In an email sent to the school’s students, faculty, and staff, Middlebury president Laurie Patton wrote this week that the college’s board of trustees would, over the course of the year, “review and announce a set of actions” to advance the school’s environmental commitments, including working with the school’s endowment manager to “address the composition of our endowment with respect to fossil fuels.”
Student and faculty activists on campus have been calling for the school to divest from fossil fuels for six years. In 2013, the college publicly declined to divest for the time being, calling the move largely symbolic and too practically difficult.
But activists say they think the school has turned a corner. Divest Middlebury, a campus group dedicated to making the school go carbon-free, presented to the school’s board of trustees last week. The group wrote in the student paper The Middlebury Campus that their presentation was met with “applause and support from members of the Board,” and that trustees were “engaged and curious.”
“This is enormous news and an unprecedented recognition (on behalf of our administration) of the climate crisis and our own institution’s culpability in it,” Cora Kircher, a junior at Middlebury and a member of Divest Middlebury, wrote in an email to VTDigger in reference to Patton’s statement.
The divestment movement, which was founded by Middlebury professor and environmentalist Bill McKibben, has convinced about 150 colleges and universities worldwide to come on board, including in Sterling College, Goddard College, and Green Mountain College in Vermont. But none of schools in the state that have decided to divest have endowments near the size of Middlebury’s.
Patton’s email made no specific commitments. But it said trustees “strongly affirmed their belief that climate change is one of the most profound challenges facing our world today, and that future generations depend upon effective action and education in the present.”
It also promised the board would also look into “further increasing the energy efficiency of our campus; investing in renewable sources of energy to reduce our carbon profile; evaluating and implementing a carbon-pricing initiative.”
A little over 5 percent of the school’s roughly $1 billion endowment is invested in the fossil fuel sector, according to college spokesperson Sarah Ray. Just 0.7 percent is invested in the so-called top 200 companies that are the primary targets of the divestment movement.