June 17, 2024: THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS VOTES FOR FOSSIL FUEL DIVESTMENT
(Washington, DC) Delegates at the June 15 meeting of the influential American Association of University Professors (AAUP) overwhelmingly voted to approve a sweeping proposal demanding that TIAA, Vanguard, Fidelity, and state pension boards divest fossil fuels from their funds. This vote throws the moral weight and intellectual analysis of the country’s university and college faculty behind fossil fuel divestment. Their goal is to help put the brakes on climate change.
The proposal passed with only a single opposing vote out of 100 delegates present. Now it goes to the AAUP executive committee for ratification and to direct its implementation.
“The great minds in America’s universities are profoundly responsible for our understanding of the climate threat; it is fitting that their colleagues are doing their part to help prevent this great catastrophe before it wrecks the lives of the students we educate.”
Bill McKibben Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies, Middlebury College, June 15, 2024
Support for the proposal signals a further US cultural shift toward fossil fuel divestment, and points to a disconnect between institutions that continue to invest in fossil fuels and influential stakeholders who see fossil fuels as the cause of unfolding climate change.
For its part, TIAA has some $1.3 trillion of retirement funds under its management from five million university professors, teachers, nonprofit workers, and staff. It holds at least $78 billion in fossil fuels assets and remains among the top five coal bond-holders in the world.
Said Daniel Segal, a history and anthropology professor emeritus at Pitzer College who is among those spearheading the proposal, “The landslide democratic vote at the AAUP national meeting conveys the collective and clarion voice of higher education faculty: Get planet-destroying fossil fuels out of our retirement funds! We owe our students, and all young people, a liveable planet.”
Read: “Your pension, your future, and your students’ future,” an Academe blog post, by Don Nonini, Sheldon Pollock, and Dan Segal.
An excerpt from the proposal (the full proposal, which is short, is here):
BE IT RESOLVED, that the Association, in consultation with AAUP chapters, will urge state pension boards, college and university committees and administrators managing the retirement funds of its members, and the boards of Vanguard, Fidelity, and TIAA, and the AAUP Foundation to:
enact an immediate moratorium on all new direct investments in fossil fuels, including extraction and processing, pipelines, and power plants;
develop and execute a prudent plan to divest fully and without delay from all current coal, oil, and gas investments for corporations or other entities that extract, transport, trade or otherwise contribute to the production of coal, oil and gas;
reinvest funds in renewable energy projects, especially those that benefit displaced workers and frontline communities; and
BE IT RESOLVED, that the Association will divest all fossil fuel investments in AAUP 501(c)(6) accounts.
