Princeton quietly updated the number of fossil fuel companies on their dissociation list earlier this semester. For the most part, it’s good news: the Board of Trustees has increased the list of companies that they will not have financial relationships with from 90 companies to a stunning 2,300, even if most of them had “no prior financial relationship with the University.” However, the Board also restarted relationships with eight companies that were previously on the outs, dampening the good news.
One of those companies is TotalEnergies, the sixth largest fossil fuel company in the world and one that has been accused running climate disinformation campaigns, such as greenwashing, the practice of advertising their operations more "environmentally friendly" than they are in reality. Re-association with destructive companies like TotalEnergies reveals the weakness of the Board’s dissociation policy, which ignores how those companies may abuse their relationship with Princeton to greenwash their image, allowing themselves to appear as eager advocates of climate action while concealing their scaled back renewable investments and lobbying against climate legislation.
“Dissociation” is Princeton’s name for severing financial relationships with a company — relationships like research partnerships, gifts, and donations. In 2022, the University chose to dissociate from any company holding values that are “in strong contradiction with Princeton University’s core values.”
A year earlier, Princeton announced two potential criteria for divesting from fossil fuel companies: sufficiently large holdings in the most polluting fossil fuel sectors or engagement in corporate disinformation campaigns. They link each of these to a “core mission” of the University; egregiously destructive extraction violates the University’s commitment to sustainability, and the spread of climate disinformation violates its “truth-seeking mission.” Combined, these two criteria would have made Princeton’s dissociation standard one of the strongest in the country.
Yet when the the Board announced their first round of divestment and dissociation in 2022, they pushed aside their previous climate disinformation criterion and only dissociated from companies which failed their standards for “clean” fossil fuel extraction. In doing so, the Board shirked their responsibility to take a stand on disinformation and rejected the consensus of scientists, lawmakers and lawyers, researchers, and its own faculty panel on how to respond to climate disinformation.
But if they are not willing to do that, the Trustees could still take a huge step forward by following both of their proposed criteria and consider dissociation from companies like TotalEnergies that engage in climate disinformation.
Because the Trustees avoided acknowledging corporate climate disinformation campaigns as one of the legitimate criteria for dissociation, they are able to welcome back companies that might have otherwise remained on the outs because of their disinformation campaigns.
The Trustees’ justifications for disregarding the disinformation clause in cases like Total’s are shaky. First, they note that “the bar for dissociation on the basis of disinformation is exceedingly high,” and that they lack “quantitative standards” to evaluate that bar.
This justification flies in the face of findings by a panel of faculty experts that the Board expressly convened to set that bar. In their report, this faculty panel meticulously defined standards for how to evaluate disinformation and provided a clear “semi-quantitative” scorecard rubric to help the Board decide if a company’s public communications meet the standard of disinformation that they lay out.
For example, on the scorecard, allegations of greenwashing would have at least triggered an automatic review from Princeton of the companies practices. Further, the panel notes that, ”the burden of proof” then lies on the accused company to show it has not participated in spreading disinformation
Unlike the Trustees, the panel’s findings raised no concerns that this bar might be too high, or that dissociation because of disinformation would be inappropriate. Indeed, the report even cited a specific example of what corporate greenwashing looks like. Not only did the panel consider it reasonable that fossil fuel companies might meet that criteria, it even suggested that the Board of Trustees could start this dissociation process by evaluating a couple of fossil fuel companies according to their rubric and posting their evaluation publicly.
The Board didn’t even take that first step. Instead, they have given no indication that they ever started to evaluate using the disinformation criteria at all. Indeed, the Board seems to have dismissed the criteria outright, claiming they were not “quantitative” enough. It’s one matter to refuse to dissociate from a company because it doesn’t meet the high bar. It’s quite a different matter to invoke the high bar as an excuse to avoid even considering if a company has waged a disinformation campaign. And yet Princeton’s Board has done exactly that.
Let’s take a look at the Board’s second excuse. The Trustees claim that by dissociating on the basis of disinformation, they would in effect force a consensus on an issue that supposedly still has a “vigorous exchange of ideas.” In other words, they claim that because there is active debate over whether or not fossil fuel companies have engaged in disinformation, they do not want Princeton to effectively “end” the debate by making a decision. Eisgruber clarified this in a later CPUC meeting, saying that if there’s a “contest” about whether or not a company has engaged in disinformation, “the Board of the University shouldn’t be in the position of arbitrators.”
By refusing to evaluate if companies involved at Princeton have spread climate disinformation, the University in effect tolerates those companies, even despite their potential disinformation. This unquestioned tolerance undermines the University’s core mission to seek truth, and therefore challenges the strength of the Board’s second justification.
Taking the Trustees on their own terms, it’s clear that they have not lived up to their initial dissociation promise. As a result, TotalEnergies can return, without any worry that its greenwashing tactics will jeopardize its place at our University. In fact, until Princeton changes its policy, any company, no matter how deceitful, can continue to exploit its relationship with Princeton.
The dissociation fight is not over. No matter how many excuses they make, as long as the Board’s members allow fossil fuel money to pour into University research and as long as their endowment is still partially invested in fossil fuels, they have chosen Big Oil over the future of their students and the future of our planet. It’s up to us to make them reconsider.
Columnist Alex Norbrook (he/him) is a sophomore from Baltimore, Md., and co-coordinator of Sunrise Princeton. He can be reached at alexnorbrook@princeton.edu.
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