Those who support the Overseers' voting on divestment hold that the Board has the responsibility to take as stand on an issue which has been discussed on this campus for more than a decade. They also argue that the position of many board members is not known, and any discussion of the sentiment of the Board without a record of the positions of the whole will be inconclusive at best.

But many members of the Board have joined the Corporation and the administration in arguing that the two governing bodies should work together, and should not make public statements about the appropriateness of one another's work.

President Bok, a voting member of both bodies, has said several times that if the Corporation were in the position of disagreeing with an action of the Overseers, he would counsel the members of both bodies to sit down and discuss their concerns in an informal way.

Administrators also say that in addition to provoking a possible confrontation between the boards, a vote would be less effective than informal discussion.

The administration has taken pains to inform board members of this view. A vote on a proposal for divestment was scheduled for the February meeting of the Overseers, but Steiner and Secretary of the Governing Boards Robert Shenton visited two-thirds of the board members before the meeting to discuss the implications of that vote, and to present the administration arguments against such a move.

Steiner says after the visits that he and Shenton told the overseers that discussion between the boards "was more appropriate, more productive, and more consistent with Harvard's form of governance" than a formal vote on the divestment question.

The Overseers Executive Committee then made the decision to divert the divestment issue to the Standing Committee on Institutional Policy to decide how the Board should proceed. The Standing Committee recommended in March that the Board not vote on divestment, but instead form a joint committee with the Corporation to discuss the divestment issue.

No specifics about the joint committee have yet been decided, but Bok has says that he thinks it will likely report back to the respective boards sometime next fall. The next step?

"I don't think we have tried to form any opinion, I would not encourage that. When you go into this kind of discussion, I don't think you try to form an opinion first, but should make conclusions as you go along," Bok says in an earlier interview.