We regret your decision. We regret your continued and deliberate willingness to invest in an industry quickly consigning our generation to life on an inhospitable planet. Understand that you do so in defiance of thousands of students, hundreds of faculty members and members of the Brown community all over the world. You do so in defiance of your own Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which concluded, “The companies recommended for divestment perpetrate grave, indeed egregious, social harm, and there is no possible way to square our profiting from such harm with the values and principles of the University.” This conversation is not over. We will divest from coal.
We reject both of your critiques. First, the coal industry’s harms are, in fact, “sufficiently grave” to warrant divestment, regardless of divestment’s symbolic value. Yes, “the reality is that (coal) still provides 40 percent of global electricity.” But if coal-driven climate change continues unchecked, the reality is that we could lose as much as 20 percent of global gross domestic product. It is precisely coal’s embeddedness in our energy system that makes it so dangerous.
It will take vision and leadership to get us off coal in time. This week, you demonstrated neither. Remember that we only developed manufacturing technology that did not rely on child labor after social outcry demanded an end to the practice. Instead of demanding change, your short-sighted response shackles us to an unsustainable status quo of mountaintop removal, lethal air pollution and climate change that has pushed us to the brink of ecological collapse and massive human suffering.
You argue second that divestment would not send an effective message because it lacks a comprehensive policy agenda to overhaul the global energy economy. This is an impossible standard. A recent Oxford study showed the coal industry is so harmful we cannot in good conscience continue to profit from it. Of course divestment is a means, not an end. How we expedite the transition away from coal to mitigate climate change and avert disaster indeed calls for research and education to which Brown should contribute. But that research and education must not coincide with the coal industry’s continued malpractice and must not disguise and rationalize inaction. Your refusal to divest condones an industry that makes its money marginalizing people here and abroad. How you reconcile this choice with Brown’s mission to “serve the community, the nation and the world” is unclear to us.
We were taken aback by your mention of lunch counter sit-ins as a foil to coal divestment. This appropriation of civil rights protests is opportunistic and ahistorical — not to mention ironic. In the same way you admit coal’s harms while saying no to divestment, white moderates in the 1960s claimed to support integration and equal rights while decrying sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Just as their moderation looks like cowardice and hypocrisy today, your rejection of divestment will look the same when half of Florida, and the vast majority of its economy, is underwater.
Your compliments regarding our “commitment and purpose” are condescending. Time and again you invoked the campaign, without our consent, to promote Brown’s “spirit of open discussion” to donors and prospective students. Meanwhile, you attempted to end this community’s commitment to divestment in a closed-door meeting that welcomed zero students or faculty members but welcomed at least five Corporation members with significant financial ties to the coal industry. And then, you didn’t even take a vote.
Concluding your letter with an allusion to the “social choice fund” was especially cynical — an immoral equivocation to keep donations rolling in. This hedging admits to the community that investment in coal ethically compromises the rest of Brown’s investments. Socially responsible investment should be the rule, not the exception.
We have gone through your established channels — bureaucratic machinery designed to sap the energy from every campaign on campus fighting for social justice — and they have yielded exactly nothing. You say that you are creating a task force to identify “bold and aggressive ways” in which Brown “can lead ... the societal response to climate change.” And we have an idea to get the task force started: Divest From Coal.
We will see you at the next Corporation meeting, and every one after that, until you act in a way that bespeaks the conviction and conscience of your faculty members, alums and students.
Yours in Protest,
Brown Divest Coal
Brown Divest Coal stands in solidarity with students across campus demanding accountability from our administration.
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