Brown University will not divest coal company assets from its endowment.
Christina Paxson, Brown’s president, announced the decision in a school-wide email on Sunday, reports The Brown Daily Herald. The announcement came after a meeting of the Brown Corporation, a bicameral body composed of a board of fellows and a board of trustees.
“At the end of the meeting, it became clear that we didn’t need to vote,” Paxson explained in the missive. “The support for divestiture just wasn’t there.”
“The existence of social harm is a necessary but not sufficient rationale for Brown to divest,” she also wrote.
Paxson noted that Brown will convene a task force in the future to come up with ways the Ivy League school can foil climate change.
The non-divestment decision has disappointed some of Brown’s world-traveling, energy-guzzling students and professors.
“There’s a logical fallacy here,” Brown student Leah Pierson told The Herald. She observed that Brown’s governing institution could not exist without students.
“This should be a democracy, and it isn’t,” Pierson complained.
The freshman’s Facebook page indicates that she is quite the globetrotter. Her “places” page boasts that she has visited Cape Town, South Africa (7,680 miles from Providence) and Belize City, Belize (3,500 miles from Providence). The Arlington, Va. native has also been other remote locales including the Amazon jungle of Peru.
Pierson’s fanypants Facebook photos show her living life to the fullest in places far-flung. In one photo, she is sitting atop the mountains above Cape Town in a Brown t-shirt, smiling broadly. In another, she can seen cavorting merrily on what appears to be the world’s largest salt flat in Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia. There is a sport utility vehicle in the background.
The Daily Caller is unable to calculate Pierson’s total carbon footprint for these trips, but her level of frustration is high.
“They’re giving us all these long, drawn-out explanations about why this has no positive social impact, but that’s not the reason they’re choosing not to divest,” Pierson protested, according to The Herald.
“If we can’t dissociate ourselves from big businesses, how can we expect our government to make social change?” she added.
Other students, such as Dara Illowsky, also weren’t happy with the decision.
“I thought we showed that the student voice was calling for divestment and that it mattered,” Illowsky told The Herald. “But the Corporation didn’t care.”
Illowsky is a member of Brown Divest Coal. Her Facebook page suggests that she is from Ossining, N.Y., a leafy suburban enclave in Westchester County full of mansions and ritzy estates.
The junior has experience as a research intern at the University of California, Santa Cruz, which is about 3,140 miles from Brown.
It’s not clear how much the jet fuel used by Illowsky hurt the environment.
“We’re not going away,” Illowsky insisted.
Some professors also disagreed with Brown’s decision.
J. Timmons Roberts, a professor of environmental studies and sociology, called divestment “a moral obligation” in an email to The Herald.
“We have been teaching about the issue for a quarter century,” Roberts wrote. “We must act on what we know, both on campus and in the ways we interact with the world beyond the university gates. That clearly includes our investments.”
In his lengthy and very impressive curriculum vitae, Roberts notes that he has been employed at five universities around the country. He participated in a fellowship at prestigious Oxford University in England. He also spoke at Occupy Providence.
In addition, Roberts has gallivanted around the world to lecture. The long list of magnificent speaking destinations includes Durban, South Africa; Cancun, Mexico; Lund, Sweden; Berlin, Germany; Vienna, Austria and Bali, Indonesia.
The professor’s carbon footprint for this delightful array of travel is unknown.
The protests arguing that Brown should divest from coal-related holdings began in May. There have been teach-ins, rallies and petitions.
A number of student groups were involved in the anti-coal movement including Brown Divest Coal, the Student Labor Alliance and, for some reason, Brown Students for Justice in Palestine.
Brown Divest Coal asked five members of Brown’s governing Corporation with ties to 15 coal companies – “the filthy 15” — to recuse themselves because of a potential conflict of interest. None did.
Brown’s investments in coal-related concerns amount to less than $2 million, notes The Herald. This total is less than 0.1 percent of the school’s total investments.
As of October, Brown’s endowment has a market value of $2.86 billion, roughly the gross domestic product of the South American country of Guyana.
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