Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is: Divestment at SLU
On the last day of senior week last May, before the families arrived and waterworks ensued, students at St. Lawrence University posted up in Eben Holden for the arrival of the Board of Trustees financial council to show their support for divestment.
Just a quick vocab review, divestment is the opposite of investment; selling stocks, bonds, or investments that are morally ambiguous or appear in contrast to an organization’s mission.
Representing the 51 percent of the student body who had, at that point, signed the student petition for divestment, the physical manifestation of support within the student body was an impressive sight. This support has set the bar high for Divestment Club to return this year and make even more progress.
The hope is to start a larger conversation on campus about the implications of investing our endowment, and thus the growth of our schools scholarship and infastructure in the fossil fuel industry. If we expect the candle we have lit in the wilderness to never be extinguished, can we keep supporting the extraction and burning of fuels we know to be detrimental to the health of natural cycles?
We believe that we have the capacity to make this change happen. On October 5, 2003, the St. Lawrence mission was expressed by President Daniel F. Sullivan as, “to provide an inspiring and demanding undergraduate education in the liberal arts to students selected for their seriousness of purpose and intellectual promise.” These words would certainly lead one to believe our capacity.
Speaking to the then-top 250 benefactors of the University, Dr. Sullivan identified three important challenges to be addressed. First, he highlighted the need to continue the improvement of the quality of education afforded to students at SLU. The second challenge concerned increasingly seeking and attracting a group of serious, committed, well-rounded students who would take full advantage of the opportunities provided by SLU. Finally, Dr. Sullivan highlighted the need to, “find a way to finance that opportunity in a fully sustainable way.”
To my understanding of the address, Dr. Sullivan was not thinking specifically of environmental sustainability when he made this remark. However, in the 12 intervening years since he made the speech, a deep-ocean oil rig has leaked millions of barrels of oil into the gulf of Mexico, winters have become more and more severe and less and less predictable, and the vegetative topography of California has been permanently altered by drought-fueled fires. Clearly, if there were ever a time to think about the ecological sustainability of SLU’s financing, it is now.
This is what we are doing by reconciling SLU’s goals of empowering well-educated, well-rounded, morally objective individuals with the financing of these goals. As long as we stay invested in fossil fuel companies, these two factors will fall out of alignment. We want to correct this conflict, and instead invest the considerable influence of SLU in shifting the paradigm from financial dependence on an unsustainable industry to financial empowerment through independence from the industry.
The winter Board of Trustees meeting will take place on February 11, 2016 at which point we hope to be able to present to the Board a unified front of Laurentian support for divestment. We believe this unified front will start with a discourse. If you are interested in helping to lead this conversation, drop by our Student Center room 336 on Mondays at 8 p.m., or shoot Max Lewis ’16, Satchel Toole ’17, or Emily Harrington ’16 an email with your thoughts.
Until next week,
Divestment Club