After several years of hard work, the Student Assembly has been successful in gaining President Wright's approval for a Student Committee on Investor Responsibility.
The Committee will examine the companies in which the College invests to make sure that they have high standards on environmental and human rights issues.
Originally envisioned by Charlie White '02, Student Body Vice-President Julia Hildreth '05 said the new committee will be, "looking at all the different companies and deciding if that company's policies correspond with the Dartmouth community principles."
"Basically what will happen is Dartmouth will use its power as a shareholder to influence their policy," Hildreth added.
The new committee will hopefully be able to influence the companies by encouraging the College to use its power as a proxy voter to support policies that the committee deems sound.
The committee will also try and release as much information about how the College is investing its money to the student body as possible.
Hildreth also said that the committee would have the arduous task of looking at a "wide variety" of social issues in each of the companies in which the College has invested some of its more than $2 billion endowment.
The College operating budget, which provides the funding for all of the day-to-day functions of the College, lives in part off of the returns from investments in corporations.
The College endowment is made up over 4,900 different funds and is invested in a number of different companies.
While the Committee on Investor Responsibility will be able to make recommendations to both the College and the companies, it will not actually have the power to enact change in the College's investment strategy.
"We are not going to change all of our investments, but it is making a statement of our beliefs," said Hildreth.
Student response has been very positive according to Hildreth, who says the Assembly has already received over 50 applications from students wishing to be on the committee.
The process of reviewing each company will be a long one, but Hildreth hopes the committee can get started within the next few weeks.
