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No ID. Polaroid is anything but a conventional corporate giant. It has no long-term debt, because Land is convinced that he should be "financially conservative and technologically audacious." In Cambridge, the company seems to feed on the intellectual and technological ferment of neighboring Harvard and M.I.T.—where Land occasionally teaches courses in specialized sciences—and sometimes on social ferment as well. Soon after the Kent State killings in 1970, Polaroid employees were invited to send any message of their choosing to President Nixon at company expense; some 2,200 did so. Polaroid technicians have gone to extreme lengths to protect the environment, once even rigging a costly twist in pipes leading from a chemical plant in order to save several trees. One of Land's personal embarrassments—until the "garbage-free" SX-70 film was designed—was the amount of litter that his product created.
Land has built Polaroid very close to his own self-image—part scientist and part humanitarian philosopher. The latter side of the corporation's personality is most strongly expressed in its extraordinarily forward-looking community-relations program, which has served as a model for other big corporations. Polaroid now donates money or some other form of assistance to 143 community projects in the Boston area, including day-care centers and tutoring projects. Says Cambridge Mayor Barbara Ackerman, a Democrat and social activist: "Polaroid is the only industry in this city that you can go to for money, for land or for some other contribution to the community. Polaroid considers itself a neighbor and actually does neighborly things."
Polaroid is interested in the world far beyond its immediate neighborhood. The company's community relations director, Robert Palmer, recently spent ten days helping mediate a prisoner revolt at Massachusetts' Walpole state prison, and has condemned as dehumanizing a proposed ID card system for Massachusetts welfare recipients—even though an ID system pioneered by Polaroid might well have been used. This year the company reached a longtime goal of employing one black in each ten jobs, about the same ratio as blacks in the total population.
As a socially conscious corporation, Polaroid is also, as Palmer puts it, "a choice target." In October 1970, a dozen black-militant employees tacked up posters on Polaroid bulletin boards accusing the company of supporting apartheid in South Africa by allowing its cameras and film to be used in internal passports and by paying much lower wages there to blacks than whites. The charges turned out to be embarrassingly accurate. Even though the Polaroid operation in South Africa is owned by an independent distributor rather than by the parent corporation, Land was deeply hurt by the employee protest. He decided on a novel solution: he asked a group of employees, including blacks, to visit South Africa and study the case. "Your decision will be implemented, whatever it is," he promised. The group eventually agreed unanimously to stop selling to the government but to continue other operations in South Africa, while ordering Polaroid's distributor to upgrade black wages.