They had been camped outside University Hall since 5 a.m. Charged with cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee, the student activists of Divest Harvard managed to block the entrance to the building for a full day of classes on March 29, 2017. The rally they staged that afternoon represented the culmination of a five-year-campaign for the divestment of the University’s $37.1 billion endowment from the fossil fuel industry. With thousands of educational institutions worldwide already divesting—the number reached 8,700 in 2018—the student activists were certain that the time had come for Harvard to take action of its own.
When Harvard Management Company’s Head of Natural Resources Colin Butterfield announced a “pause” in investments in minerals, oil, and gas less than one month later, divestment seemed tangible at last. Recent graduate and Divest Harvard Co-Founder Chloe Maxmin framed the decision as part of a “profound power-shift taking hold of our country.”
But was divestment really won? Maxmin now considers her enthusiasm premature. Since Butterfield’s announcement and the graduation of Divest Harvard’s core class of activists that year, the group has existed in name only. Talk of divestment has virtually disappeared from campus despite the University’s continued ties to the fossil fuel industry. The preemptive declaration of victory, following years of administrative resistance and growing student disillusionment, marked the death of the divestment movement. However, with the arrival of a new President and freshman class, there remains hope for the movement’s revival.
A History of the Movement
Today, divestment dominates national discourse on climate action, but when Students for a Just and Stable Future helped 350.org launch a divestment movement spanning US college campuses in fall of 2012, its messaging was largely unprecedented. That was no deterrent to taking action for SJSF member Chloe Maxmin. “We have the biggest endowment of any university on the planet,” Maxmin stated, “and that comes with responsibility”—one she and her activist peers were determined to see the University realize.
Harvard had divested for ethical reasons in the past, albeit reluctantly. The University only partially divested from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa in 1978. By 1990, Harvard had divested from the tobacco industry and in 2005, the University divested from the PetroChina corporation out of concern for the Darfur genocide. While these precedents provided hope, Maxmin had no doubt that fossil fuel divestment would be an uphill battle.
Divest Harvard sprang into action. In November, Harvard became the first American university to pass a student referendum supporting divestment from publicly traded fossil fuel companies, with 72 percent of the over 3,600 votes cast favoring divestment. The following spring, Divest Harvard met twice with the Harvard Corporation Committee for Shareholder Responsibility, failing to make any progress on the issue. After the second meeting, the group published an open letter asking University President Drew Faust to meet at an upcoming rally, where they presented a pro-divestment petition with 1,300 signatures to the administration.
Unmoved by the students’ demands, Faust quickly became the face of their opposition. In a public statement that October, she called divestment neither “warranted or wise” and warned against using Harvard’s endowment “as an instrument to impel social or political change.” A month after Divest Harvard published a video of member Alli Welton confronting Faust about the influence of the fossil fuel industry, Faust affirmed her anti-divestment stance, emphasizing how universities could combat climate change through research and campus energy efficiency.
Students were not the only contingent of divestment organizers challenging Faust. Harvard Medical School faculty member Jim Recht was the principal author of an open letter to President Faust, published in April of 2014 by Harvard Faculty for Divestment with 93 signatories—it now has 276. Recht believed that faculty had an important role to play in helping students “grapple with the very powerful isolation and stigmatization that reactionary campus administrations like Harvard’s have worked to promote,” serving as “as bulwarks against those destructive forces.”
In November of 2014, Divest Harvard took a dramatic new approach to divestment. Calling themselves the Harvard Climate Justice Coalition, seven students filed a lawsuit against the University, requesting its immediate divestment from the fossil fuel industry. Although the case was dismissed the following spring, the suit contributed to a growing climate action cases.
Shortly after the lawsuit’s dismissal, Divest Harvard organized its largest demonstration to date. During the week of April 12, 2015, the group rallied thousands of Harvard students, faculty members, and alumni for Harvard Heat Week. Divest Harvard members held blockades of Mass and University Halls. Alumni supporters occupied the Harvard Alumni Association and prominent alumni, including Bill McKibben and Cornel West, spoke at rallies. Faculty members facilitated divestment teach-ins. When President Faust offered to meet with student activists on the condition that they stop blockading University buildings, the group refused, convinced that the meeting would do nothing to shake the administration’s intransigent stance.
On April 21, 2016, Divest Harvard took its campaign directly to the Harvard Management Company. About 25 students demonstrated outside HMC’s office, leading to a sit-in by four members, including then-Divest Harvard Coordinator Naima Drecker-Waxman and graduate student Ben Franta. All four were arrested for civil disobedience and charged with trespassing.
When students met with members of the Harvard Corporation that October, they were told the University would not commit to divesting from the coal industry. For Divest Harvard Co-Coordinator Isa Flores-Jones, coal was “the smallest of possible asks. Numerous universities, including Stanford and Yale, had already divested from this “dirtiest and most dangerous of substances.” A few weeks after Divest Harvard blockaded University Hall in March of 2017 in response to the Corporation’s refusal, Butterfield announced a “pause” in in some fossil fuel investments, generating immense excitement among divestment supporters.
A False Sense of Victory
Despite the appearance of progress, Butterfield’s statement only reflected the reality that Harvard was not investing in oil, minerals, and natural gas—for the time being. His words did not reflect a commitment by HMC to refrain from making such investments in the future. Instead, HMC continues to advocate “engagement over divestment,” claiming to incorporate environmental risk factors into its investment strategy.
While Butterfield’s announcement seemed momentous to many divestment supporters off campus, the remaining student organizers saw it as an excuse for HMC to quell their demands for increased financial transparency. “This was not a win but instead a diversion,” said Flores-Jones. Kat Taylor, a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, agreed. She resigned from the Board that March, calling on Harvard to divest from fossil fuels and “stop owning climate change.”
Although the University has taken steps to reduce the campus’s carbon footprint, adopting a climate action plan to eliminate fossil fuel usage on campus and becoming a signatory to agreements for ethical and sustainable investment, the administration continues to resist discussing fossil fuel divestment. The University’s new President, Lawrence Bacow, has remained silent on the issue. He did not directly respond to requests for comment for this article.
Even more alarming, the fossil fuel industry maintains a subtle yet pervasive presence on campus, funding academic research and programming. Last February, Shell Oil Company sponsored the screening of a film with a Shell-affiliated director as part of the Harvard Kennedy School’s “Finding Energy’s Rational Middle” event, including a Shell representative on the film’s discussion panel. Divest Harvard activist Ben Franta revealed that the Kennedy School had “received at least $3.75 million” from Shell at the time. Harvard has also received funding from Chevron and Exxon Mobil, both of which are involved in current research projects at Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, as well as from BP.
“[Fossil fuel companies] don’t give that money altruistically,” stated Craig Altemose, Executive Director of the Better Future Project and a Co-Founder of SJSF. “They usually have agendas.”
Beyond influencing student life, the fossil fuel industry retains a foothold in the University’s decision-making. “There are conflicts of interest at the…administrative level and those are not widely known,” Franta told the HPR. He pointed out that Harvard Corporation member and attorney Ted Wells currently represents ExxonMobil against claims that the company misled the public about the impact of fossil fuel burning on climate change.
For Recht, the activism of students like Franta successfully revealed the “depth of hypocrisy and…intellectual dishonesty that characterizes most of the Harvard leadership.” Their continued ties to the fossil fuel industry reveal an “interest in preserving a destructive status quo.”
Why Divest Died
With the illusion of victory prevalent among their support base, divestment organizers were unsure of how to push the divestment movement forward. Even if they could re-energize supporters, they doubted whether, after five years of staunch administrative resistance, they would ever attain more than empty words from the University. Butterfield’s statement marked an end to the era of the first fossil fuel divestment campaign on campus.
According to Altemose, student activists had consistently faced the greatest opposition from the “continued clout of the fossil fuel industry.” He believes the industry’s success in “politicizing the issue of climate change” has caused some conservative donors to disregard divestment as part of a liberal agenda. In line with this rhetoric, President Faust often cited politics in justifying her objection to divestment.
Industry ties to the University also inhibited students and faculty members’ willingness to join the divestment movement. Franta recounted how several of his former professors had expressed their inability to publicly support Franta’s divestment advocacy, fearing a loss of funding for their research or retaliation from Harvard’s administration. Franta faced such retaliation himself when he applied for a postdoc at the University and was informed by a faculty member that his application was not considered due to his support for the divestment movement.
In addition to its unwillingness to engage in open and productive dialogue with student activists, the administration’s lack of transparency prevented students from gaining a full understanding of University’s investment in fossil fuels. Harvard has “an exceptionally complex and untransparent system for how it makes its investment decisions,” Drecker-Waxman told the HPR. According to Drecker-Waxman, the HMC, which meets in private, has been “increasingly outsourcing their investment decisions to other management companies.” Unlike the investments made directly by the University, these investments do not have to be publicly disclosed.
Sustaining the will to face such formidable opposition challenged even the most passionate leaders of Divest Harvard. “I think some of the students became demoralized when they saw how…absolutely deaf the administration was to [their] concerns,” recalled Recht. With many of Divest Harvard’s founding members nearing graduation at the time of Butterfield’s announcement, there was little time or incentive for the group organize a new campaign for complete divestment.
Apathy among the student body also stymied the growth of the divestment movement. “Students…do not come to this university to complain about the way the University functions,” remarked Flores-Jones. “Many students, eager to take advantage of the University’s unique wealth of resources, are not thinking to question the place as it presently exists.”
Reviving the Movement
The arrival of President Bacow, however, provides new hope for the movement’s revival for former divestment activists. Some believe his background in environmental studies and emphasis on administrative accessibility may make him more receptive to their case, offering a unique opportunity to pursue the kind of open and productive dialogue around divestment unattainable under President Faust. Others are skeptical that Bacow will translate his stated commitment to Harvard’s social responsibility into administrative action.
In order to be effective, calls for divestment must go beyond citing this social responsibility. Divestment proponents have advocated campaigning for reinvestment—presenting fossil fuel divestment as an opportunity to pursue ethical investment in sustainable, community-based funds and renewable energy. This forward-looking messaging also reflects the growing financial imperative to reconsider fossil fuel investments, which many predict are doomed to decline.
Reviving the divestment movement also requires extending its narrative beyond Harvard’s campus. Flores-Jones believes the campaign will benefit from “the realization that it operates within a national network of schools and…young people” committed to climate justice: “It’s not just ‘divest Harvard.’ It’s divest all of our institutions and hold them accountable.” Uniting environmental and social justice groups across college campuses would enable resource-pooling and broaden the campaigns’ public appeal, as well as invite new student engagement.
Alyssa Lee, Campus Programs Manager of the Better Future Project, believes that training new generations of leadership is key in sustaining the divestment movement. New leaders must be willing to take risks, challenge authority, and engage in creative protest, as well as root divestment in an intersectional commitment to social justice. Students must also continue to engage faculty and alumni supporters. Recht believes many Harvard faculty members remain prepared to re-mobilize in a second wave of the divestment movement.
Already, a new class of divestment activists is emerging. Harvard Undergraduates for Environmental Justice, a student group supporting education and political action around environmental justice, has made divestment a staple of its advocacy platform. Last October, the group’s leadership met with former members of Divest Harvard to strategize the movement’s revival. A few weeks later, members of HUEJ wrote a letter to President Bacow requesting to meet with him and the Harvard Corporation to discuss their demands for fossil fuel divestment.
“This year feels different—there’s a new urgency, a new commitment,” affirms Flores-Jones, inspired by the growing interest in divestment. “No corporation—and that’s what Harvard is—has ever done the right thing without average people stepping up to hold it accountable. Students here should understand that the time to step up, the time for climate action, is now.”
Image Credit: Flickr/ Kamyar Adl