Narrative History
Written by Steering Committee member Virginie Greene, this narrative history takes stock of the faculty divestment campaign since its inception in 2012. Here, Greene interweaves the HFD’s history with the global events of political campaigns, Harvard leadership changes, fallout from natural disasters, and the recent challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Please visit the Selected Links tab if you would like to consult a pdf version of this history.
In the late summer 2012, three Harvard undergraduates, Chloe Maxmin, Eva Roben and Alli Welton, founded Divest Harvard. They were answering the call for environmental activism targeting US campuses launched by the New England group Students for a Just and Stable Future, and the international campaign, 350.org, founded by Harvard alumnus Bill McKibben (’82). Although the founding group was small, it succeeded in bringing environmental issues at the forefront of Harvard news, when in November 2012, undergraduates voted largely (72% of 3600 votes) in favor of a referendum proposal to divest university funds from the fossil fuel industry.
In the spring 2013, the movement presented President Drew Faust a petition signed by over 1300 students, faculty, and alumni. In the fall, alumni wrote her a letter asking her to participate in a public debate on divestment. She answered on October 3 by affirming that Harvard’s official position was against divestment. She did not accept any public debate on the question. On November 8, Divest Harvard organized a forum moderated by the President of the Undergraduate Council, Tara Raghuveer. Four panelists discussed whether Harvard should continue to invest its endowment in fossil fuel companies. Daniel Schrag, Professor of Geology and Director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and Rebecca Henderson, Professor of Business Economics and Management defended the anti-divestment position, while James Engell, Professor of English, and Tim DeChristopher, graduate student at the Divinity School, supported divestment.
This first campaign reflects a turning point in environmental activism and politics, which led to the Paris Agreement in 2015-16. Students in high schools and universities met with scientists and older activists at a time when climate change deniers could no longer keep the lid on the truth. Divest Harvard has from its beginning advocated for non-violent but energetic action using traditional protest strategies (rally, march, chant, and civil disobedience) as well as social media and new forms of organizing, including an emphasis on inclusion, empathy, and care for all concerned by climate change.
The answer from university administration was a refusal to divest and to debate arguments in favor of divestment. On October 4, 2013, President Faust wrote: “I do not believe, nor do my colleagues on the Corporation, that university divestment from the fossil industry is warranted or wise.” Since 2008, she had engaged Harvard in a campaign for sustainability and a “Green Harvard” but did not change her position on divestment for the duration of her presidency. Future historians will sort out the reasons explaining what happened in 2013 among President Faust and members of the Corporation and led them to take such an entrenched position.
In the winter 2013-14, five Harvard Faculty members started to meet to talk about divestment: Joyce Chaplin, professor of History, Eric Chivian, M.D. Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Founder and Director emeritus of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, James Engell, professor of English and Comparative Literature, James Recht, M.D. and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry; Richard Thomas, professor of Classics. They were joined by activist Tim DeChristopher, who became a student at the Harvard Divinity School after being jailed for civil disobedience, and by Robert Massie, an HBS alumnus and the founder of the New Economy Coalition. Sustained by croissants and apples, they discussed strategies and responses to arguments the Harvard administration had invoked: 1) Harvard endowment should not be used as a political tool; 2) divestment is an inefficient strategy; 3) it is hypocritical to call for divestment while still using fossil fuels; 4) it is better to engage with the fossil fuel industry to make pressure on its leadership than to antagonize it; 5) by divesting, Harvard would be a target for conservative criticism, and lose its political neutrality. The founding band of five was soon joined by other faculty members from various Harvard schools: James Anderson, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvey Cox, Professor of Divinity, Alice Jardine, Professor of French, Jenny Mansbridge, Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values, Stephen Marglin, Professor of Economics; Shoshana Zuboff, Professor of Business Administration. The group took the name "Harvard Faculty for Divestment" (HFD).
In the spring, HFD sent an open letter signed by 93 faculty members to President Faust and the Corporation, and the students organized a blockade of Mass Hall. In May, Bob Massie refuted the arguments over effectiveness and hypocrisy in a Crimson Op. Ed. titled “Even the Bricks Cry Out: It’s Time for Harvard to Divest.” He referred to the divestment from South Africa campaign as a precedent demonstrating the effectiveness of divestment. A few weeks later, Bill McKibben published a “Call to Arms” in the popular magazine Rolling Stone, calling readers to act: “In a rational world, no one would need to march. In a rational world, policymakers would have heeded scientists when they first sounded the alarm 25 years ago. But in this world, reason, having won the argument, has so far lost the fight. The fossil-fuel industry, by virtue of being perhaps the richest enterprise in human history, has been able to delay effective action, almost to the point where it’s too late.”
This growing pressure failed to change the administration’s argument President Faust accused the Divest campaign of acting in an uncivil fashion. Despite the example of Stanford, which divested from the coal industry in May 2014, Harvard maintained its position. On October 17, 2014, faculty members Harvey Cox, James Engell, Alice Jardine, Jenny Mansbridge, Stephen Marglin, James Recht, Richard Thomas, and Shoshana Zuboff met with President Faust and the Corporation senior Fellow, William Lee. They presented their case for divestment as an opportunity for Harvard to demonstrate public leadership. Failing to divest would expose Harvard to the judgment of History, and in the short term would create division among faculty. President Faust and Fellow Lee remained unconvinced. Reasoned arguments and civil debate accomplished little more than blockade and expressions of anger.
The movement slowed but did not disappear. A core group of alumni, faculty and students continued to maintain a presence and a voice through a forum in October 2014, and in April 2015, another blockade of Mass Hall during the first “Heat Week.” On April 29, James Engell (FAS, English and Comparative Literature) debated with Rebecca Henderson (HBS, Business Economics, Management) at the Kennedy School of Government. Engell defended divestment as an efficient strategy to fight global warming. Henderson, while making clear she was as convinced as her opponent of the importance of the crisis, opposed divestment as not the most efficient strategy for the same goal. She argued that divestment would not raise a social movement able to push political and economic leaders in the right direction. She was also worried that taking such a radical stance would provoke adverse reactions against Harvard from conservatives.
December 2015, in Le Bourget, near Paris, saw the start of the international conference that produced the Paris Agreement, signed by 193 countries as of November 2021. In November 2016, Donald J. Trump was elected 45th president of the United States. These two events transformed the divestment campaign. Within a few months, the cause of the energy transition away from fossil fuels knew both a major progress and a major backlash. In spite of its limitations, the Paris Agreement opened possibilities and changed the tone. Most governments recognized climate change as the common nemesis of the twenty-first century, while the election of Donald Trump put him and a team of avowed climate deniers at the helm of the largest economy in the world. The fossil fuel industry lobby which had been so effective at pressuring all levels of government before Trump assumed power, now was directly involved in governing: as his first Secretary of State, Trump nominated Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil chief executive. Thus, the industry was openly compromised with hazardous politics impermeable to factual evidence, common sense, and science. Under the Trump presidency, the scientific community found itself insulted and ignored. For many scientists, maintaining an apolitical or neutral position became untenable. For most scholars in all disciplines, a nightmare became reality. Père Ubu had been elected President of the United States of America.
At Harvard, the divestment campaign continued its efforts, making "Heat Week" an annual rite of spring. In April 2016, four students were charged with trespassing on the Boston premises of the Harvard Management Company (HMC). One of them, Benjamin Franta, graduate student in Physics, explained his motivation in an online article: "The task before us now is not just to make soaring speeches about climate change. It is to move the world, bit by bit and piece by piece, to change in the ways that are necessary to align rhetoric and action." President Faust and the Corporation maintained their position on divestment, refusing again to consider divesting from the coal industry. In March 2017, students organized again a blockade of University Hall. In April 2017, Colin Butterfield, of HMC, announced a "pause" in investments in gas, oil, and minerals. A crack appeared in the armor, but it was far from a commitment.
The divestment movement suffered from exhaustion and discouragement. Some of the earliest leaders had left Harvard. The academic community at Harvard and elsewhere was coping with a US presidency that started to undo environmental regulations and authorize oil drilling in national parks and forests, in addition to trying to destroy the Affordable Care Act, populating the Supreme Court with ultra conservatives, adopting harmful migrations laws, cocooning with dictatorial heads of states, and flooding social media with a regular tide of insults and lies. A dysfunctional White House offered the world a daily tragi-comic reality show, and most Republican Party leaders and elected officials accepted to support a man they despised, hated, and feared.
On June 14, 2017, President Faust announced she would step down in June 2018. In January 2018, she announced that Harvard planned to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026, and fossil fuel free by 2050, following the advice of the Climate Change Task Force she established in 2008 and in coordination with the cities of Boston and Cambridge. Among the scientific and practical reasons that caused her to set up these goals, she mentioned "an elevation of baseless skepticism of science [...] in our public discourse." She did not mention divestment from fossil fuels as part of the plan.
Lawrence Bacow became the next Harvard President in July 2018. He had taught environmental studies at MIT for many years. On November 5, 2018, Ilana Cohen ('22), a college student newcomer at Divest Harvard, published a brief history of the campaign, analyzing its failure so far and ending with a note of hope. She suggested reviving the campaign in the broader frame of social justice and reopening dialogue with the Harvard administration and its new president. Soon, Ilana Cohen, Claire Pryor ('22), and a small group of undergraduates including members of Harvard Undergraduates for Environmental Justice, renamed the group "Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard" (hereafter FFDH) and relaunched the campaign.
The 2018 midterm legislative elections mobilized many members of the Harvard community. The US House was won back by Democrats, but not the Senate. Important democratic gains were made in state legislative chambers. For instance, former Harvard Divest co-founder and leader, Chloe Maxmin ('15), was elected Maine democratic representative in a Republican rural district. But the Republicans led in state legislatures, and support for Donald Trump remained strong. This intensely politicized atmosphere boosted the determination of alumni, faculty, and students concerned by climate change to engage with their new president and the HMC.
In early December 2018, 150 students signed an open letter asking President Bacow and the Corporation not to undermine their reputation as "a forward-looking and ethically responsible institution" and therefore to stop investing in fossil-fuel industries. The letter called for meetings between representatives of Divest Harvard and Harvard governing bodies to discuss paths toward divestment. The response given by the university spokesperson and a few days later by President Bacow did not deviate from the Faust line: politics and policy were not to be achieved through the endowment. Harvard could and would demonstrate its leadership on environmental issues through research, education, and its Climate Action Plan. The invitation to discuss divestment further was ignored. Bacow expanded the Faust argument by disqualifying divestment a priori ("improper, impractical and ineffective") and in developing the hypocrisy argument. If you are using amenities that are brought to you thanks to the fossil-fuel industry, it is hypocritical to treat said industry as an enemy rather than as an ally.
As an academic lawyer and economist specializing in environmental issues, Bacow exemplified the entanglement of contradictory aims (financial, scientific, educational, political, ethical) in academic institutions. In 2018, Harvard counted among its faculty members historian of science Naomi Oreskes (co-author of Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, 2010) and among the thirteen fellows of the Harvard Corporation, Theodore V. Wells, Jr, a renowned lawyer specializing in "white-collar defense and complex civil and corporate litigation" and defending clients like the Exxon Mobil Corporation and Philip Morris Corporation. Wells was elected to Harvard Corporation in 2012, the year Divest Harvard was born. The problem was not to have both these distinguished scholars and professionals affiliated to Harvard. The problem was that one (Wells) had power over the finances of the richest university in the world while having defended fossil fuel interests, while the author of evidence-based arguments denouncing the fossil-fuel industry obfuscation of scientific truth (Oreskes) had little bearing upon the University convictions that solving the climate crisis required working with (and investing in) the fossil-fuel industry. Times had changed, and the disconnect between Harvard research and Harvard governance could no more be considered a sign of healthy coexistence of various opinions within one community.
On December 11, 2018, twenty-one members of HFD sent a petition to President Bacow and the Corporation asking for divestment. A few were part of the initial group of 2014 (Joyce Chaplin, James Engell, Stephen Marglin, James Recht, and Richard Thomas), but most were new. They represented the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Law School, the Divinity School, the Medical School, the Chan School of Public Health, and the Kennedy School of Government. Promptly the petition was signed by about one hundred other Harvard Faculty members. On their end, alumni were reorganizing. Former senator, Tim Wirth ('61), and alumni from the class of 1969 (Valerie Nelson, Terrence McNally), which was celebrating its 50th reunion in 2019, created an ad hoc group and contacted President Bacow and Senior Fellow William Lee for conversations about the urgency of the climatic situation, painfully made clear by the October 2018 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In the face of this confluence of climatic discontent uniting Harvardians of various ages and status, President Bacow stood his ground. Then, on April 2, 2019, at a regular FAS meeting, professor of philosophy Edward (Ned) Hall asked him to open and lead a forum on the question of Harvard investments in the fossil-fuel industry. Since Bacow had repeatedly emphasized his commitment to civil discussion, he could not refuse such a request coming from his tenured colleagues. He accepted the principle of a forum allowing FAS faculty members to discuss divestment and climate change with him and members of the Corporation. By moving the issue from political battle to intellectual debate, Ned Hall and the small group of faculty members who had planned his intervention at the FAS meeting took the risk of losing the momentum gained a few months earlier by separating themselves from other activists and initiating yet another of these internal Harvard conversations that involve only a small number of speakers and deliver few concrete results on a long period of time. Monthly FAS meetings were mostly of a bureaucratic and ceremonial nature. Most faculty rarely or never attended them.
In the following days, Bacow reacted strongly against a protest organized by students asking for divestment from prisons and fossil-fuels during a panel discussion on education at the KSG. Bacow, who was one of the panelists, refused to cede to "pressure" and moved the panel to another room. But, on April 12, he showed up impromptu at a forum organized by the Harvard Political Union and Divest Harvard. Moderated by Ilana Cohen, the panel included James Anderson, professor of atmospheric chemistry, James Engell, professor of English, Karen Shapiro, financial advisor, and Cornel West, professor of philosophy. It was well attended by a mixed crowd of students and faculty. The discussion was intense and substantial, but without incident or altercation.
The Heat Week at the end of the same month of April started with a joint press conference of students, alumni, and faculty, and ended with a rally in which the mayor of Cambridge, Marc McGovern, asked Harvard to divest from the fossil fuel industry. Protest strategies were not abandoned; they had become part of a larger range of actions, including a series of discussions on climate change and divestment planned for the FAS meetings of fall 2019. After the last FAS meeting of spring 2019, Ned Hall presented to faculty members a slide show titled "Divestment from fossil fuels: Assessing the reasoning." Bacow had claimed that he "responded to reason" and not to demand or pressure. He had now to respond to reason applied to reasoning. Hall used basic logical tools to demonstrate the fallacies of the arguments against divestment, and, for good measure, of some arguments in favor. It was a Socratic moment (at least for this writer), and an eloquent public speech disguised as an introductory lesson of philosophy. More faculty members signed the HFD petition and an ad was posted in the Crimson issue for Commencement 2019 calling the Harvard Community to "Divest Now" and faculty members to join the 289 signatories whose names were listed in the ad.
The summer dispersion and lull did not break the momentum gained. On September 20, 2019, at the call of the international youth organization "Fridays for Future" inspired by Greta Thunberg, millions of protesters walked out of work or class in the streets for the third Global Climate Strike. In front of the Harvard Science Center, hundreds of Harvard students, faculty, and alumni merged with high school students and residents of Cambridge, including its mayor. In Boston, a rally at City Hall counted between 7000 and 10000 participants. Three days later, an op-ed signed by three Harvard faculty members, James Anderson, Naomi Oreskes and Kirsten Weld, appeared in the Crimson. It explained why these faculty supported their students participating in the strike, summarized the argument in favor of divestment, and responded to the counterargument the Harvard administration had repeated for many years, but with now variants that President Bacow introduced in his "View from Mass Hall" in Harvard Magazine of September-October, focused on climate change. While continuing to view "engaging with the industry" as "a sounder and more effective approach" than divestment, he expressed respect for other views, concluding: "We may differ on means. But I believe we seek the same ends--a decarbonized future in which life on Earth can flourish for ages to come."
Climate change and divestment was on the agenda of the FAS meeting of October 1st. Three speakers presented their view of the case for divestment. Ned Hall started with explaining the urgency and necessity of a debate not yet happening among FAS faculty members. While recognizing all the efforts made and initiatives at Harvard to respond to the climate crisis, he stressed that a change of gears was necessary for Harvard to "take a position of true leadership in addressing the most dangerous calamity humanity has ever faced." He ended by quoting his son who had requested him to move from resignation to action: "You know the truth. Now act as if it's real." James Anderson, a specialist of atmospheric chemistry, summarized the truth: "Irrefutable observations demonstrate that 75 to 80 percent of so-called permanent floating arctic ice melted in the past 35 years." The consequences of this irrefutable state of things were like a world war pitting "human vs. nature," which could be avoided through immediate action. "Denial and inaction in our time" would have dreadful consequences, and a university like Harvard must act responsibly, lead by example, and divest from fossil-fuel extraction and combustion now, "before Harvard relinquishes its position of leadership."
Naomi Oreskes took the stand of a prosecutor against the fossil-fuel industry: "Fossil-fuel companies knew the risks of burning their products for the climate, they worked proactively to cover up that knowledge and discredit climate science, and they tried to protect their own assets from climate impacts by using the very same science they sought to undermine in public." Thus, it was naive for scholars to hope that they would overcome climate denial only by teaching and researching: "When the fossil-fuel industry undermines public confidence in scientific evidence, then it no longer matters how much evidence we produce, or how persuasive, we as scholars, find that evidence to be." She pointed out that not only did Harvard need to reconsider its investment in a fossil-fuel industry that undermined science, but it needed to reconsider "accepting funds from fossil-fuel interests for research." She reminded of two painful precedents: one recent (the scandal around convicted sex offender and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, who had funded various universities), and one older (funding coming from the tobacco industry). She concluded: "As with the tobacco pandemic, inaction isn’t OK. Faced with the problem of climate change, we must do better." The question as she set it out was not about showing leadership but avoiding a damning complicity. The floor was then opened to all.
Zoologist James Hanken told how, in his career as a specialist of amphibians, he had seen his research subject vanishing: "Today [...] nearly all the species I saw in abundance in the 1970s are either extinct or critically endangered." Hanken communicated a deeply felt emotion. James Engell talked about practical measures the university could quickly take, such as "curtail travel and substitute electronic communications for it" (not knowing he was announcing what would be a drastic response to a pandemic).
Professor of history Andrew Gordon, while acknowledging the climate crisis, questioned "the connection [...] between that and divestment." Similarly using the parallel of the tobacco crisis, he said "divesting tobacco investments did not cause any reduction in smoking, per se" and wondered if divestment was “being advocated as an act of moral cleansing, or as a step toward more effective engagement on climate change—and if so, with whom?" Ned Hall responded briefly that there were other arguments in favor of divestment, insisting that divesting was "a [big] political statement." Classicist and Dylanologist Richard Thomas then concluded the session with expressing his sense of the gravity of the crisis in terms of long-term history and evoking the debates on divestment from South Africa in the 1980s.
The first act of the debate was like in classical theater an exposition, mostly of the pro-divestment stance. One of the main protagonists, President Bacow, was not on the stage, due to his observance of Rosh Hashanah. One had to wait for the second act to see the two sides engaging with one another. In the meantime, twelve alumni wrote a letter to President Bacow and Senior Fellow Lee, asking pointed questions about transparency and conflicts of interests, a touchy subject since the Epstein affair. Another group of alumni worked with faculty to present a slate of five candidates pro-divestment from the fossil-fuel industry for the elections of the Board of Overseers, an advising board of thirty alumni. This may seem arcane, but it was calling attention to the lack of transparency and the extreme complication of Harvard system of governance, which in the end gives little power to faculty members and alumni. FFDH was using any existing pocket of representation, any space of discussion to promote its agenda, inform and mobilize more alumni and faculty, and try to shift the administration position.
Another difficulty the campaign confronted was Harvard’s decentralization, its division into twelve graduate and professional schools and one college. It was the same difficulty that we all experienced when we tried as students, scholars, teachers, or administrators to organize any project involving people affiliated in different schools. During its most efficient phases, FFDH demonstrated this was possible but required enormous efforts to create and maintain contacts with other participants. During the fall of 2019, college students, alumni and faculty from FAS, the Medical School (HMS), the Chan School of Public Health, and the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), which were the main schools involved in the campaign, managed to maintain a high level of communication, without staff and within a horizontal organization. The most eminent speakers like Ilana Cohen, Ned Hall or Bill McKibben did not act as leaders in the usual sense of the term. Organization was done via email (for the older participants) or Slack (for the younger). The undergraduates were the better organized branch of the campaign and practiced innovative ways to make the argument for divestment convincing to a much larger audience at Harvard and beyond. The alumni were helped by Canyon Woodward ('15), who had been involved in Harvard Divest while in college and was now managing Chloe Maxmin's senatorial campaign in Maine. They too used a large range of tactics adapting them to circumstances and targeted protagonists or allies. The faculty group met irregularly, had trouble keeping track of emails threads, but were able to use their various skills and fields of expertise in productive ways.
On November 5, the second debate on climate change and divestment took place at the FAS meeting. President Bacow was present, and with him, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, a member of the Corporation. Three docketed speakers continued to make the case for divestment. Charlie Conroy, professor of astronomy, added more details to Jim Anderson's "irrefutable observations" on climate change, sea level rise and the most recent updates on their anticipated consequences, globally and locally: "With 6 meters of sea-level rise significant portions of the Harvard campus will be underwater. As will all of MIT, Fenway, and the South End." Conroy underlined the difference of impact for richer and poorer countries. His argument against engaging with the fossil-fuel industry was based on projections made by ExxonMobil, while publicly supporting the Paris Agreement: "In 2015 ExxonMobil projected that by 2040 fossil fuels would supply over 75 percent of the world’s energy needs. In its latest projections from this year, that number has actually risen to 80 percent." This industry was determined to continue extracting in such a way that the 2°C warming level fixed by the international agreement would not be reached by mid-century. Divestment was a reasonable and responsible choice for scientists and for an institution like Harvard.
Joyce Chaplin, a specialist of early American history, demonstrated that Harvard had "a long history of using its reputation and resources to make points about politics and society," starting with American Independence, which Harvard endorsed, and the contribution of Harvard in the development of the first atomic bomb. Harvard stated for the first time a policy of neutrality about its endowment in 1964 when students asked for divestment from a Southern utilities company, whose leadership was a white supremacist group. Using other examples, Chaplin concluded that "the position that the Harvard endowment should not be used to address social problems has, in any case, never been consistent." For her, the precedent of Harvard divestment from the tobacco industry in the 1990s should be a cautionary tale, warning not to postpone too long an action that would become increasingly necessary: "In 2019, science has shone enough light on climate change for all of us to see that it might end the world as we know it. This danger demands that we end our complicity with the industries that deny their responsibility in creating our current state of emergency."
The third speaker, Stephen Marglin, professor of economics, addressed the nuts and bolts of divestment. Independently of ethical issues, was investing in the fossil-fuel industry a good financial idea in 2019? Before answering, he explained that it was impossible to know the exact amount of Harvard investment in the fossil-fuel industry, because "over 50 percent of the endowment is invested in hedge funds and private equity. We simply do not know how much capital Harvard is providing for the expansion of the fossil-fuel industry through these vehicles." Truly divesting may not be just a symbolic gesture after all. Whatever the real amount of funds invested indirectly in FFI, it would be a gesture of prudent stewardship of Harvard financial resources, a gesture already performed by other institutions like the University of California, to get rid of too risky assets. "Fossil fuels are rightly an endangered species. No prudent investor would choose to be the last hold-out."
The first respondent from the floor was no less than Professor Daniel Schrag, geochemist, geologist, expert in climate change and energy policy. Since 2004, Schrag was the director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE). He had been involved in some of the conversations at the beginning of HFD, but he was against divestment. He reiterated his position while praising the discussion and recognizing climate change as a "global collective-action problem." For him, divestment was a symbolic action that diverted from effective actions. He called for the development of research and teaching on climate change, and reproached President Faust for not having funded sufficiently "a major initiative on climate and energy" that he had proposed. Greening the campus was "laudable" but like divestment, mostly symbolic, that is, negligible.
James Stock, economics professor and expert in econometry, energy and environmental policies, started with listing his impressive credentials as "a Member of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama" and as "the chief economist in the White House working on the Clean Power Plan." His argument against divestment was not economical, pragmatic, scientific, or financial. It was symbolic and political. If Harvard divested, it would send the rest of the United States a message "of moral superiority." Based on a conversation with Rep. Liz Cheney from Wyoming related to coal mining, Stock warned Harvard that by pushing to divest from fossil-fuel, it risked playing into Cheney's narrative "of climate action being something coastal elites do at the expense of everyday Americans." Stock was anxious about the political division of the USA: "Decarbonizing the economy is a problem we must solve. But if the solution is to be durable, we need to solve it together as a nation. This issue is too important to be driving wedges." In conclusion, like Schrag, Stock recommended Harvard faculty to "invest in teaching and research in climate technology and policy" and, implicitly, to leave Harvard portfolio to the expert care of the Corporation and HMC.
The third speaker, Harry Lewis, professor of computer science, used the same argument against divestment as Schrag: our best weapons against climate change were research and teaching. Since we had no power over the Corporation on financial issues, we had better not even try. The ethical question of accepting funding from questionable sources was for him a non-issue, since "Harvard can do good works with tainted money." He illustrated his argument with a bold metaphor: "Universities are the kidneys of society. The main thing you want from kidneys is to produce pure output, whether or not the flow is dirty." The simile struck this writer as one of the strangest things she had heard in this grand room.
The two next speakers defended divestment. Steven Wofsy, professor of atmospheric and environmental science, explained that he was against divestment until "the gutting of the Clean Power Plan and the CAFE standards [for automobile and truck energy efficiency], at the behest of the fossil-fuel industry" changed his mind.
Scott Edwards, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, ornithologist, repeated the dire narrative of species extinction that his colleague Jim Hanken had told at the first forum. He added remarks on the effect of climate change on indigenous populations: "I believe that, as a University, a failure to divest from companies grossly contributing to the problem of climate change is tantamount to contributing to this genocide and to ignoring the voices of diverse indigenous populations around the globe. How can we, as a University, claim to hold the values of diversity and inclusion to heart, when our actions disproportionately affect those already marginalized on the global stage?"
The last speaker, Irwin Shapiro, professor of astronomy, avoided the term "divestment," and urged Harvard to take "the lead to solve this clearly world problem of climate change through initiating the organizing of the universities of this country if not of the world, to develop an approach to the scientific, political, economic, etc., means to solve the problem."
The final words were left to President Bacow, who underscored the main points of agreement (the urgency of the crisis and the necessity to address it through teaching and research) before addressing divestment. It should not be a "litmus test" indicating our degree of care about climate change. He agreed with Jim Stock about the risk of divestment being seen as elitist and divisive. He still defended "constructive engagement" with the FFI that were making efforts to be carbon-neutral, recognizing that the conduct of others was hard to defend. On the parallel between tobacco and fossil-fuel, he made the point that "tobacco has no social utility" while after divesting "we would still have to turn on the lights." He urged faculty to read a report of HMC on their engagement with sustainable investment, and to demonstrate their engagement in their research, teaching, and personal conduct. He concluded in praising the discussion, which was to be continued.
On their side, the students were preparing in secret a public action. On Saturday November 23, 2019, during the half-time of the football game between Harvard and Yale teams at New Haven, about 70 students from both universities ran onto the field and unfurled banners calling for divestment. Divest Harvard, Fossil Free Yale and the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition had carefully planned their timing, choreographed their action, prepared what they would do if arrested, but they did not expect to see hundreds of students joining them on the field and protesting for half an hour. Protest organizers made sure that all understood the dangers of being arrested particularly for undocumented non-US citizens. Administrators and police officers asked protesters to leave the field for the rest of the game; most did; about forty were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. The game resumed. Yale won. The protest made international headlines and was endorsed by public figures such as Elizabeth Warren, Al Gore, Jane Fonda, and others. It had demonstrated that climate change, environmental justice, and divestment were not the obsession of a few activists: it resonated with many students. In the same way, the well-attended discussions at FAS meetings had shown an interest in these issues among a larger group of faculty members than the core HFD group. After each meeting, more faculty signed the petition.
On November 26, HFD announced that they would formally present a motion to divest at the next FAS meeting, on December 3. To give ample time for discussion, the vote would be postponed until the meeting of February 4, 2020. Accompanying this announcement, HFD circulated a white paper titled "Harvard's Response to the Climate Crisis." In early September Ned Hall sent the core group of HFD a draft he had written in consultation with his son, Galen Hall, then undergraduate at Brown University and part of Beyond Individual Action, a network of students from the UK and the US, founded at Oxford in 2018. What made this campaign different from others at Harvard was the amount of cross-generational and interdisciplinary discussions it generated, inside and beyond Harvard. For instance, that fall 2019, the students launched an outreach operation in which undergraduates met individually with faculty members to talk to them of their concern about climate change. After three months of intensive editing, the white paper demonstrated that experts in various fields of knowledge and methods of inquiry could work together toward a common goal, and, more amazingly, could express this goal in 15 pages of readable prose. The white paper presented the motion to divest and summarized the arguments pro and con that had been expressed in the past years and the recent weeks. It provided a list of other actions that Harvard should take in reducing its own carbon footprint, developing climate-related research and curriculum, and guiding public discussion.
If the debate on divestment had been so far moving smoothly, the FAS meeting on December 3 took place in adverse circumstances. It was a grey, snowy day close to the end of the term. The recently created Graduate Student Union (HGSU-UAW) began an announced strike on issues related to compensation, medical coverage, and investigation processes in cases of discrimination and harassment. The day before, 48 students occupied the lobby of University Hall to protest the recent University decision to deny tenure to Professor Lorgia García Peña, a specialist of LatinX studies. President Bacow, Dean Claudine Gay (dean of FAS), and Provost Alan Garber had just received an open letter signed by 200 students, and another signed by 972 scholars from Harvard and other institutions asking them to reverse their decision. The regular FAS meeting had been displaced from its usual location in University Hall to a lecture room in Emerson Hall. To access it, one had to walk through a large corridor. Protesters holding posters asking for a department of Ethnic Studies and the reversal of the tenure denial stood on both sides. Outside, graduate students were marching around the building. The atmosphere was not exactly convivial. It was one of these moments when latent conflicts emerge and converge. The creation of a department of Ethnic studies, the tenure process, the status of graduate students as employees, and the divestment of Harvard endowment from morally abhorrent investments had in common to reveal the contradictions of an allegedly liberal minded institution operating within a conservative frame of governance leaving to most members of the University little power over key decisions. Still, there was at least the possibility of debating.
The meeting started with an incident. A protester who had entered with the flood of attendants stood up silently in the middle of the room with a poster asking Harvard to reverse its decision on Lorgia García Peña's tenure. Asked by President Bacow to leave or at least move to the side and to identify themselves, the protester neither moved nor talked. President Bacow, visibly miffed, asked for a vote of the faculty about expulsing the protester. Everybody was anxious about the possible developments in such circumstances. A few faculty members said "No" and a few others said "Yes" but what the majority wanted to be done was unclear. President Bacow remarked that this was not a good precedent and asked the three members of the Docket Committee to advise on what he should do. Professor Kirsten Weld suggested to address the substance of the grievance expressed on the protester’s poster. President Bacow refused to follow her suggestion, but he let the meeting proceed without expelling the protester, who remained in the room for the whole session.
After other items on the agenda had been addressed, the Corporation senior fellow, William Lee, started the discussion on divestment. He explained why he had not been able to attend the previous meetings on divestment, because of another commitment. He was glad to join that one, which he had never done since he had been affiliated to Harvard Corporation. He agreed on the reality and urgency of the climate crisis. The issue debated was the course of actions Harvard must take. Lee had come to listen so he could report to the Corporation the different views exchanged on divestment.
Then, Nicholas Watson, Professor of English, introduced the motion that: “...the Corporation should instruct the Harvard Management Company to withdraw from, and henceforth not pursue, investments in companies that explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels, or in companies that provide direct support for such exploration and development; over a reasonable period of time, extend those instructions to advisers of investment vehicles used by Harvard’s endowment, including commingled funds where Harvard is not the sole investor; and ensure that any adviser who may be unwilling or unable to comply is replaced by one who is willing to carry out these instructions.”
The motion did not include the term "divestment," which had been a subject of contention among HFD core group as they drafted and edited the White Paper and the motion. In the debate around the wording, one faculty member wrote others that "politics is the art of the possible at the present time." Watson made clear that this motion was about "financial divestment" applied to "this specific activity of the fossil-fuel industry and those that finance it: the exploration for, or development of, further reserves of fossil fuels." Summarizing the arguments of the White Paper, Watson framed the motion in the larger context of other responses to climate change. To colleagues who thought faculty members should focus on research and teaching, he responded that a faculty meeting was a space where "a privileged group of employees (that’s most of us in the room) can freely propose, discuss, and vote on motions that could have a significant effect on the university’s governance and mission." He reminded that we were committed to the "philanthropic mission" of the university, its motto "Veritas," and our students.
The five next speakers were members of HFD. Virginie Greene (Professor of French) insisted on the urgency of the situation and the lack of time to respond by "slow, incremental adjustments of our economies, politics, and ways of life." Richard Thomas (Professor of the Classics) reminded President Bacow of their common love for Bob Dylan's songs, and how even more relevant than in the 60s his most famous song The Times They Are A-Changin' were today. We had to change with our times: we could not continue to wish for HMC to make successful investments if they continued "conducting business more or less as usual" and investing "to the detriment of the lives of all of us, in particular the poorest and most precarious of the world’s human populations and species." Kirsten Weld prefaced her talk by addressing the protester and sharing their dismay about the tenure case. On divestment, she was brief and to the point. Harvard was confronted with a choice between divesting now "in a position of leadership" or later "as part of a rearguard." Ned Hall insisted on the responsibilities attached to the privileges "that come with Harvard's status." In the current situation of crisis, it was our responsibility not "to stay safely in our lane" as some colleagues had advised us to do. We had to demonstrate leadership besides doing research on and teaching about climate change.
The last slated speaker was James Engell. His focus was the most technical of the five, based on reports and studies on the production of fossil fuels, showing "the continued production of fossil fuels projected over the next two decades at a level that subverts the Paris goals, and will, by 2040, witness fossil-fuel production at a rate double the maximum permitted to secure a 2-degrees Centigrade temperature increase." So far HMC and those in favor of continuing to engage with companies deliberately subverting the Paris Accord had been unable to show "a significant list of engagement result" while it was known that "from 2010 to 2018, the largest fossil-fuel company in the United States spent a fraction of 1 percent of its operating expenses on low- or no-carbon energy development." Engell cited Sir Nicholas Stern, a British economist recently invited to speak at Harvard, urging large institutional investors "rapidly to be aligned with sustainability." To those at Harvard and elsewhere who reproached advocates of divestment, he replied by listing scholarly and educational endeavors related to climate change accomplished by "faculty supporting this divestment motion." He ended by relaying the full support to this motion of his colleague and friend, Jim McCarthy, Professor of Biological Oceanography who could not attend the meeting. Sadly, Jim McCarthy passed away a week later.
The discussion was now opened to the floor. Three faculty supported the motion and brought new arguments into the fray. Jocelyn Viterna, Professor of Sociology, summarized arguments. The pro side based its argumentation on 1) the reality of climate change; 2) past precedents of Harvard divesting; 3) no evidence that divestment from fossil fuel would hurt Harvard financially. The anti-divestment side conceded these points or did not counter them, but, rather, supported their stance with two arguments: 1) divestment was not politically strategic because it would reinforce ideas about "coastal elites" among "the majority of people in the US —especially those poor folk who live in Red States and who rely on trucking or the coal industry for a living"; 2) instead of divesting, "we should limit our flights, use public transport, and teach more courses on climate change, and so forth." These arguments had been proposed by Professors James Stock, Daniel Schrag and Harry Lewis, and by President Bacow. She then expressed with unexpected frankness feelings shared but hushed by many: "I take issue with both of these anti-divestment arguments from the last meeting, because they are anecdotal, illogical, and unsubstantiated with evidence, and therefore, I find them kind of insulting. I find them insulting as a Harvard professor who deserves well -substantiated arguments in a faculty meeting, and I find them insulting as a long-time Red Stater, who doesn’t appreciate the caricature." She turned the hypocrisy argument on its head: teaching and researching on climate change while receiving funding from or investing in fossil fuel companies was hypocritical. Her reason to support divestment was not moral but rational, scientific. She urged Harvard "not to see this as bowing to faculty demands, but rather as building on faculty research."
Professor John Campbell, an economist who had served on the board of HMC, criticized the motion "as too rigid" and suggested to make it broader in order "to reduce the carbon footprint of Harvard's entire portfolio as a way to discourage the flow of capital to all carbon-intensive activities, and to increase the cost of capital for companies that engage in them. Even though Harvard’s portfolio is too small to have a measurable direct effect on carbon-intensive stock prices, if enough other investors follow suit the effect can be significant." He concluded with a practical measure mentioned in the White Paper: Harvard should lead by example in reducing the air travels of its affiliates. The third speaker from the floor, Arthur Kleinman, Professor of Medical Anthropology, supported divestment as "a reasonable and necessary first step" and called for a fundraiser "to make Harvard a leader in the development of solutions to global climate change and their implementation."
Larry Bacow and Bill Lee closed the session in thanking all speakers and promising to report the discussion to the Corporation. A vote would be taken at the next faculty meeting. All left the room, with no one having spoken against divestment. One HFD member wrote to the others afterward: "I think that went almost as well as it could have gone, though the sounds all around of an unhappy university, and the beleaguered looks of our leaders made the whole event a little surreal." The Winter term 2019 ended with more protests related to the Graduate Student Union, the coalition for Ethnic Studies, and Divest Harvard.
Before the winter break, HFD started to discuss an amendment to the motion based in part on John Campbell's mention of portfolio decarbonization. After the break, they planned the FAS meeting of February 4, trying to reach out to as many colleagues as possible to ensure a meaningful number of votes. A good sign was that by January 20, 2020, more than 500 faculty members of all schools had signed the online petition for divestment. On January 20, Richard Thomas submitted a modified motion to the Secretary of FAS. After much back and forth, the following sentence had been added as an amendment to the motion discussed on December 3: "Further, that the Corporation and HMC subject all endowment investments to a system of decarbonization with the goal of achieving internationally agreed standards of emission reduction commensurate with IPCC reports." But the discussion continued until the day of the vote, involving at times alumni Tim Wirth and Bill McKibben and other scholars from other universities. An email explaining the motion and its amendment was circulated among all FAS voting members who had signed the petition and to all chairs of FAS departments, calling them to come and spread the word among their colleagues.
Around the same time, the alumni campaign started reaching out to alumni, asking them to nominate five candidates active on the climate front for the positions of overseers. The election process was extremely complicated, almost as if it had been devised to avoid having to elect candidates nominated directly by alumni instead of those selected by the Harvard Alumni Association Nominating Committee. Usually, few people cared or knew about this arcane piece of Harvardiana, but a group of young alumni had discovered that it allowed nomination by petition. So, they organized their petition in coordination with the divestment campaign.
The agenda for the February 4th FAS meeting was substantial. It started with the announcement of a review of the tenure track process in FAS and a discussion of issues related to conflicts of interests in research. Then Provost Alan Garber, Professor of Health Care Policy, talked about the Wuhan coronavirus that was now spreading into a pandemic. Although only one case had been reported in the Boston area, Garber called on all to be cautious and attentive to the messages they were receiving from Harvard University Health Services. Harvard scientists were preparing to contribute on research on the disease in collaboration with their Chinese colleagues. During the following question period, no one asked questions about the coronavirus.
Nicholas Watson introduced the motion as written in the White Paper and presented in the December 3 meeting. Jim Engell presented an amendment to the motion, adding that the Corporation would submit all its investments to a system of decarbonization. Both Watson and Engell explained why and how the amendment had been designed. Watson added one argument to support the amended motion: Harvard's refusal to divest had been used by the Independent Petroleum Association of America as an expression of support for the Fossil Fuel Industry and its current course of actions. The amendment then was voted and passed, and the floor opened to discussion of the amended motion.
Dustin Tingley, professor of Government working on climate change, opposed the motion, while supporting the general engagement of Harvard on climate change via research and teaching. Divestment as a symbolic gesture may have an adverse effect on various audiences, as for example people working in the fossil fuel industries. Joyce Chaplin presented a list of worldwide institutions in education, philanthropy, medicine, etc., which had already divested, ending with the Republic of Ireland. Steve Marglin had the last word before the vote. At this point, Harvard could not be apolitical. It had to choose on which side to be: IPAA or IPCC? Marglin urged the faculty to vote a motion proposing both to divest and to decarbonize at a time it was still meaningful and could have an impact.
The motion, voted by paper ballot, passed with 179 in favor and 20 opposed. President Bacow thanked the faculty and all involved for the discussion, and promised to report to the Corporation the results of the vote. He concluded in underscoring the agreement between all on the seriousness and urgency of the climate crisis. Harvard had a role to play in response. It was unclear whether his opinion on divestment had been changed after these four months of focused debate. After the vote, one faculty member wrote to the HFD group: "This afternoon, I feel genuinely proud of being a Harvard Professor." Another, who had been in the original group in 2014, celebrated the victory and turned toward future battles: "it is time to reconsider the dependence of political and social stability on a regime of economic growth in a world of finite resources, a problem that success on the climate-change front will only exacerbate."
The next day, the Harvard Forward Team announced they had managed to collect 4,500 alumni signatures for their list of candidates to the board of overseers. By February 8, the divestment petition had reached 1000 faculty signatures across Harvard schools. On February 12, the Harvard Medical School's Faculty Council voted 23-5 in favor of a motion calling the Harvard Corporation to disinvest from companies making most of their profit from fossil fuels. Divest Harvard was energized by its success. Its different sub-groups (alumni, students, faculty in the various schools) made efforts to coordinate better. Contacts were created or resumed with other divestment campaigns at Oxford and other institutions in the UK and the US.
On March 10, 2020, Harvard administration announced that all students residing on campus had to leave by March 15, and that all courses would be switched to online instruction during the spring break. It was a day before the World Health Organization declared the Wuhan virus, now renamed Covid-19, a pandemic.
In the same fashion that some would say the 20th century started in 1914 with a war that became a world war, one could say that the twenty-first century started in the winter 2019-2020 with an epidemic that became a pandemic. The Harvard divestment campaign did not end in March 2020 but had to adapt to extraordinary circumstances. The HFD core group had tried with mixed success hybrid formats of meetings before. As we all had to learn how to use Zoom for our teaching, we switched to that form without any more ado. In early April, the group discussed possible next steps, and what to do if the administration delayed their response to the vote on divestment. Some felt that the current health crisis made the campaign on the climate and ecological crisis more relevant. And others saw the closure of the campus and the shift to online academic life as an opportunity to learn how to limit our environmental impact. The students and alumni groups took the shift in stride. For the 50th Earth Day on April 22, three days of livestream replaced actions in the streets. FFDH organized a "FFDH Virtual Earth Day."
On April 21, President Bacow transmitted in a letter to all FAS faculty members the decision of the Corporation about climate change: "the Corporation has directed the Harvard Management Company (HMC) to set itself on a path to decarbonize the overall endowment portfolio," a move in step with the final element of the resolution adopted in February. "In particular, the Corporation has instructed HMC to develop a strategy for the endowment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions from the portfolio by 2050." The letter made clear that the Corporation, while agreeing on the necessity to do something more than engaging with the fossil fuel industry, still did not want to divest: "We cannot risk alienating and demonizing possible partners, some of which have committed to transitioning to carbon neutrality and to funding research on alternative fuels and on strategies to decarbonize the economy."
FFDH responded by a press release the next day (Earth Day): the announcement was going in the right direction and the University had moved from its position. The release made clear that the commitment to decarbonize the portfolio by 2050 was far from sufficient, for it fell short of the baseline demand for divestment. And its timeline was "protracted."
HFD sent a letter to President Bacow first welcoming his announcement as "a significant step" but, like the students’ release, expressing disappointment on the timeline and on the choice made "to pursue a decarbonized portfolio while continuing to invest in the very companies that supply the carbon, and moreover, that continue to do far more to perpetuate that supply--and the demand for it--than they do to reduce it." Attached to the letter was a document titled "Proposed Harvard University Investment Policy on Carbon Emissions" authored by Bevis Longstreth, an alumnus of Harvard Law School, JD '61, former SEC Commissioner, in consultation with Jim Engell, and two other alumni: Doug Koplow, HBS, MBA '92, founder of Earth Track, and Valerie Nelson, Harvard-Radcliffe, AB '69, founder of the Water Alliance. The two-page document reiterated the urgency of the situation, using citations from a 2019 letter signed by Governors of National Banks (UK and France) and a 2019 report of the Decarbonization Advisory Panel appointed by New York State to support prompt and thorough action. Thus, Harvard decarbonization plan was set up in the context of a large move led by financial and political institutions to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. Then, six measures were listed as responding consistently to the vote of FAS, with specific deadlines. The first one was: "Dispose of Investments in the oil, gas, and coal mining industry sectors held directly by the University or by managers holding Investments in separate accounts controlled by the University‐‐with deliberate speed and in any case before June 30, 2021."
The ad hoc alumni committee on divestment (Tim Wirth, Bill McKibben) sent a letter on April 30 to Bill Lee pressing the Corporation to act faster and show the same leadership on climate change than Harvard demonstrated in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
On May 3, faculty from the HMS also sent a letter expressing their disappointment, adding "The devastating effects of the Covid-19 pandemic underscore the need for policy based on science and prompt action in order to protect lives. We urge the administration to focus on the irrefutable facts that compel us to act with urgency to address the climate crisis with meaningful action that includes divestment from fossil fuels." The letter was signed by about 170 HMS faculty members.
The last FAS meeting of the term, on May 5, held via zoom for the first time in FAS history, was mostly dedicated to the pandemic: it would be unlikely that a return to campus would happen in September; a decision about continuing or not teaching online would be announced in July. During the question period, Ned Hall addressed the decarbonization announcement, asking about the timeline for the decarbonization plan, the continuing relation with fossil fuel companies, and the involvement of all relevant stakeholders beyond members of the administration and Corporation. President Bacow replied that the Corporation found decarbonization a better plan than divestment, and that the proposed goal was “ambitious.” He also stated that if decarbonization could occur sooner than 2050, then it would. The next day, May 6, President Bacow and the Corporation received a letter calling for more vigorous action than stated in the April announcement. It was cosigned by FFDH, Harvard Forward, and the alumni Ad Hoc Committee on Divestment and endorsed by HFD. Fossil fuel divestment, interim goals for more rapid decarbonization, and transparency about progress, were called for. The letter also called for a larger consultative body representative of students, faculty, and alumni, open transparency about involvement of fossil fuel companies in research and education, and investments in a rapid, just transition to a clean energy economy.
The message came piecemeal before a unified response was agreed upon after many emails, but one thing was clear for all concerned: the vote on February 4 had been a step. The responses made it obvious that continuing pressure and open debate would continue to be necessary to coax the University away from its default position.
That spring, a group of alumni had started to plan a two-day conference on the climate crisis for the Fall 2020. In May, they decided to keep planning but be ready to switch online if the pandemic did not allow for gatherings in person. The panels would include faculty, students, and alumni from various disciplines. One of the main organizers, Valerie Nelson, graduated from Harvard College in 1969 and obtained a Ph.D. in economics in 1977 at Yale. She had worked mostly in the water sector and had been involved in environmental activism for a long time at her place in Gloucester, Mass. On her end, this writer started gathering documents and writing a timeline of the campaign. Faculty and alumni continued to discuss tactics and strategies (loyal opposition versus constructive engagement), while recognizing that there was something broken in Harvard system of governance, which gave more and more power to a few individuals, and alienated many of its faculty members and students, who then became indifferent, overwhelmed, or insurgent.
George Floyd's murder on May 25, 2020, triggered a large protest against racism, bringing millions of people into the streets despite the continuing pandemic. The students of FFDH expressed publicly their solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. Relating divestment from the fossil fuel industry with divestment from the prison industry had been discussed before. During the 2019-20 campaign for divestment, the choice of HFD had been to focus on fossil-fuel to avoid the argument of the "slippery slope" to be invoked. After the relative success of this strategy, some thought that it would be wiser to stick to it. Others wanted the divestment group to be attuned to the mood of a country engulfed into a fierce election battle, and to maintain a strong connection with FFDH students and younger alumni. The debate opposed an understanding of divestment as a matter of truth (scientific evidence, honesty in front of it) against an understanding of divestment as a matter of justice (climatic, social, and racial).
On July 6, Harvard finally announced its plan for the fall term: courses would continue to be taught entirely online, only 40% of college students would be allowed to reside on campus. Harvard administration was standing up against a US President who denied the gravity of the pandemic, and a party who pressed people and institutions to return to "business as normal" no matter the price in terms of human lives and suffering. The pattern was familiar to those concerned by climate change. The same day, the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive whose consequences was that international students would not be allowed to stay in the USA if they studied only remotely. Harvard and MIT filed a lawsuit against DHS, and the directive was rescinded toward the end of July. Adding to the anxieties related to the health crisis, the vagaries of the US government created an atmosphere of surreal farce--or nightmare.
Most of the summer was spent preparing for an uncertain fall: faculty trained to improve their online teaching skills, and pedagogy became suddenly a common worry across all disciplines and career level; scholars learned how to do research away from libraries, archives, labs, and "fields;" students decided whether to take a term or year of leave or to attend online courses, whether to come to campus for a weird experience involving masks and frequent virus testing or to stay home and encounter peers and teachers as mosaic tiles on their screen; administrators tested on themselves the limits of zoom fatigue; staff members found out whether working at home was liberating or unbearable. Many in all these categories prepared the 2020 elections with a feverish sense of urgency. HFD lost its momentum and went "dormant" as one member wrote. Another noted: "I am not sure when faculty will be able to set their mind to anything else than zoom teaching, the coming elections and daily life under pandemics." However, while some faculty took their distance or a break, new faculty get involved or reinvolved, for instance noticeably in the Kennedy School of Government who sent in October a letter to President Bacow and the Corporation signed by 46 faculty members. HMS faculty were working on a proposal for a standing committee on climate, sustainability, and health. Ideas exchanged through intermittent email threads included pushing Harvard toward greater transparency not only about its endowment but also its research funding.
The students remained more visibly involved. They tried to maintain pressure on Harvard administration, using the example of the University of Cambridge, UK, which, on October 1st, announced as its goal "to divest from all direct and indirect investments in fossil fuels by 2030 as part of the University’s plan to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2038, more than a decade before the date set by the UK Government.” The announcement included the following timeline: "1) Withdraw investments with conventional energy-focused public equity managers by December 2020; 2) Build up significant investments in renewable energy by 2025; 3) Divest from all meaningful exposure in fossil fuels by 2030; 4) Aim to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions across its entire investment portfolio by 2038, in line with the broader targets of the University." The next day, FFDH wrote President Bacow and the Corporation, requesting a meeting to discuss a more robust plan aligned with peer institutions. An online meeting was arranged on December 16, during which one of the students, Joseph Winters, asked "whether Harvard’s unwillingness to follow its peers sprang from different evaluative standards." William Lee answered that "while Harvard continues to believe that divestment is merited in cases of ethical un-justifiability and moral repugnancy, he does not agree with judgements…that the fossil fuel industry has fallen to such a standard." Another student, Connor Chung, asked for evidence that engagement with fossil fuel companies changed their core business model. The examples cited by Corporation member Paul Finnegan were criticized by Chung as less ambitious than companies made them look. The conversation made clear that the administration, although willing to continue the debate, was still attached to maintaining a collaboration with the fossil fuel industry in the interest of research leading toward a shift to renewables. That this was a major conflict of interests did not seem to be of concern.
Alumni too remained active and engaged. Shortly after August 18, Harvard Forward could announce a victory: three candidates they supported were elected overseers, and five were elected HAA directors. During the fall, Harvard Forward started again selecting candidates to support for the 2021 HAA elections.
Another group of alumni launched a series of five online "Climate Conversations" starting on September 23, 2020, ending on January 13, 2021. The main organizers were Valerie Nelson and Terry McNally ('69). Each panel brought together scholars, alumni working outside academia, and students, from various disciplines and backgrounds. They were organized around themes and questions: 1) Climate, Biodiversity, Pandemics, and Justice: Converging Reasons for Alarm? 2) Government and the Economy: Reform or Transformation? 3) Changing Hearts and Minds: A Moment for Reimagining? 4) Mobilization, Protests, and Politics: Are Power Structures Shifting? 5) Epilogue: Moving Forward: Will We Get the Job Done? President Bacow introduced the first one and Bill McKibben was a panelist in the final one. The conversations were well attended, and brought together various voices on themes broader than divestment while still continuing the debate on divestment. In normal times, they could have triggered common projects across the university, or at least helped encounters across disciplines and generations. But the novelty of online conferences and webinars had then largely waned, and their inconveniences had become obvious: a flattening of everything in one format and a reduction of spontaneous interaction that the chat box function could not compensate.
Above all, the political events that marked these five months dwarfed other concerns and drained emotional resources. It appears clearly today (August 2022) that the United States came close to a coup and possibly a civil war. It was not so clear when events unfolded, but all witnessed live the build up toward the "stolen election" rallying war cry. Between the election day on November 3rd, 2020, and the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, it was difficult to think about anything else. The new administration getting (precariously) ready to take charge was no doubt an improvement and a relief for environmental activists around the world, but once the USA would have joined again the Paris Accord as candidate Joe Biden promised, catching up with lost time and repairing the damage done by the preceding administration was not going to be straightforward and easy.
HFD managed to hold one zoom meeting on December 11, inviting two alumni and one undergraduate student to join the core group. They discussed cosigning an Op-ed that the students and alumni wanted to publish. Then they talked about the Climate Conversations and the possibilities of interdisciplinary projects in research and teaching. One faculty from the Science Division told the group that a new climate initiative in education and research had been recently presented to the division and SEAS, coming from the higher administration. It was a good sign of engagement but failed to involve other disciplines than the usual ones. Next steps in the campaign were discussed such as connecting with Cambridge local activism on climate issues, supporting Harvard Forward 2021 campaign, continuing asking for disclosure of the steps taken by HMC to implement the decarbonization pledge, continuing opposing the argument of engagement with the FFI, using legal arguments related to the status of Harvard as a non-profit and philanthropic institution.
We moved to another semester of online teaching, but this hardly resonated in the turmoil of January 2021. After the assault against the Capitol of January 6 and the inauguration of January 20, we realized that as inadequate in dealing with the climate crisis as it had been so far, the American government was in danger of being taken over by people as unconcerned by climate change as by the rule of law and factual evidence. The new administration and legislature were charged with a tremendous healing mission and the mandate to respond to environmental, social, and health crises by transformative actions and policies with a very thin majority in the Senate. Although President Biden re-signed the Paris Accord the day he was inaugurated, there was no guarantee that the Congress would pass laws enabling the USA to meet the challenge of keeping global warming below 2°C by 2050.
HMC released its first periodic "Climate report" on February 25, 2021. HFD reacted by having two of its members (a new recruit, Alexander Rehding professor of Music, and this writer) ask President Bacow questions at the FAS meeting on March 2: Could HMC provide a more detailed calendar with interim milestones and also more details on the staff and resources devoted to the task of decarbonizing? Could the Harvard community receive more communication than a report once a year? The next day, Jim Engell and Joyce Chaplin met with Kate Murtagh, in charge of sustainable investing at HMC, at her invitation, to discuss the report. As with President Bacow's announcement in April 2020, the fact that the report existed was a good thing, but this did not compensate its lack of details about time and process and its obsession with not using the D-word. For two months, the small core group of HFD that continued to meet via zoom or email drafted its written reply to the report, oscillating between welcoming and condemning. On April 30, they sent President Bacow, the Corporation, and HMC a brief letter starting with one sentence of welcome followed with a "however" opening several paragraphs of criticism: the report was too vague about its process and timeline; it was unclear whether HMC had assigned enough personnel and resources to the hard task of decarbonizing; by continuing investing in companies contributing to the climate crisis, Harvard was in contradiction with its "commitment to diversity, inclusion, and belonging" (since September 2020, FAS had an associate dean of diversity, inclusion and belonging); divestment was complementary to decarbonization and necessary to keep up with a movement embraced by more and more institutions of higher education.
The student group initiated a new strategy: using Harvard's status of non-profit organization as a basis for legal action. On March 15, FFDH filed a complaint with Maura Healey, the Massachusetts Attorney General, against Harvard for misusing its endowment and therefore being in violation of the Massachusetts Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act. Continuing to invest in fossil fuel was neither prudent nor serving the common good. The complaint was signed by 70 names of elected officials (Boston, Cambridge, Newton and Somerville city councilors, state representatives), scientists and environmentalists, community activists, Harvard alumni, faculty, and students, and about 50 community and environmental organizations. In the following weeks, more than 100 Harvard faculty signed a letter supporting the complaint. Following the same legal argument, on June 24, two State Representatives, Mike Connolly and Erika Uyterhoeven (HBS alumna), introduced a bill asking the State of Massachusetts to use its constitutional authority over Harvard to compel it to divest its holdings in the fossil fuel industry. Independently of their legal merits, the complaint and the bill reminded Harvard that Harvard does not exist in a vacuum but is part of the State of Massachusetts, the Boston urban area, and the city of Cambridge.
As a massive campaign of vaccination anti-Covid19 started in a chaotic fashion and everybody was waiting for an appointment, a new divestment group was created: "Stop Harvard Land Grabs" (SHLG). It called attention to Harvard investments in farmlands in Brazil, Argentina, and other places. From the discourse of Harvard about diversity, against racism, and its recognition of its own history of land grabbing from indigenous communities, a naive soul might have thought that "farmland" meant some form of sustainable agriculture supporting indigenous communities. It may take a long time and a lot of scrutiny over Harvard investments to find anything like that. "Farmland" means agrobusiness in its most brutal form, destructive of natural and human habitats and resources, and as doomed as the Fossil Fuel Industry. Professor of History Sidney Chalhoub informed members of HFD of recent research on the network of interests revealing the support of investors such as Harvard and the pension fund TIAA to companies supporting President Jair Bolsonaro and his destructive policies for the natural and human resources of Brazil. On May 3, Chalhoub's colleague in History, Joyce Chaplin, moderated a webinar during which three Brazilians, two scholars and one journalist, presented their findings about Harvard involvement in such ventures and their disastrous consequences on local communities and fragile ecosystems such as the Brazilian Cerrado region. The intricate story of HMC and its investments in natural resources deserves its own timeline and narrative, but it must be mentioned here for, at the same time the fossil fuel divest campaign entered its second stage, HMC was trying to turn around its "controversial natural resources portfolio" (Wall Street Journal, 8 October 2020), without doing anything to repair the damage done to communities and ecosystems.
Summer 2021 was marked by heat waves in North America Northwest, extreme drought in the Southwest of the USA and in many regions in South America, catastrophic floods in central China and Europe, and catastrophic wildfires around the Mediterranean Sea. Climate change could not be taken as a question or a problem anymore: it was our common reality but hitting much harder some than others. In the fall, courses in situ were resumed and students allowed to return to campus. Masks were mandatory in class, and a testing program imposed to all regularly present on campus. On September 8, FFDH organized a protest in front of John Harvard statue, the first after 10 months of online activism. About 80 students and recent alumni participated.
By coincidence or not, the next day, on September 9, President Bacow wrote to "Members of the Harvard Community" to announce a plan of action addressing climate change. It started with a sober assessment of the worsening of the climate crisis, citing the latest report of the UN IPCC, and calling the Harvard community to action: "We must act now as citizens, as scholars, and as an institution to address this crisis on as many fronts as we have at our disposal." The first front was financial. Bacow described the current investment strategy: "For some time now, Harvard Management Company (HMC) has been reducing its exposure to fossil fuels" and was now "building a portfolio of investments in funds that support the transition to a green economy." Still not using the D-word, Bacow stated a commitment "to make long-term investment decisions that support our teaching and research mission," and qualified investments in fossil fuels as not "prudent," using one of the arguments made in the complaint against Harvard filed with Maura Healey in March 2021. He underscored that "HMC was the first endowment in the country to commit to achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions across the entire investment portfolio by 2050. Since we announced this commitment, a number of other endowments have followed our lead." He provided one intermediary deadline: "HMC has pledged to render its own operations greenhouse gas neutral by June 30, 2022." On the front of "Research and Teaching" Bacow announced the creation of the administrative position of "Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability" and the nomination of Professor James Stock at this University-wide post. He also promised "to raise substantial incremental resources to support our work on climate change." On the last front of his message, "On-Campus Sustainability Efforts," Bacow again underscored Harvard pioneering record: "Harvard was also one of the first organizations to announce in 2018 a goal to eliminate the use of all fossil fuels to heat, cool, and power buildings and vehicles on our campus by 2050 along with a short-term goal to be fossil fuel-neutral by 2026." Bacow concluded his message by a call to "a collective effort to see one another not as adversaries but as partners, not as caricatures but as people."
Those who had participated in a campaign started almost a decade ago received the message with surprise and mixed feelings, as can be seen in emails exchanged between HFD core members and alumni: "Bacow's statement is one of the clearest notes I've seen to date that the endowment is engaging proactively to invest in carbon-replacing technologies and industries." "More can be done and I hope shall be done, but this does appear to be a victory of sorts." "I didn't see anything new beyond what they already put out in the spring re the Endowment." "English translation: Harvard maintains more than eight hundred million dollars of investments in fossil fuels!" "Can we not claim some measure of credit, this faculty group and the much larger student and alumnus group, for some of what’s in the president’s message?"
FFDH organized a retreat during the weekend of September 10-11 to discuss priorities and strategies. In a virtual press conference on September 15, Ilana Cohen explained that Divest Harvard would continue to hold Harvard accountable "for phasing out its remaining investments in fossil fuels" but would also broader its campaign toward a "larger vision of sustainable re-investment" and a "just, regenerative economy." Bill McKibben praised the "magnificent job" done by the people who campaigned and deplored that it took so long: "This day comes too late to save the people who died in Hurricane Ida or to save the forests of the West that have gone up in the last six months, or, frankly, to save the people who will perish in the years ahead, but not too late to be a huge help in doing what we still can." Other speakers talked about the impact of Bacow's announcement on other divestment campaigns.
On September 22, HFD sent to President Bacow and the Corporation a letter authored by Joyce Chaplin, Scott Edwards, and Caren Solomon, and signed by 41 faculty members of FAS, HMS, HBS, HLS, HGSE, and KSG. After thanking Bacow for his "pledge to stop investing in companies that explore for new fossil fuel reserves," the letter interpreted the statement as indicating a "new position," which was "a testament to the power of sustained social justice activism." It praised student activists at Harvard and beyond. Then, it asked for more transparency on the timeline and on loopholes in the plan that could allow HMC to continue "to invest directly, for example, in the destruction of indigenous lands and waters for the construction of fracked gas pipelines." Thus, HFD indicated that it was both acknowledging progress and remaining vigilant.
No doubt: President Bacow's announcement was a victory for the divestment campaign, and probably an unavoidable step for the University given the current ambiance (hot and stormy in all respects). But virtue is demanding. Once abandoned the Lewisian position according to which universities are the kidneys of society and should accept any money no matter its source if they do good things with it, scrutiny could not be stopped at the endowment. On November 9, 2021, FFDH published a report titled "Beyond the Endowment: Uncovering Fossil Fuel Interests on Campus." Illustrating the shift indicated in the September press conference toward a broadening of the campaign, the authors made their case clear from the start: "Universities like Harvard are entangled with the industry in more ways than their endowments. Even as they move to make their investments fossil free, they are allowing fossil fuel companies to fund research and programming, including around key issues of climate science and policy [...] It seems unclear how Harvard, or any university for that matter, can fulfill its climate commitments while continuing to permit the fossil fuel industry's influence on campus." The rest of the report was dedicated to case studies. At the Kennedy School of Government, the Belfer Center and the Mossavar-Rahmani Center, funded both by fossil fuel fortunes, supported key initiatives and projects on energy and environmental policies (the Geopolitics of Energy Project, the Harvard Electricity Policy Group) without acknowledging their ties to a highly interested party. A similar pattern was visible at the Harvard Law School with the Environmental and Energy Law Program, founded and directed by a Harvard Professor who was also a board member of ConocoPhillips. The report ended with the ties of three current members of the Harvard Corporation with the fossil fuel industry. There was no revelation in this report, but it gathered information from various sources and gave a concrete, detailed account of a major conflict of interest that had started to appear in the public sphere much earlier, for instance in the works of scholars such as Naomi Oreskes, or Benjamin Franta and Geoffrey Supran who, in March 2017, had coauthored an article on "The Fossil Fuel Industry Invisible Colonization of Academia" in The Guardian.
Following the publication of this report, on November 12, FFDH organized a rally with the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign and Stop Harvard Land Grabs to protest the use of dirty money to fund universities. The rally moved from Harvard to the Boston Common where protesters met with students from Boston College, Boston University, Tufts University, and Northeastern University.
As the pandemic receded without totally vanishing, a new human made catastrophe exploded in Europe. On February 24, 2022, the Russian army invaded Ukraine, and, against all expectations, failed to crush promptly the Ukrainian army and replace its government. Six months later, the war continues, and the toll of deaths, wounds, displacements, and destructions is mounting. Russia's control of oil and gas supplies for Europe made economic sanctions even trickier than they usually are. The war provided both an argument in favor of accelerating the energetic transition away from fossil fuels and a pretext to dig more fossil fuels in Europe and North America.
In the spring 2022, almost ten years after Divest Harvard was created, the campaign broadened its goals and perspectives. FFDH joined the Fossil Free Research movement in endorsing a letter, signed by about 500 scholars, including 91 from Harvard, asking British and American universities to refuse funding from the fossil fuel industry. The student core group concluded in May "a listening-tour" started six months earlier, during which they interviewed people and communities, either local or from other parts of the world, affected in various ways by Harvard financial decisions. The report titled "Whose University? The Case for Reinvestment at Harvard" demands Harvard administration to reinvest in local communities (for instance, in affordable housing) and in clean energies, and to democratize its structures of governance.
**************
I stop my narrative today, August 12, 2022, not because the campaign is over, but because I or other chroniclers need more time to make sense of the most recent events and understand how the argument evolves as Harvard emerges from the pandemic and the USA from its political crisis. A few days ago, the "Inflation Reduction Act" was passed in Congress. It is a historical win for the environment, brought about through haggling and compromise. In six months, the US mid-term elections will determine many aspects of the response to climate change. Will the notion of "climate justice" bear on US policies? Or will another electoral debacle give more power to lobbyists, opportunists, and worse? No one can predict now how long the war in Ukraine will last and what will be its consequences on global politics and economics. At Harvard, a new president will replace Bacow in 2023. Whomever will this person be, it is unlikely they will return to the entrenched position that marked the first phase of the divestment campaign and was painstakingly negotiated in its second phase. This means that Harvard future president and administrators will have to address a worse conflict than the investment of its endowment: the funding of its research and teaching. For divesting from fossil fuel while continuing to receive fossil fuel funding would be like giving up cigarettes while smoking cigars.
**************
Acknowledgements:
I joined the Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard campaign and the Harvard Faculty for Divestment in the spring 2019. I started to establish a timeline and write a narrative in the summer 2020, going from 2012 to 2015. I resumed working on this narrative during the summer 2022. My main published sources are The Crimson and The Harvard Magazine, and I want to thank John Rosenberg, editor of Harvard Magazine, who did an excellent job of documenting the series of FAS meetings devoted to divestment and climate change, and the Crimson teams that regularly covered the divestment campaign. Many thanks to Jim Recht who created the HFD website, to Mei Collins and Cana McGee for their help maintaining and updating it, and to Joyce Chaplin, Ilana Cohen, Jim Engell, and Richard Thomas for their editorial help.