Editorial: Don't invest in HEI

As was reported last month in the 'Prince,' Princeton is a primary investor in HEI Hospitality, LLC, a group that owns luxury hotels and resorts around the country. The company has come under fire for numerous abuses against employees, including allegations of denying breaks to workers, retaliating against workers who have attempted to unionize or have tried to bring the company’s abuses to light and discriminating against workers on the basis of age. Princeton is not alone in its dealings with HEI Hospitality — Yale, Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Notre Dame and the University of Chicago all are major investors — but while some of our peer institutions have made pledges not to reinvest with the company in light of these allegations, Princeton has made no such commitment. We believe that they have a responsibility to do so.

The University denies that its financial ties to HEI implicates the school in the mistreatment of the company’s workers, insisting that only when the workplace is the University itself is our school committed to the just treatment of employees. Only on campus, Princeton argues, does the capacity for oversight of worker treatment exist; in addition, the University has a general policy not to take a position in “external issues of a political, economic, social, moral or legal character.” Although we recognize that it is impossible for Princeton always to know or predict how a given company behaves toward its workers, that it is likely inevitable that Princeton will end up financially linked to companies later alleged to be disreputable, and that it is wrong to immediately accuse the school of wrongdoing when such allegations come forth, these facts do not absolve the school from responsibility when such allegations actually do come to light. Continuing to reinvest in a company that has demonstrated a lack of regard for the rights of its workers while claiming not to be implicated in the company’s abuses is quite a different matter from investing in a company without committing itself to safeguard the treatment of its workers. Now that Princeton is well aware of allegations against HEI, the school ought to follow the example of Brown, UPenn and Yale and not reinvest with the company. This is a policy Princeton should follow whenever it is faced with clear evidence of wrongdoing on the part of its investees.

Finally, we do recognize that in difficult economic times, when our University’s endowment is threatened, Princeton does have a commitment to making investments that accrue the greatest financial benefit to the school. Yet financial incentive should not lead us to implicitly endorse and explicitly aid a company that mistreats its workers and engages in illegal actions, as HEI Hospitality does. We like to believe that Princeton uses its financial resources to provide us with the best education possible, and to reinvest in HEI would provide a very poor lesson indeed.