This project looks at the relationships between college endowment investments in the United States and corporations profiting from Apartheid in South Africa. I conducted primary source research at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges’ special collections in order to write an original history of the events of Bryn Mawr’s Divestment movement. The college embraced corporate reform politics, while student activists wanted full economic divestment.

To this end, this project first begins with an essential overview of the violent history of Apartheid in South Africa. I provide more historical context about the movement against Apartheid by looking at the dually emerging anti-War and Civil Rights movements. This era of activism precipitated into the New Left, which was a radical student movement grounded in ideas of political and economic democracy.

I include a primer on the foundations of ethical investment in South Africa. This is necessary as the College’s plan embodied the corporate responsibility ethos of the 80s, which sought to maintain capitalism and pacify very popular alternatives through modest reforms. These principles undergirded Bryn Mawr College’s eventual divestment strategy, which sought to maintain profit and to make a statement about their opposition to the political system of Apartheid. To make this argument, I draw on archival discussions of corporate responsibility politics and the theory of change they espouse which forwarded reform through pressuring the companies they held stock in.

The Bryn Mawr College Board of Trustees, the governing body that oversees college operations and finances, proposed a plan in 1985 to divest from subsidiaries of their stock in South Africa if Apartheid was still in place 24 months later in 1987. Bryn Mawr’s anti-Apartheid student movement emerged, rejecting this proposal of slow change through corporate responsibility. Archival materials demonstrate that students demanded full divestment. The student protesters rooted their commitment to ending Apartheid in South Africa to their commitment to ending racism in the United States.

I engage in an analysis of discourses emerging from a school-sponsored trip to South Africa in the winter of 1986, which was dubbed a “Peace Mission Fact Finding Trip.” This analysis is essential to understanding student and faculty perspectives, as there was not a consensus on the subject.

In the end, Bryn Mawr adopted a divestment plan that was in the name of corporate responsibility. They wrote letters to the corporations they held stock in who had subsidiaries in South Africa, and asked what they were going to do to end Apartheid. The school divested from the 5 companies that did not respond by selling their stock, totalling $651,558 in 1986.