Petition Candidates
In the late-1980s, a group calling for a withdrawal of Harvard's investments in Apartheid South Africa helped nominate petition candidates for overseers elections. Known as the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni Against Apartheid (HRAAA), this group supported the first petition candidate to win an overseers' seat. The HRAAA also backed South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu in his successful bid to join the board in 1989. Since Tutu's election in 1989 (and the altering of election rules), no petition candidate has been successful, including Barack Obama, who lost in 1991.
Read more about this topic: Harvard Board Of Overseers
Famous quotes containing the words petition and/or candidates:
“Maybe we were the blind mechanics of disaster, but you don’t pin the guilt on the scientists that easily. You might as well pin it on M motherhood.... Every man who ever worked on this thing told you what would happen. The scientists signed petition after petition, but nobody listened. There was a choice. It was build the bombs and use them, or risk that the United States and the Soviet Union and the rest of us would find some way to go on living.”
—John Paxton (1911–1985)
“Which one of the three candidates would you want your daughter to marry?”
—H. Ross Perot (b. 1930)