President Faust,

Just three days after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its dire plea for global action on climate change, you closed the door on the University’s biggest chance to make a difference—divestment from fossil fuel companies. Certain segments of the Harvard community, which stand in overwhelming support of divestment, requested a public forum to discuss the future of the world’s largest university endowment. You rejected our request for open dialogue while putting forth many misleading and incorrect statements about divestment.

The suggestion that divestment from fossil fuels would be ineffective is contradicted by both experience and logic. Divestment played a critical role in turning the tide against South Africa’s apartheid regime and in spurring a regulatory response to the lies and political manipulation of the tobacco industry. A recent Oxford University study concluded: "In every case we reviewed, divestment campaigns were successful in lobbying for restrictive legislation." According to those researchers, the “stigmatization process, which the fossil fuel divestment campaign has now triggered, poses the most far-reaching threat to fossil fuel companies and the vast energy value chain."

As Harvard students, we understand that America’s legal and democratic institutions have broken down. The fossil fuel industry, like the tobacco industry before it, has pursued a corrupt agenda of misinformation and political lobbying designed to prevent scientific consensus from informing public policy.

As a result, Congress has proven incapable of passing any meaningful climate legislation, instead offering billions in subsidies to destructive companies at taxpayer expense. Our generation cannot wait any longer to unwind the fossil fuel industry’s stranglehold on Congress. We must use influential, rational, and functioning institutions like Harvard to revoke the social license of the most dangerous and intractable industry in the world.

You claim that it is inconsistent to divest from the companies whose fossil fuels we rely on. The real inconsistency is to vainly hope that Harvard’s groundbreaking research will somehow solve climate change. Our research and education will not achieve the political change needed as long as the University invests in corporations that peddle climate denialism and actively prevent Harvard’s contributions from impacting public policy.

It is profoundly hypocritical to pay lip service to Harvard’s “strong institutional commitment to sustainability” while profiting from the destruction of our planet. If you are truly concerned about future generations of students, we recommend you value the future of their planet over the diversity of your corporation’s portfolio.

You argue that divestment would be inappropriately political. The biggest misconception about the endowment is not that divestment would be financially destructive but that our continued investment in the fossil fuel industry is politically neutral. Investing in the wreckage of our planet is inherently political.