With only one dissenting vote, Student Council passed a resolution last night asking the University to divest, or sell off, its investments in companies doing business in Burma.
The resolution makes three requests to the Board of Visitors. First, Council is calling upon several University institutions "to disclose any ties that the University has with any corporation that conducts business in Burma." The institutions are the University Investment Management Corporation, the University Credit Union, the Virginia Retirement System and the University Bookstore.
Many corporations already have taken their operations out of Burma, including Reebok, Levi Strauss, Liz Claiborne and J.Crew.
Many of the companies pulled out because there isn't any private business in Burma and companies are forced to give money to the military regime in order to operate there, third-year College student Andrew Price said. Price, along with third-year College student Michael Freedman-Schnapp, brought the issue of the University's Burmese ties before Council.
The resolution also calls upon the Board to vote in favor of a Unocal stockholder resolution that asks the company to disclose payments that have been given to the Burman military regime. Unocal is a Los Angeles- based oil company that built a pipeline in Burma in 1996. The University Investment Management Company invests $2.1 million in Unocal. The UVIMCO is a subcommittee of the Board of Visitors' Finance Committee that invests the University's endowments. The University's stock investments total $1.8 billion.
"The stockholder resolution will ask Unocal to leave Burma," said Price.
"Essentially, we're going to encourage the University to divest its holdings in Unocal because we don't think the University should be indirectly supporting a military regime that has a well documented record of human rights abuse," said Nick Jabbour, third-year college representative and co-sponsor of the resolution.
If the stockholder resolution fails to pass, Council also asked the Board to "immediately divest any holdings in corporations identified by the Investor Responsibility Research Center as conducting business in Burma."
The Board of Visitors will see the resolution tomorrow.
"We anticipate an answer from the Board of Visitors very soon," Council President Joe Bilby said.
Student supporters of the resolution provided evidence that showed Unocal contracted with the current political military regime in Burma to support the building and infrastructure of the pipeline.
"The military regime raped, tortured and enslaved thousands of people," Price said. "Unocal says they didn't tell [the regime] to do so, but they were still under their direction."
"This resolution is not about foreign policy; this resolution is not about politics; it's about what is right and wrong," first-year College representative Ronnie Mayhew said.
Twenty-five other schools, including Harvard University, Georgetown University and American University already adopted similar measures.
In addition to discussing the Burma resolution, Council announced the nomination of Anita Gupta as chief of staff for 2001-2002.
Also, the resolution for the support of the Ad-Hoc enrollment Committee proposal for first-year housing was introduced in new business. It will be debated in next week's meeting.
The Ad-Hoc committee on the Good Ol' Song chant gave an extensive report to Council last night. Included in the report was their testing strategies, which included focus groups.
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