Committee votes to divest funds in S. Africa
Recommendation given to Zumberge
stantial evidence. They added that they planned to present this opinion to the board.
John Zak, a member of the Kappa Sigma house, said the checks were mistakenly sent to his fraternity house, which is located next door to Phi Sigma Kappa. He added that only one member, Steve Byrons, has admitted writingthe checks.
“We’re not even sure that Steve really wrote the checks, only that he tried to settle the matter with Covell on behalf of the whole fraternity,” Zak said.
Byrons, who is currently on a semester in Madrid, was unavailable for comment.
“Instead of settling the matter with a few individuals who were willing to work things out privately, Covell started accusing us of bribery and has hurt the whole fraternity. He also accused people who weren’t involved in the check-writing at all,” Zak said.
Lance Schmidt, a Kappa Sigma fraternity member, said Covell accused him of writing the checks because of an incident during which Schmidt and some fraternity brothers
By Eric Onstad
Staff Writer
In the last minutes of a special meeting Wednesday, a majority of a president’s advisory committee voted to recommend to President James H. Zumberge that the university begin full divestment of companies and banks which invest in the Republic of South Africa, and called for a university-wide open forum on the issue.
The recommendation was one of 13 items the committee sent for consideration to the president in a meeting that ran almost an hour over its scheduled time.
President Zumberge had asked the Environmental and External Affairs Committee of the President’s Advisory Council for advice on a policy of social and moral concerns in response to a Student Senate resolution which condemned
the policy of apartheid and called for divestment in South Africa.
Apartheid is the official policy of South Africa that discriminates against black people. Blacks make up 84 percent of the population of South Africa.
■‘Any university that has any moral guts will stand behind it (the call for divestment),” said Thomas Kilgore, in an impassioned argument preceeding the divestment vote. Kilgore is special presidential advisor for Community Affairs at the university, a minister, and a boyhood friend of the late Martin Luther King.
Before the divestment issue was voted on, the broader issue of whether the university should take any stands on social and moral issues was discussed.
Tony Miller, the student senator that introduced the South
Africa resolution to the senate, referred to the university’s articles of incorporation in his argument for the resolution.
“The university is organized for the ‘advancement of the intellectual. scientific, moral and spiritual improvement of man,”’ Brown quoted.
The resolution passed with 16 affirmative votes and one abstention.
Some of those who attended the meeting were not happy that discussion of broader issues of social concern took so much time at the meeting.
“It (the discussion) was a direct move to kill the divestment issue,” said Randy Ziskin, in an interview after the meeting. Ziskin is a member of Students for Economic Democracy, one group that brought the divestment issue to the senate.
“It wasn’t until we got angry at the end of the meeting that
they took the specific vote on divestment in South Africa,” Ziskin said.
Three committee members had left the overtime meeting when the votes on South African divestment and the open-forum proposals were taken.
The chairman of the committee, Robert Biller, dean of the School of Public Administration, did not agree that the discussion of broad social issues was destructive.
“The matter is best served to see it (apartheid) in the broad context of social concerns,” he said.
The university has always stood for a high level of social concerns, Biller said, and cited as evidence the affirmative action and competitive bidding policies.
The idea for a universitv-wide public hearing was suggested by Tom Mowbray, a stu-(Continued on page 5)
Students withdraw from budget panel
By Marc Igler
Staff Writer
Claiming that their time and energy can be better spent influencing the budget process through other means, a Student Senate committee ended weeks of speculation Wednesday by walking out of a university budget advisory committee meeting.
The student members of the Resource Management and Planning Committee withdrew their representation from the advisory group because they had “reached the boiling point of frustration” in attempting to halt further tuition increases and improve student services.
“It’s futile for us to continue participating on that committee. The system just isn’t serving our needs,” said Mark Slavkin, a student senator and one of four students on the budget advisory committee of the Presidential Advisory Council.
Committed to opposing tuition increases, the student de-
legation will now seek other, “more direct,” means of influencing budget allocations, Slavkin said.
“All of our interests and concerns just seemed to be getting delayed and overlooked while the committee spends its time on matters that we felt were not as important,” Slavkin said.
He added that the strategy of the student group will now focus on private meetings with top university administrators in an effort to stress that students will not accept further tuition hikes unless campus services are improved. A tuition increase of 11.5 percent has been proposed for the 1982-83 school year.
"What we're trying to tell the administration is that they can’t continually raise tuition while maintaining below par services,” said Andrew Littlefair, chairman of the Student Senate and member of the budget advisory committee.
(Continued on page 7)
Staff photos by Junji Yasuda
WEATHERING THE STORM — Students and their bicycles try to make it through the rainstorm which hit the campus Wednesday. Marcus Peacock sails through the streets on his way to class. Another student's bike does not fair as well as it sits in a puddle in front of Bovard Auditorium.
Students say check-forging case clouded by misinformation
By Charta Foster
Staff Writer
Students involved in a dispute regarding an incident in which checks were allegedly forged appeared before the university's peer review board Wednesday to present their conflicting stories.
Mark Covell, a Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity member who claimed that Kappa Sigma fraternity residents wrote at least S70 worth of fraudulent checks, said Monday that he planned to present evidence to support accusations against specific Kappa Sigma members.
The accused students said Covell based his suspicions on misinformation and circum-
had thrown some tobacco tins at Covell’s fraternity house.
“He claims that I said something about writing the checks, but I never did,” Schmidt said, adding that Covell unfairly called him a prime suspect on the basis of the one incident.
Although Schmidt refuted Covell’s claim that he had mentioned the checks during that incident, he added that he could not remember if anyone else mentioned the checks at that time.
“He might have heard someone else say something about the checks, I don’t know,” Schmidt said.
“All I know is that it wasn’t me and that Covell picked me
out of the crowd at a time when he didn’t even know who I was.”
Jeff Reese, president of Kappa Sigma, confirmed that Steve Byrons is the only student who admitted his involvement in the check-writing incident.
Reese said he mistakenly reported to the Daily Trojan last week that Ted Pappas, another fraternity member, had admitted to writing the checks.
“I never directly spoke to Ted about this and I later found out that I had been mistaken,” Reese said.
“Byrons admitted his part in (the incident) during a private (Continued on page 12)
Volume XCI Number 22
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University of Southern California Thursday February 11, 1982