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Harvard and CUNY Shedding Stocks in Tobacco [1]

['Tamar Lewin']

Date: 1990-05-24

Enemies of the Industry

Ms. Everett and her husband, Henry, have long been active in opposing the tobacco industry, and they serve on the board of trustees of the Tobacco Divestment Project, a Boston-based nonprofit group formed earlier this month.

That group and others working against cigarette smoking say the two universities' moves may be the start of a far more widespread divestitute campaign, including a proposal in the Massachusetts Legislature to require state pension funds to sell their tobacco stocks. By some estimates, more than 60 percent of tobacco stock over all is held by institutional investors, primarily banks, pension funds and insurance companies.

''Harvard and CUNY are the two great victories so far, but this is just the beginning,'' said Brad Krever, executive director of the Tobacco Divestment Project. ''We are taking the message to hospitals, universities and state and municipal pension funds: It is immoral to support an industry that kills 400,000 Americans a year.''

A spokeswoman for Harvard, Merry Duffy, declined to say which tobacco companies the university had held stock in, or how much stock it had sold, from its total endowment of $4.68 billion.

Philip Morris Replies

But Dr. Gregory Connolly, an official at the Massachusetts Department of Health, presented a paper last month at an Australian conference on smoking estimating that Harvard's tobacco portfolio was worth about $25 million in 1987, and would be worth at least twice that in today's market. He said the universities holding the most tobacco stock were Harvard, Rice, the University of Texas, Duke and the University of Rochester.

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[1] Url: https://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/24/us/harvard-and-cuny-shedding-stocks-in-tobacco.html

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