Word: divestment
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...also generates cold hard cash. Harvard’s endowment surpassed the billion-dollar mark in 1970 and has increased twenty-fold since. The University’s practice of aggressive and creative investment, though, has often garnered criticism from the liberal-leaning student body and faculty. Protests and divestment campaigns began in the 1960s when the University founded the Harvard Management Corporation and diversified its assets into stocks and property. The campaigns have ranged from a 20-year, public effort to force the University to divest unconditionally from companies with ties to the apartheid government in South Africa...
Currently, students and professors are calling for Harvard to divest its holdings in a Chinese oil utility, PetroChina, that does business with the government in Sudan. Historically, Harvard has dragged its moneyed feet on divestment; in fact, a campaign has never actually led to full divestment. But Harvard has responded to pressure to divest from irresponsible assets, such as holdings in tobacco companies...
...Harvard is part of an institutional investor community that exacerbates human rights abuses in Sudan and sustains terrorist-sponsoring states by investing in PetroChina, Sinopec, and dozens of other companies active in the world’s pariah states. According to the Center for Security Policy’s Divest Sudan initiative, 87 U.S. public pension funds have invested more than $90 billion dollars in 83 public companies that maintain active business projects in Sudan...
...University’s holdings in PetroChina have drawn criticism from human rights activists who say the company’s close links to oil ventures in Sudan have helped finance that government’s slaughter of its own people. A petition calling on Harvard to divest its shares of PetroChina- had garnered the support of 38 faculty members and 214 students as of yesterday evening...
Benjamin B. Collins ’06, who helped found the petition to divest from PetroChina two weeks ago, said several professors had signed on over the weekend...