Getting Involved: Tellus, RI@Harvard, and Divest Harvard
I first became involved with investment activism in 2011, after the director of my union local hired Joshua Humphreys of the Tellus Institute (at the offices of which, students and advisors met in 2013) to analyze the fundamentals of Harvard Management Company’s practices. This consultancy occurred because Harvard was asserting that sufficient funds were not available to cover enhanced benefits for the union’s staffers, who were negotiating contracts.
As an outcome of the Occupy Harvard phenomenon, a student group called the Responsible Investment at Harvard Coalition was organized. A pre-existing student group, Students for a Just and Stable Future, evolved to become Divest Harvard. I was involved with all three activist cohorts, fortunately at a time when free speech was among Harvard’s highest priorities—as compared to now, when constraints and penalties intended to minimize the perturbation of others have become the overriding policy focus.
RI@Harvard decided not to include divestment in its agenda, because its major focus was on environmentally and socially damaging practices at Harvard’s landholdings. At the time of the meeting in 2013 mentioned by Jim McRitchie, I was the only member of Divest Harvard present, although Josh was and remains a divestment supporter (he wrote “Institutional Pathways to Fossil-Free Investing” in 2013). Lead alumnus advisor Bob Monks was then still not in favor of divestment as a tactic and moral necessity, and he had written about his rationale on his website. He eventually changed his mind, and he and his wife even participated in a campus protest. I had urged him to reconsider.
Investigating Harvard’s Landholdings
Members of RI@Harvard put a great deal of time into reading Harvard Management Company’s tax filings, as well as those of subsidiary entities that filed separately. We found that independent managers were consistently being used to make acquisitions and subsequently oversee the landholdings, which for the most part, were forestry operations. Routinely, there were deficiencies in the extent to which these operations addressed their impacts on local environments, including alterations to water supplies, pesticide contamination, and disruption of traditional uses of landscapes. In some cases, residents were evicted and prohibited from re-entering, even to obtain subsistence necessities.
We had members of the group visit locations in Argentina and Chile to engage with local community members, to make on-the-scene observations, and to review documentation that was available only there. Harvard Management Company typically made use of rating agencies with commendable standards of practice, but their reports did not, in fact, correspond to realities on the ground. Many problems were occurring in Brazil, California, and even Romania, with local people reaching out to us from such locations.
Scolopax and the Romanian forests
Ultimately, funds were raised so that some community members from Argentina could come to Harvard and speak publicly, as well as meet privately with representatives of Harvard Management Company and President Drew Faust’s assistant, Lars Madsen. We also had the former director of the Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights participating. Josh Humphreys transitioned to operating an organization called the Croatan Institute in North Carolina, which focuses on regenerative agriculture and ethical stewardship of natural environments. He used his connections with similar NGOs around the world to put together a letter signed by representatives of 39 groups admonishing Harvard for its failures.
Civil society letter concerning Harvard University’s land and natural resources investments
From Farmland Fiasco to Solum Partners
After the former endowment managers responsible for the landholding acquisitions departed, the new head of natural resources investments, Colin Butterfield—who had formerly headed a company in Brazil used by Harvard—hit the road to investigate the actual circumstances at a number of investment locations. He was shocked by his findings, which are described in the article “Harvard’s Billion-Dollar Farmland Fiasco.” Subsequently, he left Harvard Management Company and founded a private-equity company called Solum, to which Harvard sold its holdings, taking a major stake as a limited partner. Presumably, everything is marvelous with that operation, but as with most of what Harvard Management Company does, there is no transparency about the details.
Joining PRI, Ceres, and Other Coalitions—Performatively
Significantly, as a result of the RI@Harvard and related advocacy, Harvard joined the Principles for Responsible Investment, Ceres, and a number of additional organizations. It is affiliated with others as well, touting these participations as evidence of its worthy intentions. My impression, however, is that many of these involvements were in fact performative, allowing the university and endowment managers to make assertions about pioneering and promoting responsible practices when actual participation is minimal and certainly does not involve public actions or pronouncements.
Intentional Endowments Network: Harvard University
Harvard Office for Sustainability: partnerships
Reading Between the Lines of Harvard’s PRI Reports
At one point, I spent a great deal of time reading through Harvard’s PRI annual reports, which are supposed to be examples of transparency. I found them instead to be problematically dense in their presentation of material that was not itself all that challenging, but which created an oppressive hurdle to review and interpretation by members of the Harvard community. Additionally, some of the information presented indicated that Harvard’s practices did not measure up to its claims. I wrote at some length to a PRI representative about all of that, and additionally corresponded with Harvard Management Company’s then-director of sustainable investing, Kate Murtagh.
Here’s an interview in the Harvard Gazette with the endowment’s managing director for sustainable investing, Michael Cappucci. I believe that all of these people are very sincere in their statements and initiatives, but they would benefit greatly from substantive engagement with the Harvard community and governance input from Harvard affiliates. At present, although there is an Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (made up of students, with a faculty leader, and non-disclosure agreements a prerequisite for participation) and also a Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility, which advise on and make decisions about shareholder resolutions—and which may have enlarged their roles in recent years—my understanding is that their capacities by no means amount to a contribution to governance.
Carbon Credits and the Retreat from Public Leadership
Unfortunately, Harvard, with guidance from a consulting company and in collaboration with other universities, local governments, et al., engaged in spending on carbon credits in a scheme that is, in fact, bogus because it lacks the necessary “additionality.”
Here’s a statement from former president Larry Bacow about Harvard’s obligations regarding climate change.
Subsequent presidents would not have put out any such pronouncements, all the more so now that Harvard has adopted an official policy of “neutering” when it comes to anyone in a position of authority issuing an opinion on issues of public importance (“neutrality,” that is to say). The repeated attacks on Harvard and its financing by Trump’s people, negative feedback from major donors, the consequent deficit situation, and the prospect of major new taxation, etc., have basically eliminated the likelihood that Harvard is going to be a leader in any collective endeavor to address the world’s major problems.
The Salata Institute: A Partial Exception
An exception with regard to public assertiveness about principles would be the Salata Institute, which is privately and generously funded and involved in quite a few praiseworthy initiatives. (The Carr Center would be in that category as well.) Part of its declaration of mission is:
“The defining challenge of our time is not simply advancing new technologies or addressing climate change in isolation, but building the systems, institutions and capabilities that will enable society to thrive in a more complex world.”
The question is: by what means are they realistically hoping to address what everyone involved in their operation agrees is an unprecedented climate crisis? They have some very good people involved, including faculty members of a steering committee who, at least in the past, have certainly been prepared to make strong statements about climate urgency. I don’t see, however, that they are taking the approach of starting from where humanity and civilization need to be, let’s say 20 years from now, determining exactly what will need to happen to get there, and from those conclusions deciding what needs to be done and how to accomplish it.
Other Academic Programs, Similarly Flawed
Other academic programs at Harvard seek to address the fundamental problems that are the subject of the Sustainable Development Goals, but which are similarly flawed in their approach. There is an Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Kennedy School, whose leader, David Wood, co-authored a book in 2018 titled Climate Change and the Just Transition: A Guide for Investor Action. Few people at Harvard know that the program exists, never mind potential target audiences outside Harvard.
Harvard’s Office for Sustainability also has great aspirations, substantial funding, a long history, and a great deal of unmet potential. Director Heather Hendrickson, back in 2014, gave a presentation at a conference titled “Campus Planning, Climate Preparedness and Health and Well-being,” one item of which was a map of campus flooding potential shown below.
Harvard is spending enormous amounts of money renovating undergraduate housing, relocating mechanical equipment from below ground level, installing ventilation shafts for future central air conditioning, and installing microgrids in anticipation of power outages. When the day comes that the combination of sea-level rise, high tide, and storm surge in fact submerges the campus, a very different reality will prevail thereafter.
The Larger Picture
In many other ways, Harvard strives to achieve sustainability in its own operations. On the other hand, the larger picture of sustainability for humanity’s operations continues to worsen year by year. The U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were developed by Harvard’s John Ruggie (who passed away some years ago), and are widely accepted, yet human-rights catastrophes around the world persist on a horrendous scale, and the home institution does not mobilize in response. Harvard and other institutions of higher education are failing in that regard, proceeding far too much with business as usual while scientists and other sources of expertise repeatedly spell out the realities of unprecedented crises.
What Divestment Has—and Hasn’t—Accomplished
Similar criteria for worthiness apply to divestment campaigns. On the one hand, achieving progress can be a very trying process requiring years of all-consuming effort. On the other hand, despite the fact that many trillions of dollars in assets are now subject to divestment commitments, there is still no significant lack of funding for, or investment in, fossil-fuel operations, and in many cases, participants are reaping substantial financial rewards these days. Divesting entities have done the right and moral thing, and one great value of the process is the communication and education that occur as activists explain the necessity. It is one of the more effective means of communicating about both climate change and the immoral practices of companies that knowingly assist with activities destructive to human ecological welfare.
What is lacking is adequate utilization of the phenomenal consensus that divestment campaigns have very significantly helped to build. Certainly, investors should not be contributing to activities by unrepentant companies that unquestionably are doing harm to societal welfare, nor should they be profiting from such activities. Noteworthy is that Jameela Pedicini, who was hired as Harvard Management Company’s first Vice President for Sustainability in 2013, departed after two years to work with Perella Weinberg, where she oversaw mission-aligned investing initiatives for endowments and foundations (including some divestments). About seven years ago, she went on to work for Bloomberg on climate finance initiatives and climate strategy. Originally, she was one of the new Principles for Responsible Investment’s first hires. It would seem that her endowment role did not measure up to her original great aspirations.
One can see compelling cases made for the long-term financial sustainability of shunning fossil fuel assets by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, and by advocates such as the late Bevis Longstreth, who argued for the applicability of the Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act to endowment guidance. The prime motivator for divesting must be moral, however, and that will also be the basis for essential subsequent escalations of collaborative action. I fervently hope that Harvard will be foundational to such emergency-responder action, but the university’s history shows that such fundamental reorientation will only happen if stakeholders collectively and emphatically insist.
About Aryt Alasti
Aryt Alasti
I first began with overnight security work in January of 1986, at a time when my importing business—bringing nature photo postcards from a Swiss publisher to stores in the US—was not doing well, due to a plunge in the value of the dollar. I imagined that this would be a temporary necessity, but ultimately had to give up the business. After about five years, I was asked to take on the Harvard Business School account, when a transition from in-house security at Harvard was beginning to happen.
A bizarre element of that whole situation was that my father, Arnold Schuchter, was a student at Harvard in the 1950s. He was very involved with the National Student Association during his time as an undergrad, up until he learned during his senior year that the group was very significantly funded by the CIA. He did well academically, but graduated angry about what he considered to be a betrayal of trust, immediately joining the army. Harvard was never mentioned in the household during my youth, although we lived nearby in Medford.
During my first eight years at Harvard, wages were exploitatively low, and I worked seven nights per week (as I had been doing before my arrival), up until student labor activists occupied an administration building for three weeks in 2001 to protest. As an outcome of that Living Wage Campaign, a committee was set up to assess the circumstances of outsourced guards, custodians, and dining services workers. The conclusion was that indeed the situation was unacceptable, and a policy was initiated requiring approximate equivalency of wages and certain benefits for those contracted workers. Hundreds of people’s lives were transformed by the students’ dauntless altruism.
I eventually became very involved in labor activism, and due to lifelong concerns about social justice and environmental issues, I also very naturally was a participant in other activist groups. Over time, those involvements resulted in many connections with supportive alumni, faculty, and responsible investment practitioners, and with people in various parts of the world who seek to ameliorate the climate crisis. Only in 2013 did I learn that Responsible Investment at Harvard’s lead alumnus advisor Bob Monks, was a close friend of my father’s while they were undergrads, and that they had never once been in touch since graduation! I remain agnostic, but am amazed at how reality manifests itself.
Collaborate with CorpGov.net on Social Media (or Leave Comments at the bottom)
Linkedin
BlueSky
Facebook
Mastodon
Substack
X (formerly Twitter)
Related Posts
Conversion: Harvard’s Endowment Shows Why Fossil‑Free Is Only the Beginning
Fair Harvard Fund Makes Progress: Alternative Endowment Should Be Permanent & Democratic
I was reminded by a divestment-supporting Harvard professor’s comment that Harvard Management Company has also recently invested hundreds of millions of dollars in data-gluttonous cryptocurrencies (although most of that has now been sold), and in SpaceX (which plans to escalate its data center installations to five times present numbers), and in a manufacturer of processing chips for data centers, all of which indicates a lack of commitment to emissions reductions,
“New Harvard Database Provides Policy Insights Into Climate Disclosures –
Online tool tracks corporate climate targets and emissions trends over the past 25 years”
Ideally Harvard Management Company will be making use of these analyses (from the Salata Institute) and will insist that its outside managers do so.
https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/harvard-dataset-enables-policy-insights-for-climate-disclosures/