In his Friday announcement of Harvard’s long-delayed decision to divest from fossil fuels, university President Lawrence Bacow wrote, “Harvard must stand among leaders in addressing this challenge.”
The move by the world’s richest university and arguably one of the most recognizable and influential institutions worldwide all but guarantees that others will soon follow. Harvard may have been late to the game — and, for a while, played for the opposing team — but its impact on the divestment movement will be historic.
In the hours that followed the announcement, climate activist and Harvard alum Bill McKibben wrote on Twitter, “You know who’s really sad that Harvard was forced to divest today? The presidents of Yale and Princeton.”
Both Princeton and Yale, my own alma mater, have taken minor steps away from fossil fuels, but now the pressure is on to fully divest — without the fanfare and prestige that comes with being first.
Harvard’s decision offers opportunity, justification, and cover for other endowed institutions, including foundations, to divest. To date, none of the nation’s top 10 philanthropic foundations, nor many major climate grant makers, have publicly committed to getting and staying out of fossil fuels. The race to leadership is on. Who among them will seize this opportunity?
The divestment movement is a case study in the power of sustained, strategic advocacy to challenge the status quo. When the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which I head, decided to divest in 2014, our entire endowment — about 6 percent of which was tied up in fossil fuels — was less than the $840 million in Harvard’s portfolio with fossil-fuel exposure today. Rockefeller Brothers was among the first 17 foundations committed to divestment.
Today, that number is more than 200, flanked by more than a thousand institutional investors such as the Vatican and the City of New York. Even for-profit corporations, like Amalgamated Bank, are joining the movement as the financial case for divestment grows: The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, for example, found that its average annual investment returns far outstripped market benchmarks in the years since divesting.
Pressure From Students
Harvard put up strong resistance to divestment for nearly a decade. In 2013, Harvard’s then-President Drew Gilpin Faust pledged not to divest, lambasting early advocates for pitting the endowment’s purpose as an academic resource against its potential as a tool for social change. As late as last year, Bacow himself pushed back against divestment, saying it “paints with too broad a brush.”
But a rotating cast of students, supported by faculty and alumni, have used all the tools at their disposal to whittle away at the university’s arguments. Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard, the advocacy campaign pressing the issue, exuded all the strategy and grit foundations expect of our strongest grantees on other advocacy issues. They have established relationships with divestment leaders (including Rockefeller Brothers Fund), organized an enormous protest on the field at the 2019 Harvard-Yale football game, filed a complaint with the Massachusetts attorney general, and gotten four pro-divestment candidates elected to the Harvard Board of Overseers.
Harvard’s announcement Friday also acknowledged a hard truth that divestment advocates have long known: Partial solutions will not be enough to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change.
Like other well-intentioned institutions, the university resisted divestment while introducing multiple climate-related initiatives, including a goal to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to heat, cool, and power buildings and vehicles on campus and a first-of-its-kind commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across its investment portfolio, both by 2050.
But as advocates have pointed out, setting such long-range goals alone fails to achieve sufficient progress at pace with climate change. More importantly, these measures are not at a scale commensurate to Harvard’s considerable influence and power.
Crisis Requires Action
Divestment may be just one tool in the box, but in the face of crisis, why not use everything — from research to riches to reputation — at your disposal?
Bacow acknowledged the inadequacy of the everything-but approach in his letter announcing the decision highlighting the need not just to reduce emissions but to “decarbonize the economy.”
In fact, Harvard had been quietly reducing its fossil-fuel exposure over the course of several years. The decision to allow the remaining 2 percent of its endowment in private-equity funds with fossil-fuel exposure to run off over the coming years is unlikely to have any immediate or substantial impact on the oil and gas industry.
Divestment opponents often seize on this reality, ignoring the critical role of symbolism and influence in the divestment movement. But coming from the largest and most influential university on the planet, Harvard’s announcement Friday sets the stage for a mass exodus from fossil-fuel investments.
As the news hit social media Friday, the potential for ripple effects unnerved oil and gas trade organizations as much as it excited divestment advocates. “Let this be a strong signal to other institutions that the era of fossil fuels is coming to a close,” former Vice President Al Gore wrote on Twitter.
Any top-10 foundation that seizes on the momentum of Harvard’s divestment still has an opportunity to become a historic leader in the fight against climate change. The question of a top foundation following in Harvard’s footsteps is one of “when,” not “if.” And once the first big foundation takes the leap, others around it will soon find themselves in the position of Harvard’s peers.
