BOSTON -- Nobel Peace Prize winner Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu has won a seat on the Harvard University board of overseers from which he will press the university to divest its investments related to South Africa, The Boston Globe reported Thursday.
The announcement of the election of South African archbishop and four other candidates to the board, one of two bodies which govern the Ivy League university, was expected later Thursday during Harvard's commencement exercises, the Globe said.
Tutu was one of 15 candidates for five vacancies on the 30-member board. Tutu and five other candidates were sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni/ae Against Apartheid, which is pressing the university to divest of $160 million in investments related to South Africa.
The other 10 candidates were nominated by the Harvard Alumni Association.
The Globe said the other winners were not immediately known but that a source reported Tutu was the only anti-apartheid candidate to be elected this year.
Robert Wolff, executive director of the anti-apartheid alumni group, said, 'The moral leadership of Harvard has now passed from (Harvard President Derek) Bok to Archbishop Tutu.'
Wolff's group in the past four years has succeeded in getting three of its candidates elected to board.
Wolff said he was confident that with Tutu's leadership, 'the board of overseers will take a strong position in favor of divestment.'
All Harvard degree holders are eligible to mail in ballots in the election of the board.
Tutu is an ardent advocate of using economic pressure to end South Africa's racial segregation system. He announced previously that if he did not get elected this year, he would return the honorary degree Harvard awarded him in 1979.
Tutu last year said in a Boston speech that he would return all his honorary degrees unless the institutions that awarded them divested their South African holdings within one year.
The Globe reported this year's election process was hotly contested and acrimonious. A number of Harvard officials, including the university's vice president of alumni affairs, Fred L. Glimp, opposed the election of 'single issue candidates' and decried the 'virus' of special interest politics.
