One of the country’s most prestigious universities, with one of the world’s largest endowments, has joined the student-led movement to divest from fossil fuels. Stanford University’s Board of Trustees announced Tuesday it would no longer invest in coal-mining companies because of climate change concerns. The board said it acted in accordance with guidelines that let them consider whether, “corporate policies or practices create substantial social injury” when choosing investments. Stanford’s endowment is valued at $18.7 billion. The university’s president, John Hennessy, said in a statement, quote, “Moving away from coal in the investment context is a small but constructive step while work continues at Stanford and elsewhere to develop broadly viable sustainable energy solutions for the future.”
All of this comes as the fossil fuel divestment movement heats up across the country. Seven students at Washington University in St. Louis were arrested last week following a 17-day sit-in. The students were calling on the school’s Board of Trustees to cut ties with coal industry giant Peabody Energy. Also last week, students at Harvard blockaded the office of Harvard President Drew Faust. One student was arrested.
Michael Peñuelas talking:
So this move, this victory, is a major one in the climate movement, and it’s a major one for the divestment movement specifically. This is one of the first major acknowledgments on the part of the administration of a major university that man-made climate change is a risk and that the dollars that we are investing and funding our education off of contribute to that pretty directly. So, we’re incredibly excited, and we’re proud of our university.
our generation is one of the first to have been raised the entire—you know, the entirety of our lives with this looming specter of climate change on the horizon. But tangible action that can be taken is often evasive. So when this opportunity presented itself to take our voices and unite them as students, to leverage the power and the name of our institution, that represents us and that we represent, I think students were really, really excited, and they jumped on board. We had recently an election on campus where over 2,700 students voted in favor of divestment. We’ve had hundreds of faculty, quite—you know, quite literally, almost 200 now, send expressions of support to our campaign, because they know that this is something that they can do, and they know that institutional action right now is what needs to happen to create concrete change in our country in terms of a positive direction for climate action, but also just to create this bigger space for dialogue, because our institutions have names, and they need to be part of that.
It means that Stanford is going to remove all of its direct investments in—in a list of companies. We presented them a list of the 100 coal companies with the largest fossil fuel reserves, the largest amount of carbon in their reserves. And they’re going to set up some dynamic parameters by which companies can enter and exit that list, as their control of those reserves change. But yeah, practically, that’s exactly what that means, is that Stanford is going to stop supporting them and stop funding our education on those companies, those 100—those approximately 100 companies that are mining and extracting the coal.
Last Wednesday, six students with the Divest Harvard campaign blockaded the main entrance to University President Drew Faust’s office and called for an open meeting about fossil fuel divestment.
So this juxtaposition between the administration at Stanford’s response and the administrations at other schools—Harvard and Washington University, most notably, in the last week—is really an unfortunately salient one, and one that I think is being rightfully made in media across the country right now. And it’s the fact that Stanford maintained an open dialogue now for almost 18 months with students, meeting regularly and considering our concerns. And when 78 percent of our undergraduate body stands up and asks for divestment and states that they want Stanford’s endowment and its money to be brought in line with its core values, they listened. And I think Stanford has come out on the right side of history, and other schools haven’t up to this point. But I think that one of the most important points to be stressed on this is that there is still time for these other universities to go ahead and take that step and follow Stanford and the other schools that have come even before Stanford’s lead. And I think I would actually say that that’s—it’s integral at this point that for the success of our society in terms of moving past fossil fuels, these other universities do recognize the calls of those students that they’ve been reacting so negatively to thus far.
Students at Washington University’s St. Louis campus held a 17-day sit-in campaign to remove Peabody Energy CEO Greg Boyce from the school’s Board of Trustees. At a rally on campus in April, students laid out their other demands for the university to cut ties with the coal industry giant.
— source democracynow.org
Michael Peñuelas, a student Stanford University and an organizer with Fossil Free Stanford.