Barriers to Divestment: Faculty Engagement
It’s a new dawn for environmental advocacy after the 2020 election and the Biden administration’s recent environmental advances are reinvigorating fossil fuel divestment advocates. University students from Princeton, Vanderbilt, Stanford and colleges across the country are pushing their own administrations to divest from the fossil fuel industry; but while students are organizing protests, compiling reports and voting on student government legislation, there’s one group of stakeholders often missing from this scene — faculty.
Faculty involvement is crucial to the success of a college divestment movement; yet it hasn’t been given the attention it deserves. Faculty can legitimize the movement’s presence on campus, enhance the financial and moral reasoning for divestment and assist the movement’s transition once the original student leaders graduate. If faculty members are so important in the fight against the fossil fuel industry, why are so many faculty hesitant to join the cause?
According to a study published in Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, “a significantly greater proportion of tenured faculty sign open letters of support for divestment than do not-yet-tenured tenure-track faculty (15.4% versus 10.7%).” This phenomenon possibly reflects the hesitance of not-yet-tenured faculty to support a controversial movement that they fear may risk their plans for professional advancement. Other times, faculty members are already pushing for departmental or curriculum changes and can’t risk their other projects being ignored because of their involvement in divestment.
This has led to a severe lack of faculty engagement in budding divestment movements, especially those that don’t have the advantage of years of former student pressure under their belt. Faculty engagement is a bureaucratic and lengthy process that can take years to accomplish. At Harvard University, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in favor of divestment 179 – 20 only after a four-month long debate in faculty meetings. Moreover, faculty involvement in the Harvard divestment movement goes back more than five years before the beginning of the current lengthy debate and vote. According to the Harvard Faculty for Divestment, a group of professors called for divestment in 2014 in an open letter to administration officials and have been pushing for divestment since.
While fossil fuel divestment efforts began in 2013 at my own school, Vanderbilt University, there hasn’t been a concerted and lasting effort between students and faculty as demonstrated in the Divest Harvard movement. Although we are in contact with the faculty senate now, we cannot wait five years to convince faculty to get on board. The climate crisis is urgent and the need for divestment is too.
Apart from slow-moving bureaucracy, divestment movements like Fossil Free Stanford are facing another barrier in their quest to faculty approval of full divestment: fear of losing funding. Stanford is one of many premier research institutions engaged with the intricacies of the climate crisis. However, their academic efforts are often distorted by the fact that an overwhelming proportion of their funding comes from fossil fuel companies.
According to the Stanford Daily, “Exxon Mobil, Total Petrochemicals, Shell and Bank of America formed the Strategic Energy Alliance with the Precourt Institute for Energy, a Stanford institute directed by professor Sally Benson.” In a ten-year time span these four companies donated “$225 million in contributions to the Precourt Institute to form the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP).” Even worse, these corporations determine what research is conducted. Such connections are not limited to funding as there is a revolving door between school faculty and fossil fuel companies. This clear conflict of interest poses significant issues for having faculty interested in supporting divestment. And the funding of campus energy and climate research by fossil fuel corporations is not limited to Stanford.
As current Stanford University JD-PhD student Benjamin Franta explains in the Guardian, the core of the issue is that Stanford and other universities’ research is colonized by fossil fuel companies who are planning for the long term by infiltrating academia and influencing policy and research. The goal is to ensure their domination in the energy sector, but their massive investment also motivates academics to object when issues such as divestment arise.
The funding of campus institutes, centers and research paid for by fossil fuel money must come to an end if the larger goal of divesting endowment funds is to be met. If students and alumni are going to be successful in their demands for divestment, faculty leaders and administration alike must engage with students without fear of retaliation by higher-ups or corporate donors to their institutions. The climate crisis will affect us all. Only together can students and faculty members press their campus communities to embrace action on climate change and divest from fossil fuels.
Emily Irigoyen – Rachel Carson Council Fellow
Emily Irigoyen is a sophomore at Vanderbilt University pursuing a double major in Environmental Sociology and Spanish with a minor in Communications in Science and Technology. Her RCC Fellowship project is a fossil fuels divestment campaign for Vanderbilt and others in the Southeast Conference. [email protected]
The Rachel Carson Council depends on tax-deductible gifts from concerned individuals like you. Please help if you can.
Sign up here to receive the RCC E-News and other RCC newsletters, information and alerts.
