In May of 2020, after years of student and faculty activism, Cornell University announced that it was divesting from the fossil fuel industry. 

Months later, Harvard University followed suit, announcing it would let its investments in the industry expire. Soon, the University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, and a number of other colleges and universities also divested.

Some institutions, though, hold their breath, weathering a storm of calls for divestment. In WashU’s case, these calls have lasted for over a decade. 

Green Action, an environmental advocacy group at WashU, has called for divestment from the fossil fuel industry since as early as 2012. They have held yearly rallies listing their demands, and even filed a legal complaint to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey to pressure the school to divest.

Numerous faculty members have joined Green Action in the call for divestment, like Bret Gustafson, Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology, who also attends their rallies.

“Global warming and the central role that fossil fuels [play] therein is the most significant issue of this generation,” Gustafson said. “Right now, the message that the students are getting is that ‘We don’t care.’”

It is unclear just how effective activism regarding divestment has been at WashU.

In 2014, students staged a 16-day sit-in under Brookings Hall, urging former Peabody Energy CEO Gregory Boyce to resign from the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees delegates control of University investments to the Washington University Investment Management Company (WUIMC), and some trustees also work for WUIMC.

Several days after the sit-in, seven students were arrested while attempting to hand-deliver a letter to Boyce with the same demand for resignation. In November of 2016, Boyce resigned from the Board for “unknown reasons.” Peabody Energy, a coal-mining company, had declared bankruptcy several months prior.

Despite this apparent success, WashU has been reluctant to change its stance on its fossil fuel investments throughout the past decade. 

Chancellor Andrew Martin said that the University’s investment strategy has been consistent for “generations,” even throughout previous divestment campaigns at WashU. WashU, notably, had divestment campaigns against South African companies during Apartheid and defense companies during the Vietnam War.

“It is a policy that really goes back generations that we don’t do positive screens or negative screens in the endowment,” Martin said. “That’s obviously not something that every member of the community agrees with, but that’s the approach that we have always taken.”

Positive and negative screens refer to an investment strategy in which the investor chooses to distinguish between particular companies based on their ethical standing in relation to environmental, social, and governance factors.

Unlike WashU, other universities and colleges have divested from fossil fuels upon meeting student and faculty pushback.

According to Robert Howarth, a Professor of Ecology and Environmental Biology at Cornell University, student pressure on Cornell’s Board of Trustees was critical in their divestment from fossil fuels.

“It’s the pressure from the undergraduate students that the trustees are most concerned about,” Howarth said. “The students are the University to them.”

Howarth said that calling Cornell’s reputation into question was particularly important in swaying the Board, which he described as being made up of “rabid ‘go Big Red’ trustees.”

“[The Board’s] fiduciary responsibility is maintaining our reputation,” Howarth said. “The Board thinks that [Cornell’s] reputation comes from the students themselves.”

Notably, Cornell’s board is made up entirely of alumni, which is not the case for WashU. Howarth also mentioned that being a member of the Ivy League added some pressure to “be in the leadership position” on divestment compared to other Ivy League institutions.

At the University of Michigan, student pressure also eventually led to divestment.

Nicholas Jansen, who graduated from U-M in 2016 and was a member of their divestment campaign, said that a ramping up of student support for divestment helped push the issue over the line. He referenced disruptive actions that students took as key to their success.

“I believe student involvement is crucial,” Jansen said. “[Students] shut down some entryways to buildings [and] took over buildings for a little bit, which led to some arrests. Ultimately, I think that was partially or a large part of what tipped the scales.”

Mark Schlissel, U-M President at the time, said that divestment resulted from the understanding that fossil fuels were “bad long-term investments” due to their potential decreased usage in the future. Regent Mark Bernstein, however, credited student activists (U-M operates with a Board of Regents, a body similar to a Board of Trustees).

“Student activism was the driving force behind this action,” Bernstein said in 2021. “[They] have been thoughtful, well-informed, absolutely relentless, and in the end, successful in moving this issue to the very top of [the Board of Regents’] agenda.”

Divestment campaigns have achieved their goals at other universities. So what’s stopping divestment at WashU?

One former WashU student, Isabel Huesa, took interest in student tactics and administrative responses during divestment campaigns. She completed a senior thesis on the topic, focusing on Harvard University’s successful divestment campaign and comparing it to efforts at WashU.

Huesa, like Jansen and Howarth, said that attacking the reputation of a University tends to be a critical factor in achieving divestment. 

“At the end of the day, WashU cares about its reputation, its future enrollment,” Huesa said. “That’s what’s making them money.”

However, in a sentiment shared by Huesa, former Green Action executive member Aidan Lewis ‘24 expressed disappointment that activists had not yet created enough reputational damage at WashU to push it over the line.

“The administration feels that they can just wait out the students because we come here for four-year cycles, and they’re very well aware of that,” Lewis said. “It’s been, unfortunately, really successful.”

Gustafson noted that he thought actions by the student body needed to be larger to actually be effective at WashU. 

“Right now, [the administration is] saying, ‘Oh, 20 kids in the quad, we’ll manage that,’” Gustafson said. “Until there’s embarrassment or pressure that becomes unmanageable, [they] appear to be incapable of changing.”

Huesa also singled out WashU as having an administration that is less persuadable by student activism than administrations at schools that have divested.

“WashU, specifically, is in this case where the chancellor says that student advocacy is not what moves the needle, where ‘You guys can protest all you want, but it’s not what’s getting us to listen,’” Huesa said. 

Professor Howarth also noted the importance of having an administrator or board member convinced to push for divestment.

“What it really takes is getting a few members of the trustees to take it seriously and [to] want to do it,” Howarth said. “In retrospect, that’s clearly what happened here.”

Lewis said a figure like this is missing at WashU.

“I think that the work that we’ve done hasn’t been lacking or different from other universities,” Lewis said. “It’s more that the opinions on the inside are different and a lot more against divestment, with WashU’s deep-seated connections to fossil fuels historically.”

Perhaps most significant is that, according to Huesa, Chancellor Martin doesn’t believe that students understand the University’s stance and are not willing to negotiate on their aims. Huesa had interviewed Martin for her thesis.

“[Chancellor Martin] feels that students don’t have a full understanding of WashU’s stake in the issue, and that they have this kind of tunnel vision towards one solution,” Huesa said.

Martin said that the administration is willing to listen to students, and that he expects students to be adequately prepared and knowledgeable about their demands.

“The administration is always happy to engage with students on important issues,” Martin said. “I would say that those conversations are going to be much more substantive and meaningful if everyone comes to the table with their best thinking.”

But Huesa said that the University’s actions do not reflect Martin’s words. She pointed to the movement for Gregory Boyce’s resignation as an example that shows that students did “their due diligence” in researching the University’s ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Huesa also said that the legal complaint made by Green Action demonstrated that students do have a complex understanding of the University’s investment policies, and that it signified a frustration with not being heard by the University.

“I don’t think that students would have gone to the lengths that they have in filing a legal complaint if they did not understand the issue,” she said.

Gathering information about the University’s investments can be difficult, Huesa added. Lewis said that the University is purposefully secretive in order to protect their investment strategy, and that Green Action has spent considerable time attempting to look through public information, with only modest success. 

“The administration doesn’t want to give up their specific black-box algorithm in terms of how they decide what to invest in,” Lewis said. “That’s one of the biggest arguments against transparency.”

Martin said that it was purposeful that the University only provides “modest transparency” about its investments.

“It is true that we do not provide full transparency,” Martin said. “Nor would it be wise for us to do so, given the competitive nature of endowment management.”

To improve transparency for students, Huesa added that the Student Representative to the Board of Trustees could act as a knowledgeable liaison for students to convey their perspectives. 

Huesa held this role during the 2022-23 school year.

But Lewis pointed out that students have worked directly with the administration before. Notes written by members of Fossil Free WashU during a 2014 meeting with then-Chancellor Mark Wrighton say that Wrighton was reluctant to divest, but stipulated that WashU would follow the lead of other universities. Fossil Free WashU was a previous iteration of Green Action.

“[Wrighton] said the way to convince him is to show him a university with our size endowment that has divested,” the Google Doc obtained by Student Life reads. “He seems to just not want to be the first to divest, and appears to want to see if there will be any negative impacts that come from divestment before WashU divests.”

Wrighton said that he has a different recollection of the meeting with Fossil Free WashU.

“I don’t actually recall having made [that] statement” Wrighton said. “I do know that many of the companies who would be categorized as ‘fossil fuel companies’ are also doing research that is very important to developing renewable energy.”

After leaving WashU, Wrighton became President of George Washington University at the beginning of 2022, two years after their administration had announced they would be divesting from fossil fuels. Wrighton oversaw part of their divestment during his eighteen-month tenure as president. He added that in his current role as Chancellor Emeritus of WashU, he cannot speak for WashU’s or any other university’s current policies.

Martin took over as Chancellor from Wrighton in 2019, just before a larger wave of schools with similar endowments — like Cornell, Dartmouth, and U-M — elected to divest from fossil fuels. Martin does not appear to have committed to Wrighton’s alleged statement on following other universities’ lead in divesting.

Martin noted that it is not the chancellor’s responsibility to control University investments — his Endowment 101 series says that he serves on the board of WUIMC, but that he does not vote.

“Our investment policy is one that is determined by the board of the investment management company,” Martin said. “That certainly was the case when Chancellor Wrighton was in office.”

Though he did not explain to what extent the University is invested in fossil fuels, Martin made it a point that WashU’s refusal to divest does not therefore mean it is heavily invested in fossil fuels.

“Just because we don’t divest, [that] doesn’t mean that we are invested [in fossil fuels],” Martin said.

Despite the unique challenges facing WashU’s divestment campaign, some students and faculty maintain hope that the administration will eventually be convinced to divest.

“At the end of the day, anytime that this is talked about, it’s a win,” Lewis said.

Huesa said that though she remains hopeful, she is frustrated. In researching for her thesis, she said that she came away believing that the University was not willing to either respond to collective action or work with students directly on divestment, tactics that have appeared successful at other institutions.

“He’s shutting out both avenues that students have used historically,” Huesa said. “I think that’s what makes WashU such a difficult case.”

Martin made it clear that he does not believe that any student would be able to change or influence the University’s investment strategy, after being asked by Student Life if that was a possibility.

“From the perspective of the Board and the administration, this is a settled issue for Washington University,” Martin said. “If students want to choose universities based on whether they have particular positive or negative screens in their endowments, there’s lots of places one could look.”

 

Tuesday, September 10, 8:15AM: This article has been updated to better reflect an argument made by Isabel Huesa. In a previous version, it was written that Huesa believed there could be avenues for students to work directly with the administration. In this updated version, this has been changed to explain that Huesa believes that although the University says they would work with students, this is not something they have followed through on.

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How we did this investigation

This article came from a routine discussion about article ideas in our newsroom. Student Life has a burgeoning Investigative News division, and we wanted to produce more articles for it. I took on this article to do just that, especially as someone intrigued by student/climate-change activism. I began work on it towards the beginning of the spring semester of the 2023-24 school year. 

We decided that this article would serve our readers best by comparing WashU to other institutions of similar academic standing and endowment size — namely, those that had already divested. To do so, I looked through student newspapers and university publications of other schools and reached out to some of the people that they had interviewed in them. This is how I got in touch with Robert Howarth and Nicholas Jansen. 

For perspectives at WashU, I first reached out to Professor Bret Gustafson in January 2024, as he has been a source for Student Life in the past concerning the University’s investments in fossil fuels. After our interview, he directed me towards Isabel Huesa. I also reached out to members of Green Action, knowing that they had recently filed a legal complaint against the University and had led rallies for fossil fuel divestment in the past. They shared with me some of Green Action’s/Fossil Free WashU’s activism history, notes from meetings with the administration, and some of the research they had done looking into the University’s investments. I also looked through older Student Life articles to get a better understanding of WashU’s history of climate activism.

To understand the full picture of divestment, I reached out to Julie Flory, the Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications at WashU. She offered me an interview with Chancellor Martin, which was the last one I conducted for this article.

This article was edited primarily by Student Life’s Investigative News Editors, Zach Trabitz and Lily Taylor. Our Editors-in-Chief, Nina Giraldo and Avi Holzman, as well as our Managing News Editor, Aliana Mediratta, also provided feedback. It was copy-edited by Managing Copy Editor Cathay Poulsen.