Last weekend, President Christina Paxson sent an email to the Brown community informing us that the University would not divest from coal. This was a setback for Brown Divest Coal, a group that has been working to convince administrators to remove the University’s endowment assets in various utilities and mining companies. Brown Divest Coal believes coal is damaging to both the environment and human health.
I don’t question the importance of socially responsible initiatives. It’s undoubtedly important for Brown students to voice our concerns and actively work to combat inequalities, policy failures or immoral practices. But I’d like to highlight a practice of Brown Divest Coal that I observed — one I seriously hope the organization will reconsider in the future.
On Oct. 23, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch hosted an on-campus information session for its wealth management and global banking divisions. As someone interested in the firm, I hoped to use this brief hour and a half to learn more about the firm’s internship program and meet some of the bank’s employees. After the presentation, students were allowed to approach company representatives in what was intended to be a networking session for the internship.
I waited to ask my questions with a group of about six other students surrounding the keynote speaker, a client portfolio and market manager. As I stood there, I noticed a student had begun to ask a question completely unrelated to the internship program, wealth management or banking. The student prodded the speaker about Bank of America’s energy practices, criticizing its investment in coal and asking what they would do to change their policies moving forward. Quickly thereafter, another student jumped in and asked about the CEO of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan ’81 P’14, and his investments in coal as a member of the Corporation.
Let me put this in context. At an event designed to engage students interested in finance, present job opportunities and provide information about wealth management and banking, two “socially active” Brown students spent several minutes discussing the energy practices of the firm with someone whose only job is to deal with client portfolio management. These students somehow expected an employee of a regional wealth management arm to give a meaningful answer as to how a corporation with over $2 trillion in assets was going to manage its energy investments.
These students frustrated me for several reasons. First, they wasted the representative’s valuable time, when he could have been answering our questions about working at the firm. In addition, I was ticked off by how self-important they made themselves seem. Why not consider, for a moment, that these employees took the time to coordinate an event with the Center for Careers and Life After Brown, made the trip to campus on a week day and set aside time to meet students actually interested in the internship program? Was it really that essential to cause visible discomfort to an employee who has absolutely no operational control of Bank of America and to ruin the friendly atmosphere of the ongoing conversation? The obvious answer is no.
I do not intend to disparage Brown Divest Coal’s mission, as out-of-line as those two students’ actions were. But I am trying to point out a broader issue of being cognizant of boundaries and really thinking through what one does in the purported name of good. Two years ago, Goldman Sachs canceled a visit to the University for fear that members of the College Hill Occupy Wall Street movement would disrupt the recruiting session. We are gaining a reputation as a campus that is hostile to anyone from the financial industry.
Completely ignore the fact that it’s disrespectful to both interested students and to recruiters who take time out of their full schedules to travel to Brown. Disregard that it’s absurd for Brown students to suggest they, in the name of clean energy, have a better idea of how a business as complex as Bank of America should allocate its investments and assets than those running the firm. All of this aside, the practice of sabotaging an info session is still a horribly ineffective way to achieving divestment.
Whether it’s for the environment or to reduce executive compensation, pushing your messages onto a few recruiters will never encourage social responsibility. I don’t care what sociological model of change one looks at. No bank will alter its business practices because a few students disturb one of its on-campus events. In addition to being largely useless, these efforts show disrespect for students who are actually trying to connect to firm employees to find jobs in one of the toughest labor markets in recent memory.
Jay Upadhyay ’15 is concentrating in economics.
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