The Harvard Corporation largely sidestepped the growing national debate over global warming this year with a handful of abstentions on proxy votes of corporations in which the University holds shares.

The Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (CCSR), which votes the University’s shares, released its annual report earlier this week explaining votes on nearly 100 shareholder proposals involving social issues, including nine proposals related to global warming and greenhouse gas emissions.

The report covers all CCSR-related votes from the spring 2003 proxy season, the March through June period during which many publicly-held corporations hold their annual shareholder meetings.

The CCSR chose to abstain on six of those proposals, which called for various reports on gas emissions and reduction by a forest products company and five electric utility firms.

Five of the six abstentions contradicted non-binding recommendations by the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), a 12-member board of students, faculty and alumni formed in conjunction with the CCSR in 1972 to provide student input on the University’s investment decisions and shareholder voting actions.

The CCSR followed the ACSR’s advice on 66 of the 98 proposals, but where the two groups diverged—on issues ranging from labor to animal rights—the advisory committee’s recommendations tended to fall to the political left of the Corporation committee’s final decisions.

Harvard’s annual votes on shareholder proposals are highly anticipated by corporations as well as other investors.

As a significant institutional investor in the equities market—the University holds nearly $3 billion in stock—Harvard is a powerful proxy voter in corporate America.

At the same time, many groups, including other Universities with large investments and the Washington-based Investor Responsibility Research Center, look to Harvard as a bellwether on socially-oriented proxy proposals.

Despite strong ACSR support for a yes vote on an environmental code of conduct—known as the Ceres Principles—proposed this year to Plum Creek Timber shareholders, the CCSR abstained on the measure. However, a letter by the Corporation committee to the company last spring sought “to express support for the underlying goals of the Ceres Principles,” according to the report.

Elizabeth A. Gray, secretary to the CCSR, explained the committee often abstains when it supports an issue in principle but has qualms with the specific wording of a proposal.

“The proxies should be clear and direct,” Gray said. “If they are ambiguous, they become increasingly difficult to support.”

Working on Labor

A proposal for labor reform sponsored by the International Labor Organization (ILO) and submitted to multiple firms garnered broad, though far from unanimous, support among members of the ACSR but drew mixed responses from the Corporation committee.

The proposal, which bans the use of child labor and asserts trade union and collective bargaining rights, was submitted this year to seven companies in which Harvard owns stock, including Stride Rite and Home Depot.