A petition proposed by the Princeton Sustainable Investment Initiative “asking the University to manage its endowment in a manner that reduces its financial support of environmental degradation” was accepted for review by the Resources Committee of the Council of the Princeton University Community during its monthly meeting on Thursdayafternoon.
Undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff and alumni compose the committee, which reviews general policy concerning procurement and management of the University’s financial resources.
The Resources Committee will explore the issues raised in the proposal and will likely invite the PSI leadership to have a conversation in the near future,University spokesperson Martin Mbugua said.
The petition circulated by PSI gained nearly 1,300 signatures when presented to the Resources Committee, including 950 undergraduate students. Alumni, faculty and staff also expressed support.
The petition was also endorsed by the student groups Students United for a Responsible Global Environment, Students for Prison Education and Reform, the Princeton Wilderness Society, the Princeton Animal Welfare Society, Greening Dining, the Whitman Book Club, the International Student Association at Princeton and The Princeton Progressive.
“The urgency of climate change, the severity of biodiversity loss and water pollution issues calls for colleges to do something,” Dayton Martindale ’15, a PSI leader, said. “We need to leverage the University to send a message to the world — the message that at Princeton, we will not channel resources to environmental degradation.”
According to Martindale, many peer institutions have expressed their support for environmentalism under student pressure. Stanford University divested from several coal companies, and Harvard and Yale signed the UN Principles of Responsible Investment.
The University has taken divestment measures in the past. The University partially divested from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, and in 2006, it also stopped investing in “companies complicit in genocide in the Darfur region.” Student activism and demand were key in both instances to instigating change, Martindale said.
“Although we are motivated by similar concerns to student divestment movements at other universities, we are not calling for fossil fuel divestment,” Renata Diaz '15, another PSI leader, said. “Instead, we are asking the University to work with us in a long-term, holistic process of reflection that will bring the investment of the endowment back into alignment with the University’s stated principles and preserve the integrity of the endowment in the long run.”
Diaz is a former Street contributor for The Daily Princetonian.
The petition urged the University to adopt the UN Principles of Responsible Investment, sign onto theCarbon Disclosure Project to encourage transparency of emissions, calculate and publish the endowment’s carbon footprint annually, establish a student committee to monitor environmentally damaging practices and require all of the endowment’s asset managers to implement the committee’s plan.
Harvard adopted the UN principles earlier this year.
In an email distributed to initiative members, PSI said that “by ignoring the sustainability impacts of its long-term investment strategy, the University sends a message to students that is inconsistent with the values we teach, including ‘do no harm’.”
PSI added the University cannot ignore the findings of its own scientific communities regarding climate change and environmental degradation when making investment decisions and that it need to consider impacts on other communities when making investments which benefit the University community.
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