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Students from five top universities have filed complaints against their colleges for violating a little-known law. They accused them of investing in the fossil fuel companies that caused the climate emergency.
The students from Yale, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Vanderbilt wrote to the attorneys general of their respective states on Wednesday asking authorities to investigate breaches of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act, which requires universities to invest in a manner consistent with their “charitable purposes”.
The Climate Defense Project lawyers devised a novel legal strategy. They argue that the law imposes a legal obligation to put the public interests first. Their universities, among the most prestigious and wealthy colleges in the country are failing to do that by investing in fossil-fuel companies that cause harm to the earth and health.
Additionally, the complaints claim that investments made in coal, oil, and gas aren’t financially responsible as required under the law because these industries have uncertain futures.
The five universities have a total endowment fund of approximately $150bn. However only a small amount is invested in fossil-fuel companies.
In their letter to Tennessee’s attorney general, Herbert Slatery, students, faculty and alumni at Vanderbilt University accused the college’s board of trustees of breaching its duties with investments from its $10bn endowment.
“We ask that you investigate this conduct and use your enforcement powers to bring the Board of Trust’s investment practices into compliance with its fiduciary obligations,” the letter said.
Hannah Reynolds, an anthropology student, was the co-coordinator and coordinator of Divest Princeton. She said that the group filed the suit after her university failed in its earlier attempts to end fossil fuel company investments.
“There’s been nine years of fossil fuel divestment organising at Princeton and no commitment or action by Princeton. We’ve exercised every option, we’ve made every argument that we can, and Princeton hasn’t taken it seriously,” she said.
Reynolds accused Princeton of stalling, saying that it had various committees and panels review divestment proposals. However, they were only able to recommend contradictory measures that limited the scope of action. Last year, Princeton’s Announcement of the board of trusteesIt would get rid of coal and tar sands, but not oil or gas.
Aaditi Lee, an organizer of the Vanderbilt University divestment campaign, said that students faced a similar struggle.
“Every time we ask them about fossil fuel divestment, they refer back to other actions that they’re taking to make the campus itself greener, such as carbon offsets, but they fail to address actual divestment. A lot of what they do is just greenwashing through mentioning those other actions and then using that as justification to pretend that that’s enough,” she said.
Following the actions of students at five universities, they coordinated their efforts similar initiatives HarvardAnd Cornell, which later announced they would abandon fossil fuel investments.
“We’ve seen other schools, specifically Harvard and Cornell, take the same approach,” said Reynolds. “Within months, both of those schools have divested. So our hope is that by taking this action, that maybe this will finally be taken seriously.”
Students also seek to exert pressure on universities by drawing the public’s attention to their financial involvement with the oil, gas, and coal industries.
Reynolds answered the question, “Why did student groups ask state attorneys general to investigate rather than pursue direct legal action?”
“Princeton is a university with a $39bn endowment, so they really have a lot of resources that we don’t have. I’m sure that they would be able to hire the lawyers to defend them in a way that would be much more difficult for us. We don’t have any funding or anything. It’s a bunch of volunteers in our campaign,” she said.
Four universities are located in states that have Democratic attorneys general. Their students can expect at most a sympathetic hearing. Vanderbilt’s home is Tennessee, where Slatery has been elected a Republican. But campaigners note that he declined to join 27 other states in a lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s policies to mitigate the climate crisis.
Lele stated that Tennessee had not been affected by the environmental crisis. The state was stricken by Catastrophic flash floodingLast year, the incident resulted in 20 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
“Environmental degradation and its impacts have really been at the forefront of the conversation. So we’re hopeful that the political affiliations of the state don’t impede their understandings of the gravity of the situation,” she said.
