The University of Maryland Board of Regents voted yesterday to lift its four-year ban on investing in companies operating in South Africa. The unanimous vote quietly extinguished in Maryland an issue that once seared American campuses.
The vote, taken at a session at Towson State University, follows a national trend setting aside such restrictions after South Africa dismantled its white authoritarian government last spring.
The Johns Hopkins University and the city of Baltimore, for example, dropped similar policies earlier this year. A state policy limiting investment in South Africa has already lapsed.
In 1986, the University of Maryland adopted a set of standards called the Sullivan principles that rated companies by how well they treated South African blacks. The university system shifted in 1990 to a total ban, and sold off stock valued at $1.1 million from a $52 million portfolio.
The Sullivan principles were named for a Philadelphia minister, Leon Sullivan. Mr. Sullivan initially advocated limited investment in South Africa linked to individual companies' behavior. Later, he shifted his view and advocated a total ban on South African investment.
At the request of the regents, the council representing student governments at all 11 campuses in the University of Maryland system reviewed the ban earlier this fall and voted to overturn it. But student council president Paul Mandell also reminded the regents yesterday that the council called for the board to invest its money with the same display of social conscience it showed four years ago.
"The initial action was taken on at the insistence of students," Ann Hull, chairwoman of the regents' finance committee, said after the vote. "We have not given directions to our endowment managers beyond getting us the best rate of returns."
Bruce Behrens, the Alex. Brown manager of the university system's portfolio, would not comment on how the policy affected the University of Maryland system's earnings.
More than 160 state, county and city governments had some restrictions on their investment policies targeted at South Africa, said Richard Knight, a research associate at the Africa Fund, a New York City-based advocacy group.
"Sanctions had accomplished all they were able to accomplish," said Mr. Knight. "Now the issue is kind of reversed: How do you reorganize in South Africa so that people enjoy the fruits of democracy?"
Like the University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University adopted a policy in October 1986 limiting its investment according to the Sullivan principles. But Hopkins did not adopt the total ban.
Investors for Hopkins eventually sold stock valued at $14.3 million in 21 companies.
Trustees voted in April to drop the ban. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Duke, the University of Michigan, the University of California system and Colgate and Swarthmore Colleges have also all dropped their restrictions on investments in companies with South African interests.
During the 1980s, U.S. government policy clashed with the stance of many large investment groups on how best to persuade the white separatist rule of the South African National Party. The Reagan and Bush administrations called for "constructive engagement" -- a policy of friendly persuasion.
Many activists on campuses across the nation called for full economic sanctions to send a more direct message to Pretoria. Many university administrators and trustees agreed, but some said they embraced the policy as much to soothe two decades of campus racial tensions as to exercise financial clout for human rights.
In 1986, the U.S. Congress overrode President Reagan's veto and adopted trade sanctions -- recently rescinded -- against South Africa.