The College announced Wednesday that it will stop investing in HEI Hotels and Resorts, a company accused of unfair labor practices and discouraging worker unionization, according to Director of Media Relations for the College Justin Anderson.
"For investment strategy and portfolio-specific reasons, Dartmouth has no plans to make future investments in HEI-sponsored funds," Anderson said in a statement to The Dartmouth.
Dartmouth is the last Ivy League institution and latest school to join universities across the country in publicly renouncing future investments in HEI, according to Nathan Gusdorf '12, leader of Occupy Dartmouth and campus efforts to protest investments in HEI. Schools including Harvard University, Yale University, Vanderbilt University and Brown University have all recently stated that they will not reinvest in HEI, while Swarthmore College and Cornell University, which do not currently invest in HEI, have pledged to never invest in the company in the future, he said.
"It's a big win for us," campaign co-organizer Janet Kim '13 said. "It took Princeton three years of campaigning to successfully get their school to disinvest, and we only took three months and applied only a couple of pressure points."
Kim also said that the College's decision to stop investments may prove to be the "tipping point" for HEI Hotels' future.
"HEI is heavily funded by Ivy League endowments," Kim said. "Since we are the last Ivy to pull out of investing, this means the company is going to lose a lot of funding. We're now waiting to see how HEI will respond."
In February, Gusdorf and Kim organized a march on Parkhurst Hall to deliver a letter to College President Jim Yong Kim, the Board of Trustees, the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility and other administrators in protest of the College's investment in HEI.
HEI has faced a number of labor accusations in recent years, including allegations that the company denies basic benefits to workers, Gusdorf said.
"HEI doesn't create jobs," he said. "Their sole economic function is to fire workers and downgrade pay and benefits in order to make more money."
In 2011, the California State Labor Commission found the company guilty of denying required rest breaks to eight employees and ordered the company to pay $41,000 in compensation, according to a press release from the labor rights group Unite Here. HEI was similarly found guilty of illegal retaliatory practices by a Massachusetts court in 2011 and received multiple National Labor Relations Board complaints in 2008, the press release said.
Of the 10 students who delivered the letter, the majority were involved in Occupy Dartmouth, Students Stand with Staff, the Dartmouth affiliate of United Students Against Sweatshops or a combination of all three.
Dartmouth students first came in contact with United Students Against Sweatshops during the organization's northeast regional meeting this past fall, according to Kim. After talking with Brown students who had successfully convinced their university to be the first school to publicly end all future investments in HEI, Dartmouth students began to organize a campaign.
"This is a big victory coming out of Occupy Dartmouth," Gusdorf said. "While [the campaign] wasn't Occupy-specific, this community of activists was formed through Occupy, and it's inspiring and exciting because this is going to lead to more frequent and pronounced political actions. Let it never be said that Occupy never did anything."
Four days after the letter was submitted, the College replied to the student group and said they would not make any further investments in HEI until the ACIR could review the matter, Gusdorf said.
ACIR is an internal College committee composed of faculty and student representatives that meets every spring to make recommendations to the College "on how it should vote specific proxy resolutions for U.S. companies in which the College holds publicly traded shares," according to its website.
"One of the biggest issues is that no one knows about this committee," Gusdorf said. "Even though meetings are technically open, it's not something that Dartmouth students are aware of and we have no idea how members are selected. [ACIR] is a way of satisfying or pretending to satisfy the expectation that this school practices responsible investing. It's not a real means of oversight."
ACIR's public membership list has not been updated on its website since 2010.
Gusdorf said he met with ACIR executive director Allegra Lubrano last term to advise the group on how to present its case to the committee.
"We were told it wasn't fair to HEI to let us speak to the committee unless the company could also speak," Gusdorf said.
Gusdorf said ACIR asked both HEI Hotels and the students to submit paperwork to defend their practices and their claims, respectively, for the committee's consideration.
"I think this was incredibly silly," he said. "It suggests that we're equally as powerful as HEI, and it shows how much the system is rigged against anyone being able to change anything. Our case is a moral and a political one."
Gusdorf said he received an email from Lubrano on the morning of May 2, the day that ACIR was scheduled to meet, with the College's decision to divest. ACIR therefore made a decision before its formal review of the matter was scheduled to start, Janet Kim said. Chief of Staff David Spalding sent a follow-up email to Gusdorf confirming the announcement, he said.
Gusdorf said he believes the College's decision to divest was a political move made in response to the students' campaign efforts.
"They said it was for investment strategy reasons,' and all other schools except for Brown said the same thing," he said. "But it was all about political pressure. Finance people want to remain completely insensitive because often times schools invest in unethical companies."
Gusdorf and Kim said that the College's general reluctance to speak about its investment in HEI is a reflection of a problem of transparency in the College's administration.
"Our school isn't a total democracy, but students and faculty should have some decision-making power and know what's going on and I don't think we meet those goals right now," Gusdorf said.
Gusdorf said they considered various ways to express public discontent over the College's investments and "how aggressive" the group wanted to be with their protest.
"We learned being more militant is often what's necessary to be effective," he said. "Accepting the structure of bureaucracy leads to failure when you're pressing political issues."
In addition to the February march through Parkhurst, the students also marched throughout campus as a "general protest" on May 1, or May Day, which is considered to be International Worker's Day, Gusdorf said.
Kim said she agreed that the group's active protesting techniques contributed to their success.
"If we had gone directly to ACIR, we definitely would have seen a delay," she said. "The College probably would not have overturned their investment so quickly. We got a response from Spalding right after we protested with our letter. Our effectiveness comes from our tactics and the way we put out our message."
Gusdorf and Kim said they are working on two more immediate campaigns to address other issues.
"The HEI victory makes us excited to do more work," Kim said.
In light of upcoming contract discussions with union workers at the College, Gusdorf said he hopes to make a "public demand" for fair contract renegotiation.
"Unions can't engage in protests or other political actions until the negotiations break down," he said. "As I understand, the College is using delaying methods so fewer people are around to be upset with these unfair practices."
Gusdorf said students affiliated with the Occupy movement are also pushing the College to disassociate itself with the Fair Labor Association, which includes companies that have been accused of fraudulent operations in sweatshop factories. Instead, Gusdorf said he would like the College to affiliate with the Worker's Rights Consortium, a group which he said has a "fair code of conduct for how universities source their school apparel to avoid sweatshop factories."
"Students need to have more authority here," Gusdorf said of Dartmouth's campus culture. "We're so subservient all the time to the administration, but this becomes a significant question in light of the new College presidential search. Are students going to have actual voting power or are we always going to be stuck?"
Lubrano could not be reached for comment by press time.
