March 31, 2016

Swarthmore President Responds to Pro-Divestment Student Group

Recently, Swarthmore’s President and its Chairman of the Board penned an op-ed in response to accusations made by the University’s pro-divestment student group.  In February the Mountain Justice group, alleged that three of the University’s trustees were “severely compromising the integrity of any board decisions on divestment” due to their personal or professional investments in the energy sector.   Regardless of the decency of a student group attacking the trustees who serve them, the accusation ignores the more important fact that the decision not to divest was reached by the agreement of all thirty-seven Board members.

In their response President Smith and Chairman Spock noted that the links between the three trustees and energy companies were “tenuous” and “are not, in fact, conflicts of any kind,” characterizing the student’s assertions as “nothing more than spurious ad hominem attacks.”

The links are indeed tenuous: The so-called “smoking gun” revealed by Mountain Justice included the fact that one trustee founded Boston Consulting Group’s energy practice (a practice which has an entire division devoted to green energy and the environment),  that another manages a trust that includes fossil fuel assets, and that the third had previously served on the board of an investment management firm with a stake in ExxonMobil. In short none of these trustees had ever worked directly for an industry company.

Despite this, Mountain Justice today doubled down with an op-ed in the Swarthmore Phoenix which demanded that the three trustees “recuse themselves from all future votes on divestment.” What’s more, the group is now also pushing a pledge for students who “would like to take further escalated action for divestment” to sign.

The accusations levied against Board members were not the only inflated allegations in Mountain Justice’s attack piece.  For one, their claim that divestment commitments have surpassed the $3.4 trillion mark is entirely fictitious.  As the activist group leading the campaign 350.org, has admitted, “the $3.4 trillion represents the total amount of assets represented by institutions, not the amount of money divested, which is difficult to track due to varying degrees of disclosure.” In other words, the actual fossil fuel holdings of each of these entities may only be a very small fraction of the $3.4 trillion total.

The erroneous nature of this number was noted in a recent  Bloomberg article, which quoted Frank Wolak, the Director of Stanford’s energy and sustainable development program, as stating “These efforts are pure window dressing… And, much to my surprise, the student groups are complicit in this deception.”

Mountain Justice also claimed “that the fossil fuel industry and investments in that industry have no place in a just and sustainable future.”   This runs directly contrary to the position of EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy who has noted that the United States’ increased use of natural gas has “been enormously beneficial from a clean air perspective, as well as from a climate perspective.”   A fact that was further corroborated just this month in a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), which stated “in the United States, emissions declined by 2% (in 2015), as a large switch from coal to natural gas use in electricity generation took place.”

In their op-ed, President Smith and Chairman Spock noted that Swarthmore University has taken several tangible steps in response to student’s concerns about climate change, but decided against divesting because of the financial impact it would have on the University.  As President Smith wrote:

“It is the Board’s responsibility to ensure that both current and future generations of Swarthmore students have access to the financial resources required to (1) maintain our profound and historic commitment to make a Swarthmore education accessible to all qualified students, regardless of their families’ ability to pay; (2) attract and retain an outstanding faculty; and (3) sustain the support services necessary to allow students to thrive while in college.”

Like so many other University Boards around the country, Swarthmore’s Trustees—all thirty-seven of them – have made the responsible decision to prioritize the institution’s finances and its future students over an entirely symbolic, political gesture.  The University’s students should be thankful.