campus from the 1960s: the end goal of student-led education and research.

The first institutional hub of the divestment movement at Stanford was the Black Activities Center. Originally called the Black Student Volunteer Center, the center grew out of Black student demands in 1969 for an institutional home to support political action within the Black communities adjacent to campus. Indeed, in its formative years, the center operated under the theme Hudumu Na Ujamaa, a Swahili phrase that translates as “Service to the Community.” By the mid-1970s, however, the center’s original mission was replaced by a cultural focus, one captured by the center’s name change to the Black Activities Center. The shift was rooted in the changing politics of Black students who focused on the cultural basis of Black Power combined with institutional policy changes that limited the type and form of political action within the community. When Archuletta enrolled at Stanford, he turned to the center, only to be dismayed by the lack of political commitment among his Black peers, especially those students within the communities near Stanford’s campus. Archuletta resurrected the original mission of the center by linking the center’s founding to the campus divestment movement. When he became the coordinator of the center after graduation, he renamed it the Black Community Service Center. In doing so, he reconnected the center to activism in the community. Research and education, Archuletta believed, “was not just in the classroom, but also engagement in the community.”5

The second institutional hub was the Columbae House. The Columbae House was established in 1969 by David Josephson and other Stanford students who organized the April 3rd Movement (A3M), a coalition that demanded an end to secret military research on campus. Set up as a cooperative house, it embraced a mission focused on social change through nonviolent action. The house also reflected the goal of the anti-war movement in the 1960s: to create an institutional space for students to align their political belief systems with both their educational and residential experience. One of the central concerns of students within the A3M was how a student’s education at Stanford was bound up with the violence of the Vietnam War through the university’s research.6 When Coleman joined the Columbae House in the mid-1970s, he sought to expand its mission by focusing on another moral issue on campus: university investments in apartheid South Africa.

To expand the political mission of each program, Archuletta and Coleman drew on another institutional legacy from the 1960s: the Stanford Workshop on Political and Social Issues (SWOPSI). The SWOPSI was first organized by Stanford students in fall 1969 with the goal of reorienting the general education curriculum. As students explained in their first series of workshops in the late 1960s, “SWOPSI is a student-initiated and student-led program to direct Stanford’s curriculum to urgent social and political problems.” Like other programs that emerged on college campuses in the late 1960s, the SWOPSI course had an explicit focus on translating ideas into political action. The goal of the workshop, the students continued, was to “seek ways of implementing proposed solutions through community education and political and social action.”7

In his SWOPSI course, Archuletta facilitated a seminar titled “Black Leadership.” The political meaning of the anti-apartheid struggle connected closely with Archuletta’s upbringing in the United States. Archuletta had a mixed racial background: his mother was Latina, and his father was African American. Although he was part of the first generation of Black students to attend integrated public schools, Archuletta confronted the cultural legacy of Jim Crow in his day-to-day encounters with local Whites. In Archuletta’s view, the divestment movement was an extension of the ongoing Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. The topical focus was key to his interpretation of the anti-apartheid movement. The seminar included student activists from the 1960s, such as Huey Newton and representatives from Stokely Carmichael’s All African People’s Revolutionary Party. Archuletta combined his SWOPSI experience with his work at the Black Community Service Center, linking the divestment movement in the 1980s to the political lessons of the 1960s and their institutional legacies in ways that sought to connect formal education to community activism. In the SWOPSI class, Archuletta encouraged students to link the divestment struggle on campus to issues in East Palo Alto, a predominantly African American community.

Like Archuletta in the Black Community Service Center, Coleman connected the Columbae House to a SWOPSI course that focused on the university’s financial connections to apartheid South Africa. The product of Coleman’s course was a position paper on Stanford University’s investments in corporations operating in South Africa. The position paper reflected the ways that student activists at Stanford drew on not only institutional programs but also their formal educational training to support the campus divestment movement.

The purpose of the position paper, written in memory of Steve Biko, the renowned student activist who was killed by the South African government in 1977, was to challenge the “progressive force” argument about apartheid. This argument assumed that economic growth and American investment would undermine apartheid over time. Using evidence from United Nations and corporate documentation as well as scholarly works on the subject of the South African economy, the students argued that, rather than undermining apartheid, American investments in South Africa modernized apartheid as a political and economic system. They argued that the investments, which included Stanford’s 1.6 million shares of stocks in companies that worked in South Africa—valued at $72.2 million—enabled the South African government to increase its wealth while regulating the labor and civil rights of Black citizens. The position paper demonstrated the hallmarks of research and education in the modern university. Students analyzed the sources and detected the underlying flaws of prevailing policy around South African investments.8

Despite these varied efforts from 1977 to 1980, university administrators and the board of trustees abstained from voting on investment policies. They recycled a familiar argument—they interpreted divestment as a political position that the university could not take. That university leaders had employed a similar argument in the 1960s was not a surprise. Richard Lyman, the president of Stanford in 1977, was the provost and president in the late 1960s, when Stanford came under fire by student activists for the university’s research involvement in the Vietnam War. In response to the sit-in and the calls for an active role in investments concerning South Africa, Lyman argued that taking a political stand via investment was a “very risky matter for a university to become involved as a political spokesman on issues outside the institution” and that doing so would undermine the university as a space for free inquiry.9

In another parallel from the 1960s, student activists argued that the issue with this argument was that the claim to institutional neutrality masked the university’s political position via investment. Indeed, the primary goal of student anti-apartheid activists in the late 1970s was for the university to live up to its stated mission of free inquiry. The focus of activists in the late 1970s was to push university officials and the board of trustees to take an active role in investment, develop a commission on investments with power that represented the different constituencies of the Stanford community, and compile a report that analyzed the costs and benefits of full divestment. In a letter to university officials, student organizers argued that refraining from debating investment policy was “morally and logically inconsistent.” “The purposes of the institution,” the students wrote, “are made hypocritical if the institution participates as a corporate shareholder in exploitation, illegal activities or other practices repugnant to the moral sense of the community.”10

In both ways, the anti-apartheid movement resurrected the tension that initially emerged within SWOPSI courses and the university’s research and education mission more broadly in the late 1960s. When the SWOPSI courses were first developed, the question of “action” was on the minds of students, professors, and administrators. Student director Nick Corff recognized that political action was a natural outgrowth of SWOPSI courses. Employing a logic similar to that of university presidents in the 1960s, Corff argued that whatever action was taken based on a SWOPSI course was an individual, rather than an institutional, effort. David Albernathy, a political science professor who also served on the policy board, held a different view on the relationship between research and action in SWOPSI courses. He distinguished between “proposing solutions, which should be a part of a SWOPSI,” and political action, which should not be, even if he recognized “that might be a logical result.”11

A similar dynamic thus arose in the late 1970s. The SWOPSI course on South Africa and its relationship to student activism on campus reflected what students of the 1960s envisioned in attempting to connect formal education to social and political concerns. The courses focused on a relevant political issue while providing students a set of intellectual tools and political strategies to address the issue at the institutional level. The problem, however, arose when students not only translated their research into social action on campus in the form of the sit-in but demanded the institution to similarly act based on the research findings.

Even if university administrators and students recycled familiar arguments and highlighted unresolved tensions, the institutional context was different at Stanford in the 1980s. University administrators did not simply rely on the claim of institutional neutrality. Lyman acknowledged that what the university confronted was central to its mission. He agreed with anti-apartheid activists that the university’s policies regarding “educational and internal matters ought to be ethically well determined.”12 The ad hoc faculty committee on investment policy—a committee led by Albernathy—also highlighted this dilemma. While the primary fiduciary policy of the board of trustees was to ensure financial solvency and return on the endowment, Albernathy wrote, they also needed to consider the nature of the investment policy if it were to cause social injury.13 Both views were captured by Rodney Adams, Stanford’s director of finance. “A basic tenet of educational institutions is that there be freedom to express divergent views,” he explained. But he also acknowledged that “the institution is expected, at times, to take a firm unilateral position on a particular societal issue.” In the case of investment in South Africa, Adams concluded, the university confronted “a paradox that must be resolved.”14

The paradox went to the heart of existing institutional programs and a student’s formal education at Stanford. In three different programmatic contexts—the Black Community Service Center, the Columbae House, and the SWOPSI course—Stanford University provided institutional support and equipped students with tools of analysis to critically examine the question of investments in apartheid South Africa. This enabled students to reconstruct a dormant political culture that linked activism to one’s formal education—only to confront an institutional culture that set limits on the application of the knowledge gained from their education and the programs that supported their activism. Indeed, the divestment movement at Stanford resurrected the political implications of and tensions within the university’s culture of disciplining democracy. Influenced by the market logic taking shape in the modern American university in the 1980s, students, faculty, and administrators confronted how to ethically reconcile the educational and research goal of the university with an endowment policy that was vital to providing the very financial resources for an elite education at Stanford.

Debating the Morality of Educational Investment

When Mark Funk joined the 1977 spring sit-in, he was understandably nervous. Facing a large police force, Funk thought about the prospect of suspension. Even worse, he reflected, the possibility of arrest seemed “most unpalatable,” given what it might mean for his job prospects. Despite these reservations, he stayed and was later arrested.15 He believed that the commitment to the sit-in was vital to ensuring that his education was morally consistent. Indeed, the anti-apartheid movement at Stanford resurrected debates about the goal of an elite education. By sitting in, Funk grappled with his higher education pursuits at Stanford. In graduating from Stanford, Funk received what the market economy defined as an elite education that opened up new professional opportunities, even in a tightening job market. Yet, as Funk sat in the paddy wagon sent by university officials, he also recognized the failure of the university to take a moral stand against apartheid. Funk confronted what he and others of his cohort at Stanford interpreted as the moral costs of an elite education.

Although students embraced a moral argument about the university, the idea of moral concern took on different political meanings among student activists, illuminating a range of critiques that concerned not only the institution’s role but a student’s education within it. Indeed, the focus on institutional investment pivoted on divergent meanings of appropriate actions that also influenced how students interpreted the moral contours of their elite education at Stanford. The differences were represented by the varied organizations and backgrounds of students that made up the two key student groups in the 1980s: the Coalition Against Apartheid and Stanford Out of South Africa (SOSA). Both organizations brought together students from the Black Student Union, Asian American Students Association, and the African Student Association.

International students at Stanford, especially those from different countries in Africa, confronted the very political nature of education within the exchange programs that brought them to the university. A key organizer of the Coalition Against Apartheid was Vasavan Samuel, an Indian and South African law student and the treasurer of the African Students Association at Stanford University. Samuel was also a chair of a student council that represented close to five hundred South Africans who studied in the United States. Samuel attended Stanford as a participant in the South Africa Education Program—an opportunity that exemplified the political tension within his educational experiences. The target of student protests on American campuses like Stanford was the university investments in companies such as Exxon, Chase Bank, and IBM—the same corporate sponsors of the South Africa Education Program. At Stanford, Samuel worked with students from Kenya, Tanzania, and other parts of Africa in calling for university divestment, and all of them recognized that their presence at Stanford was a product of a global financial system that benefited from exploitation in South Africa.16

Students in the African Students Association interpreted the moral contours of the divestment movement as a material and structural legacy of colonialism. As Wunyabari Maloba, a Kenyan student at Stanford and a member of the African Students Association, explained, “foreign investment means the black man is being exploited. The economic position of the black man has not improved because of foreign investment.”17 For students like Maloba, divestment was the best tool to challenge both apartheid South Africa and broader economic relations between Western countries and the continent of Africa. Indeed, students like Samuel, Maloba, and others who participated in the coalition through the African Students Association connected the divestment movement to the longer history and struggle against colonialism in Africa. In a statement written by the Stanford African Students Association, student members supported calls for complete divestment from South Africa, seeing it as the best means to challenge apartheid, or what they defined as the last “stubborn vestige of colonialism.” “We consider the processes of colonization, of which apartheid is one particularly sinister form,” they wrote, “to be immoral systems for the deliberate and systematic exploitation of human beings by other human beings for the greed of unbridled economic gain.”18

The interpretation of institutional investment as but an extension of colonialism informed how students like Maloba interpreted their education at Stanford. Indeed, students connected US foreign policy and colonialism to Stanford’s education and research. Two graduate students from Africa and members of the coalition—Charles N’Cho-Obuie and Mwesiga Baregu—argued that most “Africanist” scholarly work at Stanford and in particular the Hoover Institution reflected the ideological stance of the United States. Africanist scholars at Stanford supported investment policy, taking the “progressive force” position by arguing that the policy improved the economic lives of Black citizens in South Africa. N’Cho-Obuie and Baregu believed that the consensus among scholars at Stanford concerning South Africa did not provide students with a different political frame of reference. In their view, research on South Africa at Stanford largely assumed American foreign policy interests. “We consider it a fallacy and a deliberate obfuscation of the facts to suggest that disinvestment will hurt the colonized Africans more than the colonizing Europeans,” they wrote. “We find the suggestion itself more painful than the purported actuality. Foreign investment aids all Europeans and a pitiably tiny minority of Africans.”19

A moral education, Maloba, N’Cho-Obuie, and Baregu ultimately argued, required a commitment to anti-colonialism. The problem, however, was that students could not develop a moral commitment to anti-colonialism if what they learned merely echoed the prevailing policy of the country. In critiquing Africanist research at the Hoover Institution, they synthesized the anti-colonial goals of the divestment movement with the stated role of the university as a space for both free inquiry and civic development. Divestment, they argued, was central to the “decolonization process” and thus was important for all institutions, “especially those with a presumed and profoundly moral character or mission such as civic structures and universities of higher learning.”20

While students like Maloba, N’Cho-Obuie, and Baregu critiqued the content of their education to make arguments about the moral role of the university and the need to divest, others connected the argument directly to what they learned in the classroom. Indeed, some students believed that the content of their education in the classroom taught a set of moral lessons that required them to demand the university to divest. Stanford student Jon Adelstein drew a direct parallel between what was expected of him as a student at Stanford to the role of the institution. He explained, “Stanford expects its students to observe the highest ethical and moral standards” based on what they learn in their classes, so “Stanford students expect the board of trustees to abide by exactly these same standards.”21 Phillip J. Ivanhoe, a PhD student in
Chinese philosophy, also cited his coursework as a key factor in the evolution of his political views concerning the university investments and South Africa. At Stanford, he studied Chinese moral philosophy, an intellectual framework
that led him to conclude what he perceived to be “the university’s moral failure on the issue of divestment.” He saw the university as a “force for good” but was “saddened to see it involved in a grave injustice” by maintaining investments in South Africa.22 What both Adelstein and Ivanhoe confronted was the disconnect between the stated goal of their formal education as a source of moral and ethical development and an institutional context that seemed to disregard moral and ethical considerations.

Indeed, this dynamic was central to the experiences of Bill Cohn, a member of SOSA and the coalition. Like Adelstein and Ivanhoe, he linked the divestment movement to what he learned at Stanford while also confronting the institutional limits of applying what he learned. From July to November 1984, Cohn traveled throughout South Africa after receiving a grant from Stanford’s International Relations Department. Cohn explained that his study-abroad trip gave him “a much clearer understanding of the realities and dynamics of social change in South Africa.”23 Like the SWOPSI course and earlier efforts at Stanford, Cohn’s experiences demonstrated the embedded tensions of students’ education in the 1980s. The university enabled him to develop a sophisticated understanding of South Africa and the political situation through direct experience, which he used to justify his activism and call for divestment. At the same time that the university facilitated his intellectual and political growth, it set limits on what he believed was the morally correct way to bring about change in South Africa. For Adelstein, Ivanhoe, and Cohn, divestment was a means to align the university’s investments with the ethical lessons of their courses and programs.

Students within the Black Student Union negotiated and adopted both structural and educational arguments for divestment. While positioning the university as a central institution that could address social and racial injustice in the United States and around the world, they also questioned the content of their education like their international counterparts. A key leader in the Black Student Union and the anti-apartheid effort at Stanford in the 1980s was Amanda Kemp. Her identity and experiences as a student reflected the tensions within the movement and the university. Originally from Biloxi, Mississippi, Kemp felt insecure upon her arrival at Stanford. After attending an elite, predominantly White private institution, Kemp experienced the same doubts that other Black students reported concerning their identity, community, and education. “There’s a contradiction (in my life),” Kemp explained. “I’m poor and come from the inner city—that’s one part of me. But I did attend that elite school for four years and it was the most stable time of my life.” She worried that at the same time her education at Stanford opened up new opportunities, the institution itself disconnected her from the political concerns of the Black community. “I have always felt a responsibility, an obligation and a link to the black community,” Kemp said, but she feared her elite education at Stanford made many Black community members skeptical of her work and involvement in the community.24

Stanford University and in particular the Black Community Service Center provided an intellectual and political space for Kemp to reconcile the tensions within her educational journey. As the assistant director of the Black Community Service Center, she worked with Archuletta, who helped spark the divestment movement at Stanford in the late 1970s. Within that intuitional space, Kemp became one of the founding members of SOSA, an offshoot of the Coalition Against Apartheid. Kemp believed that her efforts in the Black Student Union and the Black Community Service Center were the “most valuable part of my education,” as her participation allowed her to engage with issues relevant to her personal identity and develop friendships rooted in social and political efforts.

While Kemp navigated the possibilities and limitations of her education at Stanford, she believed deeply that another avenue for reconciling the competing impulses of her education was for the institution to take a political stand and divest. Kemp believed that when confronted by the situation in South Africa, one had a moral obligation to take a stand. She challenged the idea of institutional neutrality, arguing, “The bottom line is that there’s a struggle going on. By not taking a stand, you are taking a stand. You’re on the side that’s not making it better, but making it worse.” In the context of SOSA and the Black Community Service Center, she worked with Steve Phillips to expand on the moral and political implications of one’s education if Stanford did not take a clear political position on investment policy in South Africa. “It is wrong to reap profits from a system that brutally represses and exploits the great majority of its population,” they argued. “An education funded by this kind of ‘blood money’ is immoral; the buildings, books and faculty of Stanford University should not be built upon the bent backs of Black South Africans.” Like their counterparts in the African Student Association, Kemp and Phillips argued that the university had a unique role to play in society, especially in relation to moral issues like apartheid. “The university should assume a role of moral leadership,” SOSA activists wrote, “sending a message to other institutions and individuals that any sort of support for apartheid is unacceptable.”25

Drawing on the lessons and efforts of students that came before them, particularly Archuletta and Coleman, Kemp and Phillips also held regular forums and produced research with students in the African Students Association on the effects of apartheid on Black life in South Africa. They also helped organize the National Anti-Apartheid Day at Stanford in the spring of 1985, bringing over a thousand students onto Stanford’s main quad to demand for divestment. How new Stanford President Donald Kennedy responded to the campus-wide protest and efforts to reconcile different conceptions of moral education reflected the ways university leaders not only recycled but expanded disciplining democracy as an institutional logic to mitigate students’ broader political visions of the university as a political actor.

Reconciling Moral Action

At the height of the anti-apartheid movement at Stanford, Kennedy met with students from SOSA. As a former student activist in the 1950s who challenged anti-Communist purges on college campuses, Kennedy recognized the importance of civil disobedience as a key element of democratic citizenship. He also agreed, at least in principle, that active citizenship included a combination of activism, service, and intellectual commitment. He disagreed with students as to what the university as an institutional actor could support. In Kennedy’s view, the link between university investments and apartheid South Africa seemed tangential at best. Kennedy supported the Sullivan principles. In this way, Kennedy and the Stanford Board of Trustees largely adopted Ronald Reagan’s policy of “constructive engagement.” As he explained in his public statement in the fall of 1985, “Divestment by non-profit organizations will reduce the influence of those organizations most likely to exercise it in favor of the goal of ending apartheid.”26

Kennedy, however, learned that the Sullivan principles and the idea of “constructive engagement” were also politically limited as a policy solution. In the late summer of 1985, a couple months after the National Anti-Apartheid Day rally at Stanford, Kennedy met with representatives from the Carnation Company, Ford Motor, Southern Cal Edison, Chevron, Amdahl, General Motors, and other companies that worked in South Africa. During the meeting, Kennedy explored the effects of American corporate roles and the Sullivan principles. He learned that most representatives took the stance that the companies were strictly in South Africa to do business. John Young, the CEO of Hewlett Packard and a Stanford Board of Trustees member, explained, “businesses provide jobs, products and services. We are not an agent for fundamental change. There are limits on what can be expected by businesses—they are an economic entity and not a social entity.”27 Even as executives like Young took this stance, most of the companies did attempt to align with the Sullivan principles. But, as Christopher Beirne of the Carnation Company admitted, when the company raised wages to conform to the Sullivan principles, they had to lay off people in order to “automize” more.28 Kennedy learned that even those businesses operating in South Africa that committed to the Sullivan principles had very little effect on undermining apartheid as a political and economic system.

Kennedy’s conclusions from the meeting demonstrated the institutional constraints of his politics—both the committed belief in the value of civil disobedience and the view of the Sullivan principles as a strategy to combat apartheid. Indeed, what the meeting revealed was Kennedy’s intimate awareness of the university’s dependency on external funding and investment from foundations and corporate donors. Rather than consider divestment as a political option, he concluded that the argument for divestment ignored the board’s fiduciary responsibility to the institution. “Our judgment is that divestment of the kind proposed would entail significant losses to the University resources for which the Trustees are legally responsible. In effect, we would be moving resources from the purpose for which they were originally intended to another social purpose.”29 While maintaining a commitment to the Sullivan principles and strategic investment, he believed the anti-apartheid movement represented an important civic lesson on how institutions operated. Students needed to understand the economic reality of the situation, Kennedy concluded in his public statement, and the limited role of the university as a moral actor in political life.

Indeed, Kennedy believed that the task of the university was to teach students the perceived economic reality of South Africa and the political constraints of the institution. Divestment, he argued, ran “counter to our tradition
of fair and rational processes for determining guilt. A wholesale condemnation of corporations for activities that are permitted under law strikes me as unfair.”30 Despite students’ commitment to education and research, Kennedy also assumed that the students acted from emotion rather than “rational debate.” In response to student activism, the Stanford administration published a small report defending the institution’s stance on South Africa. As Kennedy
emphasized in the introduction, the book was a reflection of “Stanford’s responsibility as an education institution” to provide “the means for people to become more knowledgeable.” The booklet presented the two arguments concerning South Africa: divestment or selective investment. Kennedy argued that divestment was but one “moral” approach. As such, “energy should be poured into trying to find ways to bring about fundamental change in a responsible manner” and to encourage students to “objectively” analyze the complex issues surrounding South Africa and American foreign policy.31

Ironically, students and faculty supporters of divestment found the report lacking “objectivity.” Vladimir Matijasevic, a graduate student in physics and member of SOSA, argued that the book attempted to present the university as “above the issue itself” and sought to be “educational and objective.” But, he wrote, “the administration finally has to see that it is taking a side on this issue,” in the sense that “no decision on divestment is in fact a decision to continue investing.” In Matijasevic’s view, the book also had an analytical flaw in its attempt to be “objective”: it overlooked the fact that most South African leaders called for divestment. Over the course of 1980s, South African leaders, ranging from Sipho Buthelezi, a cofounder of the South Africa Students Organization, to Bishop Desmond Tutu, called for university divestment, often helping to mobilize students in the United States. Given the support and advocacy for divestment by Butheleze and Tuto, Matijasevic argued, the belief that university leaders like Kennedy held—that is, that elite leaders in the university knew what was best to combat apartheid in South Africa—was but an extension of the “white man’s burden.”32

Faculty members also supported the students’ critique of the pamphlet, focusing on the report’s stated objectivity. A panel sponsored by the African and Afro-American Studies Association concluded the pamphlet was misleading. One invited panelist was Kennel Jackson, an African history professor at Stanford. He called the pamphlet a “provocative act,” adding that it represented at best “a kind of propaganda.”33 Many student activists ultimately believed Kennedy and the institution’s response created false categories. Baregu, the coalition activist who challenged Africanist work at Stanford, argued that “the choice is not between moral urgency and rational discourse, as Kennedy would have us believe. It is between resistance and collaboration.” In Baregu’s view, Stanford was a collaborator, and he wondered if university officials had the “moral courage to face up to this truth.”34

The pamphlet was part of Kennedy’s broader strategy of teaching what he believed were more effective forms of civic engagement, most prominently public service and volunteerism. Amid campus unrest around the divestment movement, Kennedy created a new Public Service Office that supported student work in legislative processes in Washington, DC, among many activities. He envisioned the program as a way to educate students about the policy debates and legal procedures, with a particular focus on those concerning US–South African relations. SOSA activist Cohn drew on Kennedy’s call for public service, developing a proposal for students to work
in DC for the summer. He saw the opportunity as part of the broader divestment effort. “My proposal, based primarily on President Kennedy’s statements,” Cohn wrote, “seeks to diversify Stanford student anti-apartheid efforts with an emphasis on the legislative perspective.”35 Kennedy believed Cohn’s proposal was a legitimate use of university finances, and the Public Service Office supported Cohn’s work in Capitol Hill.

The DC program attempted to channel the activism of students like Cohn into more acceptable activities, but his experiences also demonstrate the ways students co-opted those programs to support the divestment movement. Indeed, like the legacy programs that served as the basis of the anti-apartheid movement at Stanford, the DC program accommodated competing tendencies. It was designed to support a set of learning experiences within certain boundaries even as the experience provided political knowledge that extended beyond the mission. After spending the summer in DC learning about legislative processes and debates, Cohn recommitted to calling for university divestment. In an op-ed for the Stanford Daily, he explained, “In examining the economic sanctions legislation on Capitol Hill over the summer, I found anti-apartheid movers in Congress expressing deep gratitude to students for our divestment activity on college campuses.” The lesson he took from his experience was that there was a need for continued pressure on the university to divest from South Africa. After all, Cohn asked, “would powerful people like Derek Bok [Harvard president] and Donald Kennedy have publicly supported economic sanctions legislation against South Africa if it weren’t for the demands being made upon them to divest?”36

Like Cohn, other SOSA activists utilized the Public Service Office as a resource for political organizing. Like Archuletta, both Kemp and Phillips interpreted the divestment movement as an extension of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. Indeed, they took direct inspiration from the 1960s by planning and coordinating Project Democracy, a voter registration drive modeled off of the 1964 Freedom Summer. “Inspired by the example of students in the Sixties who participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi,” they explained, “this project is designed as our generation’s contribution to the struggle to extend the blessings of democracy to all U.S. citizens.” They justified the project based on Kennedy’s new public service effort. “We also see this experience as part of our responsibility as concerned citizens”; the experience will educate students and “lend a needed sense of urgency to the task for supporting the ongoing struggle for justice and equality.”37

For students like Kemp, Phillips, and Cohn, public service and activism were complementary civic activities. The public service projects, whether they involved learning legislative processes in DC or conducting voter registration drives in Alabama, were a political education process connected to transforming institutions like the university. Indeed, activists associated with the divestment movement sought to expand the original mission of the Public Service Center. Along with Lisa Neeley, a member of the Third World Coalition, Phillips connected political activism and public service in the handbook for Stanford’s Public Service Center. “Given the abundance of problems in the world one can literally start anywhere,” they noted. “Some people choose to comfort the afflicted” through food drives and visiting the sick, all of which “are valuable and immediate forms of public service.” But, they argued, activists needed to “go beyond treating the symptoms to dealing with the root causes of our social condition (social discrimination, economic exploitation, lack of democracy and political power).” In their view, this type of commitment also included addressing the need for divestment.38

Indeed, student activists also challenged Kennedy on a related public service initiative: You Can Make a Difference conferences. Held from 1986 to 1990, the conferences sought to encourage and develop mechanisms for students to get involved in social and community issues, similar to the DC program. The conferences had wide-ranging support from the Stanford student community. The Stanford Daily’s editors—Beth Klein, Allison Hartwell, and Mark Lawrence—supported the conferences. “Given the gravity of the issues confronting us today—hunger, poverty at home and abroad, concern over the quality of our education, the escalating arms race, and the rising federal deficit,” they explained, “this conference served a very important function.”39 They believed the conference provided students a mechanism to engage deeply with what role they might play in addressing the issues plaguing American society.

In fact, the editors further argued, students had been active. They highlighted SOSA students who challenged the university on its investment policies related to companies working in South Africa. “Indeed, students have taken to heart the now oft-heard slogan, ‘You Can Make a Difference,’” they argued. “The University has been quite successful in encouraging students to take initiatives and become involved in certain public service activities, but Stanford as an institution has itself not heeded the call for public responsibility.” They framed their critique around engaged citizenship. “We must take action both as citizens and as an institution to be a real force for social responsibility.” The students called on Kennedy and the board of trustees to take up a resolution to divest. “Students have taken the lead in making contributions to the public welfare through numerous activities. Now it is time for Stanford to translate its talk and advice into action. Only in this way can we really make a difference.”40

To the dismay of students, the university never took a broader institutional stance on South Africa, and the Stanford board of trustees determined that selective investment was the best means to address the institution’s role in South Africa. In this context, Kennedy also prioritized volunteer service over dissent as the preferred way of reconciling the relationship between moral concern, formal education, and the role of the university. While disagreeing with students’ call for divestment, Kennedy supported and funded Project Democracy and expanded the Public Service Center. He saw the project and the new center as appropriate forms of citizenship at the university. Students, he believed deeply, should be involved in community and public service. “Civic responsibility,” Kennedy stated, was central to citizenship. By supporting Project Democracy and expanding the new center, he encouraged a notion of citizenship that aligned with institutional norms of providing public service. By dismissing calls for divestment, Stanford discouraged an activist form of citizenship that sought to reimagine the university’s role in political life.

Kennedy’s programmatic efforts to teach students what he thought were the institutionally appropriate forms of political involvement also had a long-term effect: they drove a wedge into student efforts to integrate local community service with a broader global student politics that sought to transform institutions like the university. As the debate around divestment subsided, students interpreted the meaning of public service differently than Phillips’s initial framing of the Public Service Center, raising a much broader debate about appropriate forms of activism and citizenship on campus. Mark C. Estes, an engineering student, also drew inspiration from the You Can Make a Difference conference, highlighting a range of activities at Stanford—including Reach Out Today, the Stanford Volunteer Network, and Bike Aid—to demonstrate the varied ways that students made a difference. He contrasted these activities with the work of SOSA, in particular the construction of shanties that sought to build social awareness among students. These forms of activism—among others—put too many political and moral demands on the university, he argued. As he explained, “students can make a difference. We must also realize that there is a fine line between making a difference and just making noise.”41

Andrew Shields, a student activist who supported the divestment effort, responded to Estes, arguing that “the methods of volunteerism proposed by ‘You Can Make a Difference’—‘student planning, dedication, innovation, and cooperation help[ing] to improve the lives of others’—while friendly, do not and cannot lead to a better society.’ They are band-aids for society’s self-inflicted wounds. They treat symptoms, rather than causes.” Shields believed that Estes’s solution of “remaining within the bounds of politeness” also meant “remaining within the already existing social structures.” As such, Shields concluded, maybe Estes would “understand the value of ‘noise.’”42

The political value of “noise” was also marginalized in the new Public Service Center. A particular historical amnesia informed the center’s expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At Stanford University, when Archuletta was included to discuss the new Public Service Center, the conversations centered on what it would do rather than on the insight and experiences of the Black Community Service Center or the perspectives of students who
mobilized the campus community around divestment. Archuletta saw the effort as a form of institutional colonialism. He believed deeply that service must be linked to social movements and political struggles that challenged the status quo. Like many students in the divestment movement,
he worried that the Public Service Center promoted a particular kind of service that tended take the approach that the student’s moral role—like the university’s—was to provide charity and service.

Legacy

Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a broad coalition of students challenged Stanford University to divest its holdings in companies working in South Africa. The student efforts grew out of the institutional legacies of the 1960s, reflecting the persistent tensions within the programs. In taking the position to divest, the students again raised questions about the moral contours and implications of their education at Stanford in light of university investments in companies that worked in South Africa. Could my education be morally and ethically sound, the students asked in different ways, if it was partly or fully funded through investments that reinforced a system of racial injustice and inequality? Students ultimately took the position that their education could not be morally consistent unless the institution itself also acted in morally consistent ways by divesting from its holdings. Indeed, students argued that in the same way they sought to relate their education to political action, the university needed to align its research and education with its actions as an institution.

University leaders, including Lyman and Kennedy, agreed with students that investments in apartheid South Africa raised ethical questions about Stanford’s role in the political economy. However, they worried that divestment would undermine the very mission of the university. They argued that the institution and the board of trustees had a financial responsibility to ensure a return on investment to continue to provide an elite education for students. They thus turned to the logic of disciplining democracy to reconcile the moral disconnect in one’s education. Believing that students did not understand existing institutional arrangements, Kennedy promoted, developed, and expanded a series of public service opportunities that he believed would support students’ moral and ethical development as citizens in ways that helped them better understand the limits of the university as a political actor.

What emerged in Public Service Center programming was a pedagogical approach that synthesized moral consideration with public service. In 1990, Kennedy convened a meeting to explore the status of public service and its place within the university. The committee defined public service as participation in university-sponsored service projects, work sponsored by community service agencies such as Big Brothers/Big Sisters, events organized by for-profit organizations and churches that sought to meet a community need, government-supported volunteer service, and independent service projects. Nonpolitical public service, Kennedy believed, represented the best way to reconcile the moral gaps in one’s education in a way that aligned with the structure and logic of the modern American university. Kennedy and others in the meeting argued that the public service experience integrated the development of academic skills with the development of ethical considerations. In the view of Kennedy and other faculty participants like Terry Karl, one of the important components of ethics was the ability to practice empathy—a trait that they believed was necessary for public service. “In the sense of good scholarship, empathy,” Karl argued, “is the ability to move outside what you understand from your own experience or your own training, and to be able to move into and put yourself in the place of others who come from very different settings and have different problems.”43

Efforts like Stanford’s Public Service Center maintained important discussions about the place of moral and ethical considerations within one’s education that grew out of the anti-apartheid movement. It also enabled students to apply what they learned to a social context in ways that expanded the initial vision of SWOPSI courses and other institutional legacies from the 1960s. As Goodwin Liu, a Stanford student who participated in the 1990 meeting, explained, “What is unique about public service is that there is a social context to what you do. You affect populations; you affect people. And that’s where its value is.”44 In both ways, the center represented the ways that university leaders at Stanford reconciled what students interpreted as the moral conundrums of their elite education. But the context in which students could explore and act on moral concern was limited to nonpolitical public service. Much like what occurred in the 1960s, the focus on public service disciplined the mass student politics that emerged from the anti-apartheid movement. The Public Service Center limited the goal of a student’s education and research in the community to individual and scholarly development, which had the effect of deflecting the broader critiques of the university’s political role.

The divestment movement on campus and Kennedy’s response in the form of public service efforts across Stanford reflected what South African student Jonathan Jensen saw as the university’s competing impulses. Jensen grew up in Western Cape, the Black township of Cape Town, South Africa. A precocious student, Jensen was one of the lucky few Black students to attend college in South Africa in the late 1970s. At the University of the Western Cape, he majored in science education and, after graduation, became a teacher. Through the South Africa Education Program, he then attended Cornell University, where he obtained a master’s degree, before pursuing a PhD in International Education Development at Stanford.

Jensen was not politically involved in the movement until arriving in the United States. The program and the university provided a space for Jensen to meet with and learn from different groups in ways he had not been able to in South Africa. “Something happened to all of us—particularly those of us who weren’t . . . full blood activists,” Jensen explained about the meetings. “And that is you found yourself . . . being addressed by leadership of the groups demonized at home.”45 The leaders from the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress engaged the students as active and vital participants in the political struggle. After those meetings, Jensen noted, “many of us got involved full time.” Over the course of his four years at Stanford, Jensen also found a supportive environment for both his political goals and educational pursuits. He worked with American activists as president of the African Students Association, developed new education programs for South Africans in the international office, took courses that exposed him to the history of South Africa, and used the newly established Public Service Center to raise funds for Ethiopia.

Jensen’s experiences reflected the ways Stanford played a key role in the broader anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, similar to how the SWOPSI courses and the Black Activities Center served as the basis for the divestment movement in the late 1970s. But Jensen was also disappointed with Stanford for its failure to take a clear moral stance by divesting holdings from companies working in South Africa. Jensen’s experiences at Stanford shaped his understanding of education and knowledge. “Knowledge is not neutral” and often “acts as an arm of the state,” Jensen came to believe. He also maintained that knowledge and the university could be used to develop grassroots political power. In the context of the anti-apartheid movement, university leaders chose to act as an arm of corporate interests even as they promoted efforts that seemed to support local and global grassroots efforts. The university, Jensen ultimately concluded, had “two faces.”46