Christie Lee, Vice President for Sustainability of the Energy Environment Club at Harvard Business School, said she believes that from a practical standpoint, divestment will be difficult to achieve.
“If you consider divesting from [the top] 200 fossil fuel companies, the largest market cap companies in the stock exchange, actually detangling Harvard’s endowment from that will take quite a while,” she said.
Environmental Science and Engineering Professor Daniel P. Schrag, who serves on President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said he commends the students’ symbolic efforts to use the endowment to “point a moral finger” at the rest of society, but is not convinced that the University should follow through with student requests.
“Harvard divesting doesn’t build windmills, doesn’t make solar panels. It doesn’t transform oil to biofuels,” Schrag said. Real change, he added, will take a long time and effort from every individual.
“Everyone I know drives a car, rides airplanes, plugs in their laptops with electricity that uses coal and natural gas. This is on all of us...we need to rebuild the infrastructure that supports our modern existence,” Schrag said.
NOT GIVING UP
Although they have heard administrators’ stance time and time again, students are not letting up the pressure on Harvard to divest.
“We’re going to keep going with our campaign until it happens,” Stahl said.
But they have also broadened the scope of their efforts in hopes of influencing other underwriters of the coal industry. In late November, a group of students from Students for a Just and Stable Future staged a protest at a Bank of America recruiting event as part of a campaign by the Rainforest Action Network to persuade banks to divest from the fossil fuel industry.
“Whether it is Harvard or Bank of America, we absolutely need to decarbonize their lending portfolios,” said Todd Zimmer, a campaigner for the Rainforest Action Network. “I think [the] administration should understand that if they aren’t willing to make progress on campus, then students will continue to grow, continue to put pressure on all different parts of the carbon web whether it’s banks or higher institutions.”
Stahl said that for Divest Harvard, this semester was mostly focused on faculty and alumni outreach. Next year, the organization will try to mobilize the student body. Through student, alumni, faculty, and media support, Stahl said the plan is to continue to “put pressure on Harvard to the point where [the] Harvard administration will feel like it has to divest to maintain student support.”
Student members of Divest Harvard are optimistic that the movement will eventually prevail.
“We’re going to succeed because there are millions of lives at stake in the climate crisis, including our own,” Welton said. “We don’t have any choice but to fight harder.”
—Staff writer Selina Y. Wang can be reached at selinawang58@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @Selina_y_wang.