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 […]
When I wrote Conversion: Fossil Free Endowments in 2013, I admitted that I had been “far too dismissive of the movement…to divest of fossil fuels,” and that divestment was “likely to be a very important part of a larger movement to ensure a salubrious planet.” At the time, my thinking was shaped by debates over […]
Dear Bob, I read your final reflections—Advice to a Younger Me—not once, but several times. Intending to write a book review. I ended up writing this letter of reflection because that’s what your last book invites readers to do. Yours is not really an autobiography. It is a reckoning. And it is impossible to read […]
Post-doctoral fellows and senior associates in the fields of corporate governance and/or law and finance: applications from highly qualified candidates who are interested in working with the Harvard Law School Program on Corporate Governance are now being accepted. Post-Doctoral Fellows Applicants for a position of a post-doctoral fellow should be interested in spending between one and three years […]
Duties & Responsibilities The Business and Environment Initiative at Harvard Business School seeks to deepen our collective understanding of the urgent environmental challenges confronting business leaders and to help them use the tools of business to design effective solutions. We aspire to help leaders create the economic and political institutions that will enable firms and […]
Amy L. Goodman and John F. Olson, both of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP posted Shareholder Proposal Developments During the 2014 Proxy Season on the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation yesterday. It included some good information and analysis but seemed a bit too much like the response to a shareholder […]
Guest Post: Dr. E. James M. Gifford, a Senior Fellow at the Initiative for Responsible Investment by way of Annie Olszewski, Research Associate at Initiative for Responsible Investment at the Harvard Kennedy School. This article was originally posted in the Harvard Crimson on May 28, 2014. Last month, Harvard University joined more than a thousand other global investment institutions that have signed the UN-supported […]
About a month ago, I posted a piece aimed at getting students and alumni at Harvard (and hopefully at other universities) to advocate for more democratic endowments. In my zeal to focus on endowment governance, I was far too dismissive of the movement at Harvard and hundreds of universities to divest of fossil fuels. While […]
The Responsible Investment at Harvard Coalition recently announced it had invested contributions from 450 donors in a socially responsible fund withheld from Harvard University. The Fair Harvard Fund, designed as an alternative endowment fund, will be invested in the Portfolio 21 Global Equity Fund. According to Harvard undergraduate and investment committee member Michael Danto: (more…)
Harvard Management Company, the wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University that manages Harvard’s endowment, will establish a new senior level position devoted to overseeing the environmental, social, and corporate governance-related aspects of the university’s investments. (more…)
My proposal to declassify the board at United Natural Foods, Inc. ($UNFI) passed by an overwhelming margin of 87.89%: 38,086,048 for 5,248,963 against See their 8-K filing. Text (pdf) of proposal and opposition. Of course, the margin would have been even higher without insider holdings and blank votes going to management. Have we turned the corner on declassification measures […]
The Shareholder Rights Project (SRP) and each of eight institutional investors it represents announced their collaboration for the 2013 proxy season to encourage 74 S&P 500 and Fortune 500 public companies to move to annual elections. (more…)
Marty Lipton and David Karpview view as “significant” the announced effort by BlackRock Inc., which invests over $3.345 trillion of client assets, to take a direct interest in the governance of the companies in which they invest. According to this 1/21/2012 post, Disintermediating the Proxy Advisory Firms, at the Harvard corpgov (more…)
In response to growing concerns on the spread of the financial crisis, the Yale School of Management, in partnership with the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, organized a roundtable discussion in New York on September 23, 2010 that brought together business leaders and scholars from Yale, Wharton, NYU, and the Columbia and Harvard business schools […]