By Mikayla Patel and Phoebe Lease
In an Oct. 18 email to the Smith Community, President Kathleen McCartney announced that the Smith College Board of Trustees voted in its October meeting to “direct Investure, the college’s outsourced endowment management firm, to exclude from the Smith College endowment all future investments with fossil fuel-specific managers” and also voted to enact a “phaseout of all current investments with fossil fuel-specific managers in the Smith College endowment.”
This phaseout is predicted to take 15 years. “These two new actions align with and build on the momentum of our ongoing work, which includes partnering with four other colleges on a 46,000 megawatt-hour solar array in Farmington, Maine,” McCartney wrote.
McCartney also said the college is “exploring the potential of geothermal energy through a pilot well underway near the Field House; reducing carbon emissions (already down by 29% since 2004); and embedding environmental sustainability in more than 100 courses in our curriculum.”
An organization by the name of Divest Smith College has been calling the college to divest from the fossil fuel industry since the group’s formation in 2013. “We had to leave the building because we were screaming inside Hubbard at 8 a.m.,” said Dana Barry ’20 of the moment they received an email labeled “confidential” and “urgent” while eating breakfast with their fellow Divest members and opened it to discover that the board of trustees had voted to divest. Barry said it was “very cool to be with other people working on the campaign” as they all processed the significance of the moment.
Caitlyn Perrotta, also a senior member of the organization, said they were alone when they heard the news of Smith’s divestment. “I was shocked and in disbelief.”
Perrotta was particularly surprised given that the announcement came the same day Divest had planned to hold a rally, which Perrotta argued was potentially their largest to date.
The group had to “rework the whole thing that morning,” said Barry. Divest decided to make the rally less directed toward board members and administration and more toward the community.
“There is more work we want to see done after this,” said Barry, adding that Divest is “not anywhere close to being done,” as the group wants to be involved in the reinvestment process.
Divest is interested in the “morality behind endowment and investment, getting students to a baseline of understanding of where our investment is [going toward]… and how the endowment functions.”
Barry said that they would love to “see a pathway open up for students to have a voice in things” and also expressed concern for the fact that “other universities have pledged to divest but [have] not done it.”
Barry and Perrotta both expressed dissatisfaction with Smith’s estimated 15-year-long process of divestment. “It doesn’t need to take that long,” said Barry.
There are “other things Smith could and should divest from,” said Perrotta, expressing frustration with the fact that students “don’t have access to information of where our investments are.” As an example of this, Barry said that some groups are “talking about private prison divestment.”
“Students need to be in the room,” said Barry, in reference to lack of student voices in the conversation of where Smith’s investments go.
Perrotta expressed that Divest and students generally “should take a moment and breath and enjoy the victory” as “this work is exhausting,” however Divest will continue “advocating for more transparency in the investment process” going forward.
Barry added that Divest wants to continue to support work that other people are doing, namely other climate action groups.
Lately, Divest has been working more closely with Extinction Rebellion, a local climate activism group.
Extinction Rebellion Organizer Adrie Rose AC said, “I was delighted to get [the divestment] email, and I think it’s a really important step. It would be really bizarre and upsetting if they declared the Year on Climate Change and then didn’t divest. I agree with my fellow students, President McCartney and the Board of Trustees that this is just one of many actions and isn’t enough and more still needs to be done.”
In addition to divestment, Extinction Rebellion is asking all five colleges in the consortium to declare a climate emergency and to commit to having zero carbon emissions by 2025. The group is also organizing a “5 College People’s Action Committee” as part of their list of demands, which would involve students, community members and other stakeholders in the solution brainstorming process. Rose said organizers want to make sure that they are making choices that will lead to a just transition, especially for people most affected by the climate crisis.
Activists like Rose are also asking the five colleges to further integrate climate change into all aspects of the curriculum. “[The colleges] should prepare their students for the world that they are going to be living in. Students should have a fundamental understanding of the climate emergency and should be prepared for its impact on our futures and the fields we’re going into.”
When asked about the timeline for Smith’s divestment, Rose said, “I think the timeline for the divestment is ridiculously slow and needs to be faster. Divestment is a wonderful decision by the college, and only happened because of sustained student pressure. We need to hold them to their promise and make sure they carry it out with transparency. It is important that the voices of students are in this picture not just the administration, because students are the institution.”
Extinction Rebellion will also be working on the reinvestment process alongside Divest, and Rose says the group is currently working on building relationships with other student-run organizations. “Divestment may feel risky to administration, but for students it feels absolutely necessary.”
In an email response to The Sophian, President McCartney responded to student concerns about the 15 year divestment timeline, saying, “As the vast majority of fossil fuel–specific managers in the endowment are investing in private companies where a sale of all or part of the company is required to liquidate the investment, we project that it could take up to 15 years to sell or liquidate those investments based on their life cycles.”
“I share the concern of student activists and agree that climate change is an urgent, complex problem that calls for immediate action,” wrote McCartney. “As an educational institution, our greatest impact in fighting climate change will be through, as the Study Group on Climate Change wrote in 2017, integrating climate action and sustainability across all aspects of the college. I’m proud of the steps we’ve taken, from our curricular offerings to our campus operations and investments. That said, there is much more to do.”
With this announcement, Smith joins two other colleges in the consortium who have divested from fuel sources deemed harmful to the environment. The University of Massachusetts was the first public university in the country to announce divestment from direct holdings in the fossil fuel industry as of May 2016, and according to a press release from Hampshire College’s website, “Hampshire’s exposure to fossil fuel investment is de minimis – less than 1 percent in what most would consider fossil fuel stocks.” Both Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College have yet to fully divest their endowments from the fossil fuel industry.
