Word: divestments
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...coalition of 11 student groups called on Harvard to divest from any holdings in Sudan-linked firms in a statement released Saturday, urging the University to emulate a similar move by Yale last week. One of the campaign’s leaders, Jennifer T. Morse ’07, said the impetus for the recent push was Harvard’s increase in its Sinopec holdings. The stake had increased by 1,150 shares by the end of last year, according to SEC filings. The group laid out plans to begin a coordinated campaign for divestment at an organizational meeting...
Four years later, the University decided to divest its holdings in PetroChina due to the company’s financial ties to genocide in Darfur. The effect was, even just superficially, quite different—public attention focused on the magnitude and intractability of the problem, and Harvard divested for the fourth time in its history...
Having served on the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility during the PetroChina decision, the most important question in deciding to divest from PetroChina was the money flow. Harvard’s investment money went to a company that used that money to purchase oil from a Sudanese oil exploration effort, which in turn used that money to finance the militias that slaughter people. It mattered that it was oil; had PetroChina been in the coffee business and sourced coffee from Sudan, Harvard likely would not have divested—there was no straight line from the coffee export industry...
Last year’s PetroChina divestment campaign sparked a campus debate on how politicized, if at all, the Harvard endowment should be. The problem with seeking maximum returns in investments is that companies like PetroChina, Sinopec, Unocal that either indirectly facilitate or are directly complicit in grave human rights abuses remain in Harvard’s portfolio. Fortunately, last year the University agreed that Harvard must ensure that its money is not used to facilitate morally bankrupt activity. Citing President Derek C. Bok’s precedent that divestment is reasonable in “exceptional circumstances...
While Harvard has a long tradition of morally responsible investing decisions—including its decisions to divest from Angola’s oil industry, apartheid South Africa, and tobacco stock—all these decisions were made on an ad hoc basis. This “Bok system” has several problems. First, the “exceptional circumstances” criteria for divestment forces the ethical responsibility debate to be rehashed from scratch each time a questionable investment is discovered in Harvard’s portfolio. Second, the current system means that reviews often do not occur...