Harvard University announced April 4 that it will sell its shares of PetroChina, a China-based oil company with ties to the Sudanese government. Harvard student groups and national organizations have put sustained pressure on the university to divest from businesses cooperating with the Sudanese government's acts of genocide in the Darfur region.
PetroChina's parent company, China National Petroleum Corporation, assists the Sudanese government in the production of oil in the country.
The university's Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility wrote in a public statement, "Oil is a critical source of revenue and an asset of paramount strategic importance to the Sudanese government."
As of Dec. 31, Harvard University held 67,200 shares of PetroChina - a holding currently worth $4.4 million - on the New York Stock Exchange.
Both the U.S. State Department and Congress have called the situation in Darfur genocide.
In February, former Harvard Undergraduate Council President Matthew Mahan and Harvard Black Men's Forum President Brandon Terry, both seniors, wrote a letter to the senior class asking that they refrain from participating in the senior gift, which is a donation to the university, to boycott Harvard's investment in PetroChina.
"We used the senior gift as leverage to get Harvard to divest from PetroChina," Mahan said.
Mahan and Terry's organization, Senior Gift Plus, asked Harvard seniors to instead donate to the Save Darfur Coalition, an affiliate of Doctors Without Borders.
In the open letter to the class of 2005, Mahan and Terry wrote, "We believe that there is a clear moral imperative to withhold your donation until Harvard divests from PetroChina and any other companies as of yet undisclosed that are financially enabling genocide by operating in Sudan."
"We're really happy that Harvard divested from PetroChina," Mahan told The Herald. "It sends the right message - that Harvard needs to be a responsible investor."
However, Mahan said that the Darfur Action Group, a coalition of students seeking to address the Darfur crisis, will not be entirely satisfied "until Harvard discloses it has holdings in other companies in Sudan."
Mahan also suggested that the Harvard Corporation was careful not to set a precedent for divestment amidst controversy.
"They were more specific with PetroChina. I suspect that part of the reason was that they didn't want to have to disclose or divest from other organizations," he said.
Mahan also outlined plans for the Darfur Action group in the future. "We're going to start looking at state pension funds and at other campuses and use Harvard as an example of what (others) can do on their own campus," he said. "We have a moral obligation to make sure we're not enabling it."
Eric Reeves, professor of English at Smith College and an analyst of Sudanese affairs, organizes divestment efforts on a national level. Along with PetroChina, he said, ABB, Alcatel, Siemens and Tatneft are also commonly traded companies that are especially culpable for the genocide in Darfur.
In addition to Harvard, Reeves said, several state pension plans are considering divestment.
"Illinois' state legislature is on the verge of divestment, (and) I've been contacted by Vermont and the state of New York as well as a few others," he said.
Reeves explained that "divestment drives down share prices and makes continued business intolerably expensive.
"Clearly, we need to hold institutional shareholders responsible for looking at all the equities in their portfolio," he said.
At Brown, Vice President and Chief Investment Officer Cynthia Frost said in an e-mail that the University is not invested in PetroChina.
