A victory long in the making : divestment from South Africa at the University of Missouri

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI--COLUMBIA AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This thesis focuses on the little known, but significant, movement for divestment (the sale of stocks from companies doing business in South Africa) at the University of Missouri in the late 1970s and the mid-1980s until the university's administrators decided to divest in December 1987. Missouri students joined compatriots across the United States calling for similar objectives. Scholars who look at collegiate anti-Apartheid movements or divestment usually focus on administrative divestment decisions or on the intricacies of specific campus activism. Instead, I look at the divestment movement's unique characteristics at University of Missouri campuses and particularly at the flagship campus in Columbia. Concurrently, I look at the reasons why the University of Missouri's administrators actually decided to divest in 1987. My first chapter covers the first two phases of divestment at Mizzou; here Students began calling for the university system to divest in 1977 and did so again in 1985. The major themes of this chapter focus on the administrative response to activism and the university system's partial divestment in 1985. Chapters two and three take a more microscopic approach, they focus on the protests and events that were directly related to them at the University of Missouri's flagship institution. In my fourth chapter I consider divestment activism's impact on the University of Missouri's administrators and I ask why they eventually decided to completely divest from South Africa in December 1987.