Joseph Grundfest responds on the SEC, Bebchuk, and academic freedom

I received this email:

A colleague forwarded your post this morning, and there is an easy reply to your concerns.

Nothing in our analysis implicates academic freedom in the least, and the paper addresses this point directly in the text at page 12:

“The Harvard Proposal’s incomplete and categorical analysis of the academic literature could be published in any academic journal without raising any risk of violating the federal securities laws. But when scholars avail themselves of SEC regulations to force issuers to place statements describing academic research in the corporation’s proxy materials, the scholars voluntarily subject themselves to standards of legal liability that do not apply in other venues. There is no “professor exemption” from the requirement that a proxy proposal not be materially false or misleading.”

Thus, the salient point is that the proposal appears in the proxy only because the Harvard SRP voluntarily decides to avail itself of an SEC rule that forces the company to put the statement on the company’s proxy. In order to benefit from this rule, the proponent has to agree to abide by SEC rules that prohibit proposals from making statements that suffer from material omissions. The Harvard SRP can write or say whatever it wants without any of the concerns raised in the paper, provided that those statements don’t appear in Rule 14a-8 proposals. But, once the statements are submitted as a Rule 14a-8 proposal, they have to abide by the same rules as any other 14a-8 proposal.

The article’s analysis therefore suggests no constraint on academic freedom. We academics can write and say what we want without any concern regarding any of these SEC rules, provided we are not submitting shareholder proposal. And, for what it’s worth, to the best of my knowledge, the Harvard SRP is the only university-run program that engages in Rule 14a-8 campaigns, and no research by any Harvard scholar is at all affected by our article’s analysis, other than the materials that appear within the four corners of the shareholder proposals voluntarily submitted by the SRP.

Indeed, as an academic who benefits from academic freedom, I too would be concerned about any suggestion that our analysis has any effect on academic freedom whatsoever. It doesn’t.

Hope that’s responsive to your concerns.

Here is the home page of Joseph A. Grundfest.  Here is his Wikipedia page.

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