This piece reflects the views of the author, Michael Dreiling, and not those of Emerald Media Group. Send your columns or submissions about our content or campus issues to [email protected].
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On May 10, UO President John Karl Scholz asserted that there was “no previous history of divestment at the University of Oregon.” He acknowledges that the university had decided it would no longer acquire new investments in extractive industries. However, in an interview with the Daily Emerald, Scholz said this was “not because of a moral or ethical decision, but rather those were poor investments to invest the university’s portfolio in.”
I was intimately involved with the fossil fuel decision as part of the fossil fuel divestment movement that spread across the world and ignited a multi-year student campaign here at the UO. I am afraid that President Scholz has been misinformed about the decision. It was not about the “portfolio.” Rather, for two years, students, faculty, and community leaders persistently advanced scientific, ethical and political reasoning to expose the problematic nature of continuing with those investments in fossil fuels.
Here is what happened.
Over several years from 2013 to 2016, UO students joined students from hundreds of other campuses across the US and the world to demand their colleges and universities divest from fossil fuel corporations. Here at the UO, students formed Divest UO – later joined by the student’s Climate Justice League – a student group that worked with other groups on this campus, in the Eugene community, and across the nation. They mobilized rallies, meetings with administrators and two sit-ins in Johnson Hall. Faculty members signed petitions pressing the UO administration to work with students on this important public and environmental policy objective.
On January 14, 2015, the University Senate voted unanimously on a resolution calling for the UO Foundation to: “1. Sell its investments in fossil fuel extraction companies within six months of approval of this motion and use its power, connections, and influence to address the issue of climate change; 2. Pledge to stop investing in fossil fuel companies in the future…”
This Senate resolution was preceded by and followed by the vigorous student-led campaign, which included a UO Divest rally in February 2015 as part of 350.org’s Global Divestment Day. The Mayor of Eugene spoke publicly at the event (as did I), backing the students in their demand that the UO Foundation divest. Just a few months later, during Earth Week, UO Divest held rallies again. During this time and into the next academic year, I worked with students from the Climate Justice League and UO Divest, drawing on my experience as a senior faculty member and UO Senator. With tacit approval from the UO President, I joined students in meetings with Scott Pope of Sustainable Wealth Management and the UO Foundation’s former Chief Investment Officer Jay Namyet.
The campaign culminated in the spring of 2016 with rallies, testimony before the Board of Trustees, and two sit-ins at Johnson Hall. Up to that point, over fifty colleges and universities had divested, including Stanford. They were joined by faith communities and numerous successful municipal divestment campaigns in Oregon, such as Multnomah County, Ashland, and our own City of Eugene. A massive street demonstration in New York brought 400,000 people to march for climate action with satellite events around the nation and world, including here in Eugene. In fact, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, run by the descendants of the founder of Standard Oil, divested from fossil fuels before the UO Foundation.
In June 2016, at one of UO Divest’s last public events, students again testified before the UO Trustees to persuade them to vote for divestment. In September 2016, the UO Foundation publicly announced their intention to cease future investments in fossil fuel extraction, which at the time made up less than 1 percent of their financial portfolio. One year later, the Oregon Public University Fund’s Board of Trustees passed a resolution to divest from fossil fuels.
Several years later, the Daily Emerald reflected on this moment and cited UO Foundation president Paul Weinhold, who said that the foundation “has not made any new investments in fossil fuels since its 2016 promise to no longer financially support its extraction.”
Claims that the UO Foundation cannot make decisions based on ethics, politics, or other values are simply wrong, legally speaking. In 2015, the IRS issued guidance that charitable organizations (of which the UO Foundation is one) may use investments to advance their missions, and in fact may do so even if it might not bring the same returns financially but still prudently aligns with the organization’s mission.
The UO can, and has, divested before. If it quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck.
There is a precedent for divestment, and it occurred in a uniquely Oregon way. This history and that decision should not be used as a justification for denying students a hearing on divestment today.
[Michael Dreiling is a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon.]
