Chapter 6 Brown University Updating the Liberal Arts Tradition

Defining the Issue

In the fall semester of 1977, Shaun Brown, a young African American activist at Brown, traveled to the United Nations in New York, where she met with and learned from other anti-apartheid student activists from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Haiti. At the gathering, the international group of young activists came to a clear consensus. The continued investment by Western—particularly American—businesses in South Africa reinforced rather than challenged the system of apartheid. Drawing on her experience, Brown concluded that her university also had a role to take: divest from all corporations working in South Africa. As a member of the Undergraduate Council of Students at Brown, she encouraged her fellow board members to critically examine the university’s investments in South Africa. In the spring 1978, the Undergraduate Council of Students at Brown voted for divestiture. At the core of the decision was the view that moral stances required moral action. As council member Nanci Maclean explained, “If you’re going to say something is immoral, than it’s immoral. You have to take that to the limit and do something about it.”3

While making a broader moral argument, the decision to support divestment was based on extensive research by students that highlighted the political implications of investments and what they saw as the university’s direct support of apartheid. With other members of the council and the newly formed Southern Africa Solidarity Committee (SASC), Shaun Brown wrote and published a range of pamphlets titled “What’s the Word?” The pamphlets focused on the relationship between the American corporate role in South Africa, Brown University’s investments, and the economic and political conditions of apartheid. One pamphlet issue focused on Brown University’s $3.2 million investment in IBM stocks.

The hyperfocus on IBM was significant for two reasons. First, students highlighted that IBM technology was an integral part of the apartheid system. Starting in 1952, IBM was the largest computer supplier in South Africa, where government officials used the technology to modernize the pass system that tracked and limited the movements of Black South African citizens.4 Second, and even more significant to students, a prominent board member of the Brown Corporation was Tom Watson, the CEO of IBM.5 This direct relationship between the Brown Corporation and the technological system used in apartheid South Africa demonstrated to the students that the university was far from a complacent actor there. In the view of students, Brown University was playing an integral role in the perpetuation of the apartheid system both through investments and membership on its corporation board.

As a member of the Brown Corporation, however, Watson was not going to outwardly defend the institution’s investments based on his company’s bottom line. Rather, members like Watson took it as an opportunity to teach civic lessons that contained a set of assumptions about the market, the role of business, and the position of the university. Foremost, the corporation board argued that university investments were the product of the modern global economy. “The division of labor has been carried so far in the modern economy that it would be almost impossible to find a public corporation that does not derive at least some income from sources which are repugnant to some within the university,” the board explained in its “Statement on Investment” in 1971.6 The economic entanglement of the university with the modern market economy, they further argued, made it difficult to take a clear moral position on investments. Central to their argument was an analytical distinction between business practices and the university. “The dilemma we face in the South African question is not a clear-cut issue of high morality vs. [sic] financial profit,” the board wrote. “Brown, as a non-profit institution whose resources are devoted to teaching and research, is not in the same category as an individual or corporate investor whose main motive in maintaining a large portfolio is the accumulation of wealth.”7

Indeed, the distinction between the mission of business and of the university was vital to the board’s evolving argument on maintaining investments. In response to appeals to divest in 1978, Brown Corporation members shifted their focus away from an economic lesson to a defense of traditional ideas of institutional neutrality. Foremost, they argued, the role of the university was to function as a space for open debate on political issues. “From a philosophical standpoint,” they wrote, “not enough has been said about the need for Brown and other great U.S. private universities to encourage diverse viewpoints within the academic community.” The university could not take “‘institutional’ positions on issues,” they continued, without running counter to institutional commitments to neutrality. Brown Corporation Board members believed that the institution should not take a political position via investments. As they explained in the 1978 “Statement on Investment,” “from a practical standpoint to the University, we reject the notion that our portfolio—through the wholesale divestment of a large number of securities—can or should be used as a means in support of social change.”8

The value claims made by the board concerning how the market operated, the role of business, and the position of the university obfuscated not only the financial interests of members like Watson but also the primary motivation for continued investments. Swearer and corporation members were concerned with the financial health of Brown and its related position as an elite institution. In its 1971 statement, corporation board members worried that “total abstinence from participation in corporate sources of income would severely curtail the vital educational functions of the university.” They expanded on this view in their 1978 statement, focusing in particular on the financial health of the institution. “Brown is currently operating on its first break-even budget in a decade after a long battle to stabilize our expenditures and increase our revenue,” the corporation underscored. As a result, “a precedent-setting action to divest would also have a major effect on our ability and flexibility to reinvest. That is a price we cannot pay at the very time we are attempting to increase our endowment in the early stages of the larger capital campaign in Brown’s history.”9 The financial benefit of investments, especially in terms of funding and supporting education at the institution, the board concluded, was more important than a broader moral claim about the university’s public mission.

The decision to maintain investments was supported by select faculty at Brown in 1978, who, like the board members, drew on traditional ideas of the university and academic culture to defend continued investments. In a letter to Swearer, math professor Walter Freiberger defended the corporation’s decision to maintain investments by inverting the idea of academic freedom. While acknowledging that “both—teaching and investment—have moral overtones,” he believed that how individuals made decisions based on their position in the institution mattered more. “I expect the trustees not to advise me how to teach my courses and conduct my research. I should therefore be inconsistent were I to presume advising them on investment policy.” He continued, “I have full confidence in the ability of our trustees to solve their moral dilemmas, as they have shown their confidence in my ability to solve mine.”10

Other faculty members at Brown offered a different civic lesson that directly challenged the claims made by the corporation board and thus articulated a more progressive vision of the university’s role. In the view of David Buchdahl, a professor of anthropology, Swearer and the board’s presentation of the issue was misleading. “We are not confined to two alternatives, an all or nothing choice between complete and immediate withdrawal of investments on the one hand, and a continuation of all our investments on the other,” he argued. Rather, “conceiving and debating the choices in this manner only appears as a misplaced effort to avoid the real issue, namely—is symbolic moral action less important than responsible fiscal action, both generally and in this particular case.” In his view, the “facts of this particular case demand a strong moral response on the part of the University.” To support his position, he drew a historical parallel. For the United States to be involved in South Africa, he argued, “is merely a repetition of the same tragic mistake made recently in Vietnam.” As such, Buchdahl called for a “gradual divestiture” so “that the position of Brown is clearly evident.” Indeed, the general view of faculty was that divestiture was more about its symbolic meaning for the university’s mission than its immediate effect. But, he worried, “apparently it is nearly impossible for the United States business community and its government allies to learn from the lessons of the past.”11

Arguments for symbolic action by faculty were also supported by Brown alumni. After graduating from Brown University, Monica Ladd worked for the United States Mission to the United Nations. In her view, the economic argument for continued investments, especially in terms of challenging apartheid policy, ignored the legal context of corporate investments in South Africa. “Foreign investment is always required to obey local laws,” she wrote to Swearer, “and in South Africa this amounts to participation in and furtherance of apartheid.” Moreover, she continued, Brown’s own investments were insignificant to the companies themselves. When understood in this way, Ladd argued, divestment was the morally right decision to make, especially for the university: “It is my contention, then, that for the university to pass up the opportunity is to shrink the responsibility that the university has to the society in which, and for which, it operates.”12

The different political positions and interpretations of the university demonstrated what Brown professor and African American Studies scholar Dean E. McHenry saw as the competing impulses within the institution itself. McHenry understood the dilemma as reflective of the gap between theory and practice when applied to the institution. In theory, he argued, the university was against any form of injustice. The university’s primary education role was the theoretical engagement with ideas to develop thoughtful and critical thinkers. He believed that the research and organizing efforts of students in SASC and the arguments made by alumni like Ladd exuded the hallmarks of a liberal arts education at Brown. However, McHenry continued, the university rarely put those ideas into practice. Nowhere was this more clear, in McHenry’s view, than in the ways the university perpetuated injustices in South Africa through its investments. “There is a divergence,” he explained, “between Brown’s objective of not aiding racism and her practice of supporting it through her investment policy.” Like student activists at Brown, McHenry linked the financial investments in corporations that worked in South Africa to the university’s role as an institutional actor.13

Even as faculty, students, and alumni alike made arguments about expanding the very idea of the university’s role when it came to apartheid South Africa and grappled with the implications of those investments to a student’s education, Swearer interpreted the situation differently. Throughout the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Swearer remained skeptical of divestment. “There is something very appealing and simple in washing one’s hands of complex moral and practical problems,” Swearer wrote in his public statement to the Brown community, and “at the present time, there are too many unanswered questions.”14 But he was not dismissive of student efforts or the wider views shared by those associated with Brown, at least not initially. Indeed, he read the alumni and faculty letters sent to him and the efforts of student activists as evidence the university served as a space of public debate. He also saw SASC efforts as a reflection of the liberal arts tradition, even as he ignored the students’ critique of the political implications of a corporate-sponsored education. In this reading, he concluded that the university must maintain institutional neutrality. This conclusion supported his political position on divestment but was also demonstrative of how institutional culture shaped his educational worldview.

Swearer thus focused his attention not on the issue itself but on how the university should appropriately debate the problem of Brown’s financial relationship to South Africa. As he explained in a letter to SASC, “There is no disunity among us—the trustees, the faculty, the students, and the administration—on the repugnance of apartheid policies of the South African government.” However, he argued, “The only disagreement we have is over what to do about those policies.”15 In the late 1970s, as Brown students organized to highlight the issue of investments, Swearer underscored the disagreements to defend the need to remain institutionally neutral. In doing so, he built upon the corporation board’s argument. He recast the anti-apartheid campus movement as a civic problem to be addressed through the teaching of appropriate forms of debate and deliberation.

Narrowing the Political Issue

In late spring of 1978, SASC organized an anti-apartheid protest that attracted over three hundred students. A prominent figure at the protest was Barney Mokgatle, a leader of the 1976 Soweto Student Uprising. He supported Brown students’ political demands while also challenging the logic of Brown leaders. Mokgatle argued that “the money from U.S. corporations does not go to improve our lives”; rather, “it goes to buy guns to kill us.” While supporting students’ demands, Mokgatle also resurrected the political salience of “action” that initially grew out of the mass student politics of the 1960s. He called on students to “take uncompromising action. We want to see action!”16 Mokgatle’s appeal was central to SASC’s argument about the role of students and the university. SASC student leader Ruben Cordova believed that students needed to maintain and act on their own individual moral conscience in order to transform the conscience of the institution. As Cordova argued, “We students cannot allow ourselves to become morally bankrupt because we are the conscience of the university.”17

While SASC activists used the rally to demonstrate that divestment concerned the moral conscience of the university and required action by both students and the institution, Brown academic leaders and other students believed the rally represented SASC’s disregard for free speech and public deliberation. Swearer attended the divestment rally, hoping to present the university’s position on continued investment. SASC leaders voted to deny Swearer the chance to speak at the rally. In response, Thomas Bechtel, the associate dean of student affairs, concluded that the decision to deny Swearer the opportunity to speak was “an issue of free speech.”18 The news of SASC students’ decision to deny Swearer the chance to speak did not just pit students against university leaders, either. Other students, some of whom sympathized with the cause of divestment, also called out SASC activists. In the Brown Daily Herald, the editorial board argued that the actions of SASC at the rally “indicate that group members are more eager to chant slogans on the Green than to rationally exchange information with university officials. Regardless of whether divestiture is the right course of action to take, the group’s methods are unquestionably wrong.”19

The decision to deny Swearer the chance to speak at the rally shifted the political focus away from institutional investments and the moral conscience of the university toward questions about appropriate forms of civic deliberation. The rally thus supported Swearer’s initial interpretation that there was a need to promote debate. In the aftermath of the rally, Brown leaders interpreted the issue more in terms of teaching appropriate citizenship than of addressing the underlying moral dilemma of the university. Richard A. Marker, the university chaplain, suggested setting up forums to discuss the issue in order to diffuse and redirect student energies. “While students claim that they want a specific leadership response, in fact, I think they simply want to feel enfranchised,” Marker wrote; “the most appropriate leadership position may be to add dignity and direction to the questions.”20 In the context of the SASC-sponsored rally, Marker called for a strategically structured approach to create a venue in which Swearer’s position was presented as a response to the student position and a model of appropriate deliberation.

University leaders also argued that the rally did not represent the diversity of views present at Brown. On the same day the rally was held, the Undergraduate Council of Students recognized Students for Rational Action (SRA), an organization that challenged calls for divestment. The organizer of SRA, Victor Houser, echoed the views of Swearer and other university leaders. The SRA is “disgusted by the racist behavior of the South African regime,” he argued, “but we didn’t think divestiture . . . was the best way.”21 Students who took this view also raised issues with the approach of SASC. Julie A. Shapiro, a student at Brown University, agreed with the efforts of SASC in principle but worried about the implications of the institution divesting from corporations working in South Africa, especially in regard to the operation of Brown. “The consequences of any action on Brown’s part are questionable,” she explained in a letter to Swearer, “and the probable adverse affects [sic] on Brown’s financial situation could impair the diversity of the student body and the academic quality here.”22 Shapiro made this argument in a letter to Swearer because she worried that her views were often marginalized at Brown. “Such opposition” to SASC, she wrote, “is the deterrent to people in my position to voice an opinion on this issue in light of the certain misunderstanding and attack which would result.” Shapiro’s letter reinforced Swearer’s stance on the issue of divestment and his interpretation of the university’s role as a space for public debate.

Indeed, Swearer used Shapiro’s letter to delegitimize the modes of action employed by SASC activists. After receiving the letter, Swearer forwarded an excerpt to Shaun Brown and Cordova, the two students who oversaw SASC. In particular, Swearer underlined the reason why Shapiro sent the letter—concern that her views were dismissed on campus. Swearer believed the concern raised by Shapiro reflected a twofold problem. Foremost, he argued that dissenting views like Shapiro’s were marginalized by SASC’s actions. He had experienced this himself at the 1978 rally. He also extended his interpretation of Shapiro’s experiences to his understanding of the university’s role. He believed her letter demonstrated further evidence of the problem with taking moral stances as an institution. If the university took such a stance, Swearer argued, the institution would exclude views like Shapiro’s and thus constrain open debate.23

In the view of SASC activists, however, the response to SASC’s actions was contradictory. SASC leaders argued that denying Swearer the opportunity to speak was merely an extension of the same logic of the university’s position on SASC. As Adam Max explained, “Howard Swearer doesn’t yet recognize SASC, so we won’t recognize Howard Swearer and we won’t let him speak.”24 Indeed, Swearer and the associate dean of student affairs did not recognize SASC as a university-associated student organization. As an unrecognized organization, SASC was denied the right to participate in any deliberations related to university investments. “The administration has not recognized them [SASC] in that they were never invited as a group to speak with the administration,” Shaun Brown argued.25 SASC leaders also noted that their political rights to action were already limited by the institution itself. In organizing the rally, students had to notify the university in advance of when and where the rally would take place at Brown University, a policy they interpreted as an existing constraint on their political right to action on campus.

Brown University leaders adopted the policy guidelines of the American Council on Education that emerged from the mass student politics of the 1960s, recycling the ideological side of disciplining to constrain the political actions of SASC activists on campus in the late 1970s. University leaders maintained that the institution was to function as a neutral actor. Indeed, the first guideline, which supported the right of student and faculty action, also maintained that such rights were only protected “PROVIDED that it is made clear they are not speaking for or in the name of Brown university.” But, in the view of SASC leaders, the university’s position through existing institutional policies masked two key issues. First, the problem with the guidelines to students—especially in the context of the anti-apartheid movement—was that they concealed the existing political positions of the university itself. In one guideline, university leaders underscored the use of funds for political activities: “Funds or contributions may not be solicited under any circumstances in the name of Brown University for use by or in any political activity.”26 But, in the view of SASC members, Brown University leaders were using funds and investments to take a political position. As student activist Pedro Noguera argued, “the university makes clear its political values in the stances it has taken on South Africa.”27 The 1978 rally was an attempt to offer a different political position for the university to take, especially in its use of funds. However, university leaders interpreted divestment as contradicting the guiding principle of the use of funds.

Second, the guidelines provided leeway for university leaders to interpret what was and was not political. While supporting the right of students and faculty “to express their individual and collective political views,” the policy guidelines also defined politics in a way that gave university leaders broad discretion. “‘No substantial part of the activities’ of the university, as an exempt institution, may be used for ‘carrying on propaganda, or otherwise attempting to influence legislation.’”28 Indeed, Swearer employed this definition of politics to limit the type of student organizing, actions, and public events on campus. He drew a distinction between “avowedly political organizations,” such as SASC, and “organizations whose actions occasionally and inevitably have political consequences,” such as the church or local human relations board.29 In his interpretation of the guidelines, Swearer believed that church activities were allowed functions of the university in ways that SASC’s activities were not. In the view of student activists, Swearer’s interpretation of the guidelines enabled him and the university to make political decisions behind the façade of institutional neutrality.

When taking into account the policy guidelines and Swearer’s interpretation of politics, SASC leaders concluded that Swearer’s commitment to public debate masked the ways that debate and political action were already limited on campus. Indeed, they argued that Swearer’s idea of public debate was narrowly defined and served to reiterate the university’s position. In the fall semester of 1978, university leaders sponsored a debate about the institution’s investments and South Africa on the university radio channel. But, as Cordova noted, “the so-called WBRU ‘debate’ was merely a question and answer session” and “concerned parties had no input and could neither ask questions nor express their viewpoint.” The debate, Cordova continued, also only presented the Sullivan principles and continued investments as the two possible actions by the institution. In addition, given the board corporation members’ political power within the university, their policy statements had the effect of shutting down genuine public deliberation. Cordova thus argued that the problem was the university itself in how it conceived of public debate and deliberation. “In light of this,” Cordova concluded, “the ‘careful and reasoned consideration by the community of the various factors and arguments’ that you claim to be more ‘appropriate’ is rendered difficult, if not impossible.”30

The 1978 rally thus shifted the political terrain of the divestment issue on campus. Initially conceived as a rally to motivate political action among students and challenge the university’s continued investments, it was recast as an effort to promote appropriate public deliberation within the university. Brown student activists in SASC maintained a focus on the moral problem of continued investments but argued that the institution itself limited genuine democratic debate and engagement on the issue of university investments. This position rested upon a view made clear at the 1978 rally: the civic role of the student was to serve as a moral conscience for the institution. Activists demanded institutional flexibility for constant and open deliberation on campus, which would serve as a core teaching practice of the university itself. Swearer and Marker also emphasized civic debate and deliberation but argued that Brown’s goal was to teach a particular kind of citizenship that helped students understand what they interpreted as the limited role of the university within prevailing national and economic policy. Ignoring critiques of prevailing institutional policy, they treated existing policies and their own views as descriptive truths of the university rather than political positions. This approach also informed how university leaders and students defined education when responding to efforts by Brown Divest in the 1980s.

Promoting the Liberal Arts

In 1982, a new class of students formed Brown Divest, an organization that sought to carry on the legacy of SASC. Two key leaders of Brown Divest had deep connections to the civil rights movement and SNCC in the 1960s. The first was James Forman Jr., the son of SNCC field-worker James Forman. When he helped form Brown Divest, he believed the student organization was embarking on something new in the broader Black Freedom Struggle in the United States and around the world. He changed that opinion when he spent a summer working in the archives at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Social Change and listened to a recording of Julian Bond and his father, James Forman, discuss their protests against South Africa. He found the conversation inspiring. Listening to the tape, he remembered, “forged a connection between what he was doing and previous generations.”31 Rachel Harding also made those cross-generational connections. As the daughter of Vincent Harding, the prominent Black historian and activist, Harding interpreted the divestment effort at Brown as an extension of the Black Freedom Struggle in the United States. At campus rallies and within the Brown Divest organization, she called on students to address “the South Africa within us.”32

The study of history and institutional memory became a key guidepost for Brown Divest’s educational efforts. Collete Mattzie, who took on a leadership role within Brown Divest, learned from her peers like Forman and Harding to see the divestment effort as tied to issues in the United States. As Mattzie explained, the process of coming to terms with issues concerning US relations to South Africa inevitably led to “our own coming to terms with racism and our own role in the world.” The anti-apartheid struggle, she noted, “resonated with our own history” and “felt like the next chapter of that story.” This included the next chapter in the history of Brown. Indeed, on the ten-year anniversary of when student activism helped form the Third World Center at Brown University, Brown Divest activists planned an Alternative Day of Education. Organized as part of the National Anti-Apartheid Day, the gathering brought close to six hundred students together to participate in a range of workshops focused on African American history and South Africa.33 The workshops were also linked to direct action on campus, including a sit-in that called on the university to divest. The combination of the workshops, South Africa protest, and sit-in resurrected efforts from the 1960s that sought to integrate political action within formal education. As Lauren Christman, a Brown Divest member, explained, “we have always stressed education and action.”34

In response to the Alternative Day of Education and the National Anti-Apartheid Day, Swearer addressed the Brown Community concerning the university’s role in relation to apartheid South Africa. He asked, “What can we do as citizens and as members of the Brown Community to help achieve an early end to the system of apartheid in South Africa?” In the same way he challenged the tactics of SASC in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was critical of the ways that students expressed their views as citizens of the university as part of Brown Divest. Swearer criticized the anti-apartheid protests, sit-ins, and Alternative Day of Education in the spring as devoid of purpose, believing that they could have been expressed in more “constructive ways.” “There are many mechanisms for discussing and reaching decisions,” Swearer explained. “In too many instances last year the established mechanisms were by-passed in favor of the politics of confrontation.”35 Swearer’s public statement not only dismissed the educational commitment of the campus protest, it also recycled a familiar argument: the approach by Brown Divest activists was not a constructive form of civic engagement.

Brown Divest activists argued that Swearer’s views reflected three key issues with the university itself—issues that were already raised by the generation of Brown activists associated with SASC. First, in response to the university’s call for students to utilize existing campus mechanisms, Brown Divest activists countered that those very mechanisms entailed restrictions that limited debate. Indeed, as Eric Widmer, the dean of student life, explained in a letter to divestment advocates about their campus activism, “we will decide what is disruptive and what is not, following University rules.”36 Second, the statement ignored students’ commitment to education and research. In the public letter, Swearer identified several points that student activists had already addressed in their mobilization effort, including the views of South African leaders, discussions of the role of the university, and the impact of divestment both on the university and South African society. In the view of Richard Gray, a member of the campus Organization of United African Peoples and organizer of the Alternative Day of Education, the fact that Swearer suggested that students needed to study these factors demonstrated not only the need to “educate the educators” but also the value of the Alternative Day of Education.37 Third, Brown Divest activists again reiterated an older argument about investments. Forman argued that university officials interpreted investment strategies as “apolitical” and assumed that calls for divestment would politicize not only the portfolio but also the institution. Forman countered that Brown was already taking a political position through its investments. Sustaining investments, Forman and others argued, meant taking a political position.38 In all three ways, supporters of divestment illuminated the implicit and explicit political positions of education at Brown in the 1980s.

Although familiar arguments re-emerged, the campus climate of the 1980s was different. In the late 1970s, university leaders could draw on students’ skepticism of divestment, but the political context was different in the 1980s. Divestment was more widely supported among students at Brown. Over the course of the 1980s, Brown Divest garnered wide-ranging support among students and staff; a student referendum on divestment was backed by 83 percent of the undergraduate body, the Graduate Council, and Local #134 of Brown staff. A year after the Alternative Day of Education, in 1986, the faculty voted in full support of divestment. Reflecting the impact of this broader political shift, students who were not involved in Brown Divest or did not consider themselves activists made similar arguments about the politics of the endowment. As Brown student James Karb wrote, “I contend that it is impossible to hold apolitical investments in South Africa.”39

Moreover, student activists now had further experiential evidence of institutional constraints. Brown Divest members and student supporters utilized university mechanisms, only to be stymied by their processes. In the aftermath of anti-apartheid activism in the late 1970s, Brown University established the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment. The committee included representatives from across the university, including students. However, committee members found that their recommendations on investment had very little impact on the Brown Corporation Board’s decisions. In a meeting with Swearer, committee members noted that the committee only disagreed on two recommendations, but the corporation overturned eight. The process demonstrated to the members the limited power of the committee—a limitation that also suggested to the students that the committee deflected rather than enhanced genuine deliberation on the university’s actions as it related to investment.40

With increased support for divestment and the use of existing institutional mechanisms, university leaders again changed their response, focusing less on pushing for honest debate between different alternatives and more on the nature and form of education itself. After a range of debates and forums, Brown Corporation members voted to take a “selective” investment approach in 1986. Over the next four years, Brown would sell all stock in companies that did not comply with the most stringent Sullivan principles for doing business in South Africa.41 Defending the stance taken by the corporation, Duncan MacMillan, an emeritus corporation member, told students that their purpose on campus was to be devoted to “scholastic concentration.” As such, he continued, “I am strongly opposed to anyone using Brown University Campus as a platform for social or political purposes. You are encouraged to express your viewpoints, but care should be taken to not interrupt the educational process for any reason.” In defining Brown Divest’s efforts as political, MacMillan deemed the activities as falling outside the educational function of the university.42

Students from Brown Divest and other organizations responded to MacMillan’s editorial, labeling his “perception of ‘education’” as “both patronizing and frightening.” In MacMillan’s view, they argued, the ideal campus would be characterized by “5200 young automatons demurely scribbling regurgitated discourse.” While MacMillan narrowly defined education as occurring in the classroom, the students argued that education also included “theater, music, art, community service and yes even (shudder) social and political activism” as “valuable, and more importantly, educational.” They also argued that civic education must be rooted in political commitment, thus resurrecting a key argument from the mass student politics of the 1960s. “‘Scholastic concentration’ is absolutely useless,” they wrote, “without active application to a very real issue.” They believed that divestment activists were not, in the words of MacMillan, bringing ruin to the university. Rather, if they remained silent, “what they are bringing ruin to is Brown’s [sic] concept of a liberal education.”43

While the exchange between Brown Divest activists and MacMillan focused on the character of the American liberal arts tradition, South African students at Brown highlighted the underlying financial logic of the liberal arts and its relationship to the struggle in South Africa. Lunga Madlada, a student from Lamontville, a Zulu-speaking township outside of Durban, attended Brown as part of the South African Education Program. Madlada recognized the value of his education at Brown. “Compared to Zuzuland,” Madlada noted about Brown University, “it is great. There we had no choice. Here, I have access to so much information.” Although he appreciated the opportunity to study at Brown University, Madlada questioned the underlying motives of the program and the implications of his American education in South Africa. Madlada knew that his education in the United States was funded by Mobil and Shell, two key supporters of the South Africa Education Program that also worked with the apartheid government in South Africa. Corporate support of the program, he concluded, was intentional. The companies wanted Blacks educated through the American university so that they returned to South Africa and helped lead the Black population in “evolutionary” change along American lines rather than revolutionary change.44

By focusing on the corporate funders of his education, Madlada navigated the political implications of his education at Brown. He worried that his education might hinder the liberation struggle. “For [the corporations], human rights isn’t the only priority,” he argued. “They are also interested in securing their investments,” which included developing educated Black citizens to maintain those investments. Having an elite education from the United States, he would be able to return to South Africa and join the Black middle class, a prospect that concerned Madlada. “You become part of the very system you’ve been oppressed by and fighting against,” he worried.45 Madlada joined and became president of Brown’s African Student Association, believing that the only way that his education could support the liberation struggle was if it was connected to the campus movement to divest. Working with American students, Madlada became a prominent activist who pushed the university to divest its financial holdings in companies working in South Africa. Madlada’s experiences as a student—as someone who benefited from corporate investments in the program that made his education possible and as someone who participated in campus activism with his American counterparts—captured the competing impulses at the heart of Brown’s liberal arts education.

Indeed, Madlada’s reflections and the exchange between Brown Divest activists and MacMillan revealed how campus debate had further evolved to include the appropriate form of education and what it meant to be educated. In the late 1970s, the focus was on what Swearer defined as proper civic debate. In the mid-1980s, with Brown Divest’s efforts that combined formal education with direct action, Swearer focused on what he deemed to be appropriate forms of action as part of a student’s liberal arts training. In addition to implementing a selective investment policy, the Brown Corporation increased funding for South African exchange and volunteer legal programs. As Vice President Robert A. Reichley explained, funding for these programs reflected what he believed the university could do based on its institutional mission. “There was also a recognition that universities should do what universities are specially equipped to do, and that is to use their knowledge and experience to assist South African students and educational institutions.” The new programs in South Africa, which included scholarships, research, and education, fell under Swearer’s emphasis on community service and volunteerism.46

Swearer adopted educational language that was reminiscent of anti-apartheid activism but stripped of its political goals. Indeed, amid the anti-apartheid movement at Brown, Swearer became a leading figure in promoting national service as part of one’s higher education pursuit. He viewed community service as vital to a liberal education. “A liberal education encourages awareness of the responsibility that individuals bear toward the society to which they belong,” Swearer noted when establishing the C. V. Starr Fellowship. Indeed, he believed the program, which linked formal study to volunteer service, represented the new liberal arts education at Brown. He emphasized that “service to the commonwealth deepens the understanding of social and economic conditions, human needs, and political issues in contemporary society” at the same time that the “experience complements and enhances formal education.” Echoing claims made by Brown Divest students, Swearer noted that community service would “awaken a deeper awareness of the moral relationship between University education and social obligation.”47 While dismissing the type of civic commitments by anti-apartheid activists, Swearer promoted civic action through community service.

The emphasis on volunteerism as Brown’s commitment to updating its liberal education served as bulwark against the educational efforts of the divestment movement. In a 1986 editorial titled “The Age of We,” the Brown Daily editors argued that recent promotions of volunteerism and service by Swearer represented more effective forms of activism. They stated that Brown needed more “doers not talkers” and wondered whether “instead of rallies on the green this year, we can concentrate on rallies to build parks in South Providence.” James Berson and Bryant Walpert agreed, challenging Brown Divest and other students’ ideas of civic activism and its place in the university. In response to an editorial by Forman, who lamented the lack of political activism on campus, Berson and Walpert argued, “We’re trying,” although in a different way. “We’re not getting arrested. And our names are seldom in the paper,” they explained. Rather, students in the “Brown Community Outreach and the newly created Center for Public Service sacrifice both their mental and academic health spending hours helping others, organizing service projects, and just plain getting involved because they want to make a difference.”48

Like their peers at Stanford, other student activists and Brown Divest members argued that community service and political activism were not mutually exclusive. As they wrote in response to the editorial, “Service may prove to be a double-edged sword if it becomes a pretext for government inaction, or fuel for someone’s hidden agenda.” The students supported community service and volunteer programs on campus, as many were deeply involved in these efforts. But they believed that such work should either be a means to broader political education or be connected to other forms of activism that challenged institutions and how they operated. They argued, “It is true that volunteerism can build parks and clear abandoned lots, but it is only economic and political empowerment that can erase blight.”49

In responding to new institutional efforts to promote public service, Brown Divest activists also navigated internal tensions concerning appropriate modes of action, especially in light of the corporation board’s decision on selective investment. Indeed, with the decision by Brown administrators to commit to selective investment, students differed on the most effective methods to respond. Some advocated for more direct action, believing that confrontation “is the only logical next step” and that Brown Divest was “past the stage of education. People are as educated as they want to be.”50 In the spring of 1986, a couple months after the Brown Corporation decided not to divest its holdings in South Africa, Brown Divest members constructed a shanty on campus. When Brown Divest was supposed to take down the shanty, however, some student members refused, leading to mass arrests that divided both the community and Brown Divest members. Some believed such confrontational approaches alienated the broader campus community. As Brown Divest member Eric White explained, “I didn’t see what immediate goal [a confrontational action] would accomplish. It didn’t seem a logical action.”51

In this context, the promotion of service represented an alternative form of action that better aligned with academic culture and opportunity. In the process, the arguments made by some Brown Divest activists on the need to connect community service to a broader set of politics were increasingly marginalized in Brown’s promotion of volunteer service. Students who engaged in public protests, rallies, and other forms of activism that challenged the institution faced academic probation and arrests, like those associated with the shanty sit-in. In contrast, students involved in the new social volunteer programs supported by Swearer were rewarded for their “activism” with financial support and institutional recognition. In the fall of 1986, Brown gave a scholarship to Jon Rubin for his work as a legal aide in South Africa, only a couple months after Brown University leaders arrested students for the shanty sit-in on campus.52 University officials supported students’ moral commitments by encouraging them to engage in action that served the world as is but pushed back against the educational models of Brown Divest that attempted to change the institution’s economic and political relationships at home and around the world.

Legacy

In 1987, when Swearer inaugurated the Center for Public Service as part of his wider promotion of national and community service, he drew on Arthur Schlesinger’s book Cycles of American History. In the book, Schlesinger developed a theory of American history, what he saw as the cycles of private and public interest constitutive of the American political tradition. In his speech, Swearer employed Schlesinger’s theory of history to make sense of the decade of the 1980s. “What we witness on the evening news and the front pages of the newspaper is, in simplistic terms,” he argued, “the playing out of a cycle of dominated by private interests.” As a result, he continued, “it is no wonder that the current generation of college students is caricatured as self-interested and more concerned about their financial security and career prospects than about the welfare of their community.” In the new Center for Public Service, he saw “the beginnings of a turn of the cycle, in Schlesinger’s words, away from private interest toward greater levels of public concern and involvement.”53

Swearer’s use of Schlesinger’s theory of cycles reflected what he defined as genuine public interest. Between the late 1970s and the early 1980s, Swearer responded to a range of cycles of genuine public involvement among students in the divestment movement. Indeed, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, Brown student activists demonstrated wide-ranging commitment to public debate, deliberation, and action that transformed the political community of the university. Yet, at each stage of those efforts, Swearer mitigated and disciplined their forms of public engagement while adopting the private interests associated with university investments. In drawing on Schlesinger’s theory of history, Swearer ignored the role of the university itself in promoting or limiting public interest. Indeed, his promotion of community service as an expression of public involvement merely masked the private interest of the university. In the context of the anti-apartheid movement, Swearer’s use of Schlesinger’s theory reflected a broader worldview that narrowly defined student and institutional agency.

Swearer’s efforts extended beyond Brown’s campus. He became the head of the Campus Compact, the national organization that promoted community service. He also worked with Susan Stroud, the first director of the Center for Public Service, to create a marketing campaign around community service. In a letter to Swearer, Stroud underscored the ways the “Media Relations Task Force has acted as a catalyst for media coverage of student public service and community service on campus,” referencing coverage of Brown’s community service efforts in the New York Times, the Chronicle of Education, and other media sources.54 While Brown’s efforts to promote its institutional reputation in media resources reflected new marketing trends in higher education, it also had the effect of marginalizing other forms of public interest on campus in the 1980s. Indeed, when promoting Center for Public Service and combating the image of the “me generation,” Swearer referred to the one thousand students who volunteered in public service and did not mention the students associated with the anti-apartheid movement. Swearer’s efforts enabled him to speak widely about Brown’s promotion of civic engagement in public life in a way that masked the university’s role in limiting other forms of civic engagement.