This year the impossible happened. The Harvard Endowment finally announced in a September email from President Bacow to undergraduates that it would no longer be engaging in partnerships with funds that had substantial holdings in fossil fuel equity.
This announcement represents far more than a one-off decision. It’s the result of grassroots student activism that has been knocking on Harvard’s door for almost a decade.
“Victory is the culmination of almost ten years of hard work and dedicated organizing,” said Jade Woods ’22, a member of the Divest Harvard movement. Historically, the movement has been marked by disappointment and rejection. Just over a month ago, the unlikelihood of the decision seemed as permanent as ever. Yet a guarded optimism continued to motivate its members. Alexi Stravropoulos ’24, who took part in the Divest protests in September, recalls an alumna coming back to campus to help protest and urging students “not to be discouraged by the fact that we haven’t been able to make Harvard have a lot of action.”
Given the former uncertainty surrounding the issue of where to invest Harvard’s endowment, many of us are asking, why now? What caused Harvard to divest? As Woods noted, there wasn’t any single action that provoked the September announcement. Instead, Divest Harvard’s success comes from an incremental build-up of pressure over time that proved its persistence and intentional presence on campus. It was this assuredness that signalled to the Harvard Management Company [HMC] that they couldn’t simply wait out the protests.
The movement was able to exert pressure on the administration that extended beyond just the student-led marches. A network of alumni, faculty, and former Divest members contributed to a multi-frontier fight against the stance of the endowment. Harvard faculty sided with the goal of Divest, voting 179-20 in favor of fossil fuel divestment in 2020. “This victory would have never worked without a huge network of support,” said Woods.
She also cited a March 2021 legal complaint filed by students against the University which alleged that Harvard’s fossil fuel investments violated a state law requiring non-profits to make investments with a charitable purpose in mind. Though the complaint does not represent formal litigation, it does add pressure for the Attorney General of Massachusetts to look into the Harvard Endowment’s assets.
To its credit, the Harvard administration has been in dialogue with Divest advocates for many years, and the University has been clear in its recognition of climate change as a catastrophic threat. In the summer of 2020, President Bacow said that the “existential threat posed by climate change” had motivated the University to ensure that its endowment would achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from the portfolio by 2050.
Indeed, as made clear in the September announcement, the Harvard Endowment had been “reducing its exposure to fossil fuels” for some time now. When the Independent reached out to Harvard Media for a comment, they declined to respond.
Where will the Divest movement go from here, now that its primary mission has been accomplished?
Woods said Divest Harvard will continue to pay close attention to the University’s actions. “There’s still so much work to be done, so I want to emphasize that Harvard needs to see this through. Their announcement was by no means perfect. They didn’t release any timelines for when all this would happen, and they used vague language about holding,” she said. “Our goal going forward is to hold Harvard’s feet to the fire.”
In the announcement email, Bacow wrote, “HMC has pledged to render its own operations greenhouse gas neutral by June 30, 2022.”
Apart from the pragmatic implications of the announcement, Harvard’s affirmation of official divestment comes after years of denying the endowment’s effects; in no means is explicit agreement by the administration with the goals of the movement a trivial accomplishment.
Stravropoulos described the positive effects this has on the morale of Divest. “It was really empowering for a lot of students, especially for those who have dedicated a lot of time,” he said.
The theme of divestment being both an ethical accomplishment as well as much as a material change was reflected across Woods’ comments as well, as she emphasized the personal meaning the announcement took on for her: “This is such a huge moment of recentering. I had always joked that Harvard would divest at the end of my senior year, and while there is still work to be done, it really shifted my paradigm about what was possible. Harvard is one of the wealthiest and most intransigent institutions in the world.
Divest Harvard has always had a much broader scope than simply rearranging money. Bacow’s announcement opens the path for the movement to focus on the broader impact of fossil fuels on campus life.
While Divest “will have people working to see whether Harvard is following through on this commitment,” they will also be “investigating the extent of fossil fuels’ influence on campus” in terms of what research and knowledge is produced and why.
Similarly, Woods states that the movement will encourage the University to pursue green investments, by “spending a large chunk of time thinking about what it means to shift funds … away from exploitative economies.”
The trajectory of the Divest Harvard offers insights into how students can directly change one of the most powerful and wealthy institutions in the world. Harvard has affirmed that it supports a climate-sensitive investment portfolio. The ramifications of this decision will only be clear in the years and decades to come, but it has the potential to radically reshape the orientation of secondary institutions to climate change, as well as parallel initiatives like prison divestment, indigenous land rematriation, and campus police reform.
“This is a big turning point for the club because when we get institutions like Harvard to make concrete changes … I think that actually is a lot bigger than what it seems,” Stavropoulos said. “People may view it as something just Harvard is doing, but a lot of people who look up to the institution may follow.”
Aden Barton ’24 (adenbarton@college.harvard.edu) and McGavock Cooper ’24 (mcgavockcooper@college.harvard.edu) will pay close attention to future developments for Divest Harvard.