The Harvard Shareholder Rights Program (HSRP) has spent the last few years pushing back against board staggering, where directors are given multi-year terms so that they don’t all go up for re-election at the same time (the Senate, for example, follows a similar system). The ‘Harvard Proposal,’ developed by the project, has been used in more than 100 campaigns against large US companies by shareholders trying to force boards to de-stagger, and the HSRP is credited with pushing the public debate steadily against staggered (or classified) boards.
But according to Stanford professor of law and business Joseph Grundfest and SEC commissioner...