This October, many in the Brown community may have been delighted to hear that Brown University tied for first place in the 2011 Green Report Card, a report by the Sustainable Endowments Institute that profiles the environmental and social initiatives of over 300 American colleges and universities.
Along with Dickinson College and the University of Minnesota, Brown received all "A" grades in categories ranging from green building to investment priorities. These grades, which are the highest Brown has yet received in the four-year history of the report, might seem a cause for celebration — if only they accurately reflected the realities of Brown's policies. For criteria involving the endowment, which account for three of the nine grading categories ("Endowment Transparency," "Investment Priorities" and "Shareholder Engagement"), they do not.
For "Shareholder Engagement" and "Endowment Transparency," the Green Report Card gives schools high marks for implementing advisory committees on investment responsibility. These committees determine how a university should vote on shareholder resolutions related to sustainability, such as whether or not a corporation should conduct environmental impact surveys on its operations, or act in response to their findings.
Brown has such a committee, the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies (ACCRIP), but this body has not advised Brown on shareholder resolution voting in two years, as Brown no longer has the kind of investments that result in votes. The extent to which the Green Report Card emphasizes the institution of the advisory committee model as the single measure of endowment transparency and shareholder engagement is questionable, but even so, the A's received by Brown in these categories imply a working system where none exists. At the very least, leaving these categories blank would have reflected this reality more honestly.
Fortunately, it is possible to see where some of these misleading grades come from, as the questionnaires that were used to determine the grades are included on the Green Report Card website. The answers that Brown submitted neglect to mention the inactivity of ACCRIP on shareholder resolutions — information which could have prevented Brown from receiving an "A" in "Shareholder Engagement."
Similarly, when Brown claimed on the questionnaire that a list of its votes on shareholder resolutions is available online to members of the school community, it did not clarify that this list never was completed or particularly accessible. It is only possible to determine a small portion of Brown's votes between the years 2006 and 2008. To do so, an intrepid researcher must wade through ACCRIP's 50-page annual reports to see the votes received by the committee. Even then, it is only possible to see ACCRIP's recommendations on how Brown should vote given its ethical principles, as ACCRIP is only an advisory committee. Furthermore, even during those three years, only a fraction of the shareholder resolutions that Brown voted on were ever submitted to ACCRIP. The rest remain invisible to the school community.
Another section of the questionnaire asks if a university has investment policies or managers that consider sustainability factors. Brown's efforts in the area of "Investment Priorities" are tokenistic at best, and center around Brown's Social Choice Fund, which invests in a "green" mutual fund. As of October 2008, the Social Choice Fund had received a single donation of $1.3 million, which is less than 0.07 percent of the value of Brown's endowment. More recent information is not readily available, but it has been noted by former ACCRIP member Daniel MacCombie '09 that the threshold donation level of $25,000 may prevent a majority of potential donors from contributing. While the fund is certainly a step in the right direction, it is clearly a baby step and does not make Brown "A" material.
That Brown is a beneficiary of serious grade inflation is perhaps clearest when comparing Brown's results with those of other schools. According to SEI, Wichita State University, just like Brown University, makes a list of all holdings available to trustees and some senior administrators while only asset allocation is made available to the general public. In fact, the only difference between the two schools is that Wichita State does not make its shareholder voting record available to the school community, while Brown supposedly does, though as we have seen this is not really true.
Nevertheless, by the inscrutable logic of the Green Report Card, Brown received an "A" to Wichita's "F" in transparency. Perhaps even more bizarrely, Columbia, which discloses significantly more investment information than Brown, making a list of equity holdings available to school community members in addition to having an advisory committee like ACCRIP, received a "B" in that category.
As one of the most widely-known and respected measures of the environmental and social commitment of America's colleges and universities, the Green Report Card clearly has an important role to play in setting nationwide standards for campus sustainability. Just as the U.S. News and World Report motivates colleges to compete for the lowest acceptance rates, the Green Report Card has the power to make schools take note of how their sustainability initiatives compare with their competitors'. But it is unclear that the "A" grades that Brown received for its investment policies will set a positive standard for Brown's peers, as Brown's performance in these areas is anything but exceptional.
Ian Trupin '13 is concentrating in COE and wishes he were a polyglot.
