A student group’s request that Pitzer College rid its endowment of investments in fossil-fuel producers prompted more than a year of debate, research, and soul-searching at the California liberal-arts college. But this month, Pitzer’s once-wary Board of Trustees approved a plan so broad that it surprised even members of the working group the college had assembled to hammer out recommendations.
Instead of refusing to divest—like Bowdoin, Middlebury, and Pomona Colleges and Brown and Harvard Universities—Pitzer’s trustees said its $124-million endowment would be
99 percent free of fossil-fuel investments by the end of this year. And they matched the symbolism of divesting with four other steps in a Climate Action Plan that includes a boots-on-the-ground—or bike-tires-on-the-road—commitment to trim 25 percent from the college’s carbon footprint by the end of 2016.
The plan also creates mechanisms for measuring the college’s progress, proposes rethinking standards for investment decisions, and establishes a fund within the endowment that will be directed at investing in sustainability. Pitzer’s president, Laura Skandera Trombley, said at a Los Angeles news conference at which the plan was unveiled that it proves to Pitzer and other colleges and universities that “it’s not too late to do something” about climate change.
“It’s time to do many somethings,” she said.
‘Mutual Respect’
Even for Pitzer, which was established in 1963 and cherishes its reputation as the most liberal of the Claremont Colleges, getting to such a point was an unexpected journey.
Jess Grady-Benson, a Pitzer senior, said in an interview that the trustees were at first “quite resistant” to the request from the Claremont Colleges Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign, of which she is a leader.
But as discussions continued, “we’ve really developed a relationship of mutual respect,” said Ms. Grady-Benson. She was a member of the working group, which includes students and faculty and staff members as well as trustees. After months of meetings, she said, the group “came up with this incredibly robust and holistic document.”
Brinda Sarathy, an assistant professor of environmental analysis, was also a member of the working group, though she admitted that she “went in skeptical—was this part of kicking the can down the road?” In the end, she said, the proposal that the trustees unanimously approved “was more comprehensive and better than anyone could have imagined.”
A focal point of the debate was the trustee who leads the board’s investment committee, Donald P. Gould, who is president of a local asset-management company. Coincidentally, he is an alumnus of neighboring Pomona College, which was approached by the divestment campaign at the same time but turned down the request last October. Pomona’s consultants projected that eliminating fossil-fuel investments would “result in a total decrease in the endowment’s performance over a 10-year period of about $485-million,” according to David W. Oxtoby, the college’s president.
Mr. Gould also attended business school at Harvard, whose president, Drew Gilpin Faust, argued in a letter turning down a similar divestment request that “the endowment is a resource, not an instrument to impel social or political change.”
There was a point early in Pitzer’s discussion, Mr. Gould said, when he could himself have written a letter much like Ms. Faust’s. “But over the summer,” he said, “my thinking evolved from ‘This is a crazy idea’ to ‘This idea merits further consideration.’”
For one thing, a careful analysis persuaded him that divesting would not cost Pitzer much: “I saw no reason to think fossil-fuel-company stocks were going to do better or worse than the market over the long term.” Nor was he worried about the college’s ability to assure that its investments remained sufficiently diverse. “Fund managers will do what they need to do to adapt to the client,” he said. “That’s a lot better than losing the client.”
And while many people see a board’s fiduciary duty as being to maximize endowment performance, “I believe fiduciary duty is much broader than that,” he said. “Our values, our leadership—there are other elements that have to be weighed into the mix.” Trustees were particularly mindful that the 50-year-old college had offered courses about the environment almost since its founding and that it includes environmental sustainability and social responsibility among its five core values.
‘Twice in 50 Years’
He and others did worry, he said, that “divestment is something that you can’t do often, that it has to meet a very high bar.” Pitzer had divested only once before, during the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s.
A turning point of sorts came when Mr. Gould read in The Wall Street Journal in February that the CVS pharmacy chain had decided to stop selling tobacco products, even though the decision will cost $2-billion a year in lost sales. Since everyone involved in the Pitzer discussion agreed that climate change is a colossal—possibly catastrophic—problem, he thought turning to divestment to make a point seemed justifiable. A college, he said, can do it “twice in 50 years, let’s say.”
His conclusion: “In order to align our actions with our values, it made sense not to be seeking to profit from fossil-
fuel exploration, extraction, and sale.”
There was also the matter of leadership. “My feeling is that the divestment movement is real and gaining ground,” he added. “And it makes a difference whether you’re the 11th college or the 111th.” Ten other colleges and college foundations have committed to divestment, the best known of which are the College of the Atlantic and Hampshire College.
Still, Mr. Gould and others “wrestled with the issue that it was not internally consistent to single out fossil-fuel companies” while continuing to drive automobiles and buy airplane tickets. But, he said, “it finally hit me that fossil-fuel companies are not indifferent to where energy comes from, today or in the future. They have an understandable bias—they want people to use their product.”
By contrast, “when you plug a vacuum cleaner into the wall, you don’t care where the electrons come from"—whether coal, natural gas, or wind. And Ford is eager to sell you any kind of car you want to buy, no matter what powers it.
Robin M. Kramer, a former chief of staff to two Los Angeles mayors and the first Pitzer graduate to serve as its board chair, said the working group’s proposals to the board were particularly interesting as an example of “addressing a problem by making it bigger"—in this case, by considering not only divestment but also the Pitzer community’s reliance on fossil fuels.
“It’s always much easier to legislate for other people,” she said. But in the plan the board approved, “everyone’s a participant—there are no bystanders.”
Daniel A. Segal, a professor of anthropology and history who was another member of the working group, noted that linking divestment with cutting fossil-fuel use was “immediately persuasive” and was “an argument that works both ways"—the college can’t ask people to change their habits if it’s not willing to make a related change in its investment policies.
Combined Vacations?
Possibilities for shrinking Pitzer’s carbon footprint include further limiting the number of students who can bring cars to the campus, as well as combining fall break and Thanksgiving vacation so students use less fuel traveling home and back, said Jesse Meisler-Abramson, a 2011 Pitzer graduate who is now the college’s sustainability coordinator. Reaching the 25-percent mark will involve “working on on-the-ground, daily-life behavioral-change issues” for students. Innovative efforts to reduce the fuel used by the faculty and staff in commuting could also play a role, he said.
Mr. Gould said that Pitzer was “defining our carbon footprint in the largest sense—including student travel to and from campus, travel abroad, and commuting.” In a number of respects, he said, trimming the carbon footprint was going to be “really hard.”
In contrast, he already has a plan for divesting by the end of this year. But he did argue for a “reasonable” approach—divesting “substantially,” rather than trying to ferret out every fossil-fuel stock in every indexed fund in which the college has an investment. The college’s investments in fossil-fuel providers total $5.4-million now but will amount to only $1-million by the end of this year.
“The tiny residual,” said Mr. Segal, the anthropology professor, “I really do feel is entirely in good faith.”
The board chair, Ms. Kramer, looked at the working group’s final proposal this way: “If Don Gould and his committee could get around the corner on this issue—these are tough-minded men and women—I felt this was well thought out.”
At the news conference announcing the board’s decision, President Trombley said she was “issuing an invitation to our sister institutions in higher education—come join the party.” Whether they take her up on that, though, remains to be seen.
Regardless, she said, “we’re digging in; we’re rolling up our sleeves.”
