Stanford Pulls Its Coal Investments, but Why Haven’t Other Divestment Movements Succeeded?

On Tuesday, Stanford University became the first major university to divest its endowment-a not insignificant $18.7 billion-from coal-mining companies (though not all fossil fuels).

May 9, 2014 | Source: News Week | by Zach Schonfeld

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On Tuesday, Stanford University became the first major university to divest its endowment-a not insignificant $18.7 billion-from coal-mining companies (though not all fossil fuels).

For the students and activists who have spent months or years embroiled in campus divestment campaigns, that’s heartening news. For those who have just started paying attention, it spotlights inaction elsewhere. Why has no other university of national prominence heeded calls to remove investments in fossil fuel companies that profit from pollution linked to climate change?

Stanford is not the only school where students have made the push for climate-related divestment. According to one common figure, the movement has spread to about 300 colleges, paralleling the divestment movement that targeted South Africa over apartheid a generation prior. Those campaigns led to U.S. sanctions against South Africa in 1986 and arguably contributed to economic pressures dismantling the apartheid state in the early 1990s.

But the trustees and administrators who came of age during those protests have spent much of the past year rejecting, delaying, or ignoring fossil fuel divestment efforts altogether. Doubtlessly, many of them object to the parallel.