Within half an hour after President Christina Paxson announced the Corporation’s decision not to divest from coal on Sunday, my Facebook News Feed was overrun with criticisms of Paxson’s letter.
Despite rallying alongside more than 100 other student activists last Friday in support of divestment, I did not “like” any of these Facebook posts. While I agree that, as the School for International Training’s Christian Parenti said, it is “morally unconscionable and irresponsible for Brown to vote no to divestment,” I am uncomfortable with the way students framed the decision not to divest. I find it problematic that students equate it with the University refusing to take action on climate change and ignoring student opinion. The premises underlying that logic are, first, that divestment is an effective strategy for tackling climate change, and second, that the University is not taking other steps to address climate change. The first premise is questionable, and the second is false.
Consider the best-case scenario: The Corporation votes to divest. The Huffington Post and the Nation congratulate Brown on taking a courageous stance against one of the most polluting industries in the world. Brown is held up as the first Ivy League institution to divest, leading the way for Cornell and Harvard to revoke their earlier decisions not to divest. And then what? The coal industry continues to profit until the day that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency succeeds in enforcing carbon limits on coal plants and until the technical and financial barriers to integrating renewable energy into the grid are lowered. Transitioning away from coal has been made only marginally easier as a result of universities’ divestment decisions.
The obvious counter-argument to this is that divestment is meant to be symbolic rather than instrumental. Divestment is an ethical choice, an opportunity for the University to stand against oppressive structures and to call for the morals of our society to be realigned.
But that realignment is already happening. Divest or not, few Americans today would argue that the coal industry is not environmentally and socially destructive. Yet still the barriers to building the energy system we desire are enormous. Building a just energy system is as much an economic, technical, political and legal project as it is a moral one. Divestment is but one — as yet unproven — method of contributing to this project.
If divestment is not a proven strategy for addressing climate change, then there are two ways we can read the Corporation’s decision. Arguing that the Corporation has aligned itself with corporate interests over student opinion is one. The other, less popular but equally plausible, is that Paxson and the Corporation have listened to students’ proposal that the University divest from coal as a means of addressing climate change and have determined it is not the most effective or responsible strategy. Simply assuming the validity of the former without leaving room to consider the latter further widens the divide between students and administrators.
I urge students to see the Corporation’s decision as merely one outcome of the campaign that by no means takes away from everything that Brown Divest Coal achieved to date. Amongst other tremendous successes, BDC has amassed over 3,000 signatures, spoken at a meeting with the Corporation and most importantly, galvanized a vast group of students to strive for the moral vision of a just energy system. Students do have power — power that should be leveraged not just to protest the Corporation’s decision, but more importantly, to further other University strategies for addressing climate change.
Rather than view divestment as the priority strategy for addressing climate change, recognize that there is a whole suite of other strategies that Brown can employ. Rather than cast the Corporation’s decision as an attack on student power, respect the conversation space that has been created as a result of the campaign: the Provost’s Task Force on Brown’s Response to Climate Change. This conversation will not be as sexy as campaigning for divestment. It will not make national headlines. It will look like Brown’s equivalent of corporate greenwashing. But it is a conversation the administration is willing to have and a leverage point for students to hold Paxson to her promise to “identify bold and aggressive ways that Brown … can contribute to the societal response to climate change.”
A set of recommendations needs to be presented to the task force — anything from funding more climate change-related internships, to reexamining the possibility of hiring tenured environmental studies faculty members, to asking that the president host an open forum to discuss how the divestment decision was reached. The results that emerge may deliver more concrete impacts than singularly demanding divestment from coal.
I find it deeply troubling that all the letters to the editor in Monday’s edition of The Herald assumed the “common sense” that not divesting is the equivalent of ignoring student opinion and sidelining action on climate change. I cannot emphasize enough how important I think it is for us to reexamine the assumptions underlying our rhetorical arguments. Failing to do so will cripple us from having respectful and productive conversations about the multiple roles that Brown can play in tackling climate and environmental injustice.
Jacqueline Ho ’14 would never want to be a university administrator. She invites you to help her get a better understanding of either side of the debate at jacqueline_ho@brown.edu.
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