For the last several years, climate change activist Bill McKibben has been traveling the country encouraging colleges to stop investing their endowments in the fossil-fuel sector. But it looks like that message is a tough sell at Middlebury College, where McKibben is a scholar-in-residence.
Yesterday, Midd released a statement explaining why it won’t be withdrawing its investments from the fossil-fuel industry any time soon. In it, president Ronald D. Liebowitz explains that the school’s administration and Board of Trustees took “a hard look” at pursuing a no-fossil-fuels investment strategy and decided against it.
In his letter, Liebowitz touts Middlebury’s existing environmental initiatives, which include the first-in-the-nation environmental studies program of which McKibben is a part. But Liebowitz also explains that Midd’s nearly $1 billion endowment covers about 18 percent of the school’s operating expenses. He describes the “fiduciary responsibility” of the school’s Board of Trustees to manage that fund with the bottom line in mind.
“If it is to continue to fund operations at comparable or increasing levels in the years ahead, the endowment must grow through new gifts and, especially, through the returns it earns on its investments,” he writes.
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Why would a student at Middlebury want the school to divest from Dad’s oil company?
Do you have the courage(heart) to post the following?
excerpt: http://www.counterpunch.org/20…
350.org front man, Bill McKibben tells us that “It’s not all right to be profiting from the wreckage of the planet†yet he will not tell us that the unparalleled violence upon the planet and its most vulnerable peoples is inherently built into the system of industrialized capitalism. He will not tell you the simple fact that every day this system is allowed to continue represents one more day of profiteering from the wreckage of the planet and brings us one day closer to our shared global annihilation. Further, McKibben undermines any campaign that attempts to bring this most critical issue to the forefront of the global debate.
Wait… Middlebury doesn’t trust McKibben with their endowment money… get right out of town!
It might be because chicken little is a nutjob and fossil fuels is a lucrative economic investment strategy…
WHOA! 98 MILLION twitter followers?! Does the person who wrote this even know what twitter is?
Try 98 thousand.
FYI, the last link in the article is broken. Would like to read that letter if possible.