TUESDAY evening, Student Council passed a resolution urging divestiture - the termination of all investment in companies with ties to a particular nation - in Burma, a country ruled by a military regime with a record of human rights abuses. Later in the week, Controversial Princeton philosophy professor Peter Singer gave a talk on "Ethics for One World" Friday morning.
As unconnected as these events may seem, they coalesced to form a question in my mind. The first exemplifies the capacity of University students to look beyond their own borders and care about places and people they've never seen. Anticipation of the second spurred me to reread one of Singer's best-known articles, "Famine, Affluence and Morality," which argues for Americans to take a greater financial interest in aiding Third World nations. So the question arose: What are our obligations, as students, to developing countries? As further research shows, students at the University have had to deal with similar questions before, and those past actions should serve as a model for today's students.
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When acting as a University, the easy course usually consists of Council's resolving that something should happen, without any further action to accomplish this goal. For example, statements like, "The Student Council of the University of Virginia condemns female genital mutilation" sound good. But they will not cause societies perpetuating this practice to be terribly sorry and sin no more. The power of our verbal disapproval of something to reach around the world exists but has its limits.
Economic power, however, particularly in a global economy, speaks much more loudly. The University has some history regarding divestiture that predates the recent Burma resolution. For over a decade, students called for the University to end its investments in companies doing business in apartheid-governed South Africa. In 1981, Council made the request to the Board of Visitors, which promptly turned it down. During the mid-1980s, a sustained and broad-based movement spearheaded by Students Against Apartheid led to the Board's October 1985 approval of divesting from firms failing to uphold basic human rights guidelines in South Africa. This selective divestment did not satisfy students, however, and in May 1990 the Board voted to divest fully.
Despite the length of the process, we might look at students' push for South African divestment as a model. These students saw the University as failing to act with moral responsibility toward South Africa's oppressed black majority and took action accordingly. In February 1985, Council passed a resolution against apartheid. But they did not end their activism there. Considering selective divestment too small a step, in September 1986 Council resolved to call for total divestment. That November, the issue was put to referendum, and a majority of students voted in favor of the resolution as well.
To emphasize the importance of the issue, students took a day in early 1990 to experience apartheid, with a minority of students given special benefits and the rest denied their usual privileges. As a result, students from all schools - graduate schools included - worked together to press the Board. This effort also helped to prompt then-Gov. Douglas Wilder to issue a directive for all state entities to end investment in firms with South African ties.
Had the insistence on divestment been limited to a Council resolution and a few protesters, the Board probably would not have felt compelled to divest until ordered to do so by the governor. The students' constant interest in a policy involving human rights, though thousands of miles from the University, made an enormous difference. Council gave focus to the issue by calling for a specific action from the Board, the body entirely charged with making such decisions with a responsibility to University students. No vague, ineffectual wish-making here - they knew exactly what they wanted and how to get it and weren't afraid to ask for it over and over. The rest of the student body mobilized over the long term to keep divestiture constantly on the Board's agenda.
Students' actions from over a decade ago exemplify how we can effect change the University's Burma investment policy. We should voice our opinions for as long as it takes. It worked then. It can work now.
(Pallavi Guniganti's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at pguniganti @cavalierdaily.com)
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