Responding to weeks of student protest against Harvard's South Africa-related investments. President Bok stated last week that divestment of these holdings would be illogical, ineffective and costly to the University

In his first public statement since students seized on the South Africa issue this spring, Bok said that the University can influence the apartheid state more by working internally to shape company policy and by educating Black South Africans at Harvard.

Harvard's investments in companies doing business in South Africa has generated controversy for several years, but it resurfaced dramatically on campus this semester as students staged hunger strikes and rallies, and created a special escrow fund linked to the University's divestment as an alternative to the senior class gift

Many divestment proponents criticized Bok's statement in interviews yesterday, maintaining that Harvard's shareholder votes have been useless in effecting change in South Africa's apartheid regime.

Professor of Education Noel F. McGinn, a member of the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), which advises the Corporation on investment ethics, charged yesterday that the University has not used its shareholder power. "If the University were actively working hard to overcome that evil [apartheid], no one would be making any complaints," he added.

Bok argued that Harvard alone could not have much effect, but McGinn responded that "clearly it would make waves. When President Bok criticizes the legal system, everyone listens."

"Bok premises his statement on the idea that Harvard's divestment won't make any difference. If Harvard wants to make a difference, it can--it's a self-fulfilling prophecy," Jamin B. Raskin '83, a member of the Southern Africa Solidarity Committee, said.

In addition to questioning the effectiveness. Bok argued that divesting only from South Africa-related companies would be inconsistent, since there are "groups who might not view South Africa as a special case and would press the University with equal fervor to extend its embargo to avoid any connection with Guatemala, El Salvador, and the Soviet Union, and other countries toward which they had strong moral objections."

"Unless we live like hermits in the desert, we must all be linked in indirect and innumerable ways to the wrongs of the world." Bok added in the open letter.

Bok also contended that divestiture would impose an excessive financial burden on the University and might "constitute an unlawful breach of trust by those of us who have fiduciary obligations to the University."

The letter also argued that divestment, if successful, could be dangerous for South Africa. "The... issue arises whether such privations would provoke serious unrest and opposition to the Afrikaner regime and what the ultimate consequences of such protest would be."

The open letter, released Friday in the Har-

Among its recommendation, the committee had concluded that "one of the things wrong with legal education at this school was the one big exam at the end of the year," Liebman said.

He acknowledged that "the Michelman Committee seems like ancient history to present students" and that students "have already registered for next year's classes without knowledge of the new rules, and he said the faculty would reconsider the issue May 18.

Morton J. Horwitz 62. Warren Professor of American Legal History, spoke and gave the demonstration his approval to which the students responded by chanting. "Make him dean." Grading classroom participation, Horwitz said, "reflects an authoritarian and repressive view of the educational process."