Following the arrests of 90 people during protests on campus Wednesday night, College President Sian Leah Beilock sent an email to the Dartmouth community. In it, she wrote that “the Board has a clearly articulated process for considering [divestment], which was explained to student protesters.” However, a close examination reveals that this process, the criteria underlying divestment decision making and the committee overseeing it are far from clear or accountable. The goal of the “clearly articulated process” actually seems to be an attempt to mire divestment discussions in administrative lingo and to provide administrators with a talking point for their lack of action and accountability to the Dartmouth community. In order to make divestment possible, Dartmouth must change the criteria, governance and process by which it evaluates divestment proposals.
Dartmouth has a proud history of divestment following student activism, with multiple cases of divestment in response to severe human rights violations — including apartheid, genocide and the violation of Indigenous land treaty rights. In 1989, Dartmouth divested from South African apartheid following student advocacy that included an encampment on the Green. In 1993, Dartmouth divested from the James Bay HydroQuebec dam project in response to student amplification of Indigenous advocacy opposing the dam. In 2005, Dartmouth discouraged investment in select companies operating in Sudan in reaction to the genocide perpetrated in Sudan’s Darfur region. In 2012, Dartmouth divested from companies that manufacture or produce tobacco or tobacco projects. Finally, in 2021, following an eight-year-long campaign I was extraordinarily proud to be a part of, Dartmouth divested from fossil fuel companies.
The divestment process, as outlined in the policy, functions as follows: a President-appointed committee of unknown membership will review proposals for divestment, if and only if a written proposal documents a set of obscene and irrelevant criteria, and requires that all members of the Dartmouth community — including faculty, staff and alumni — have come to a consensus to support the proposal. After this extraordinary burden has been met and the committee has reviewed the proposal and provided a recommendation, the President will decide if the recommendation merits referral to the Board of Trustees, who will then decide to vote on the issue.
This process lacks accountability and transparency, allowing members of the administration to dismiss calls for divestment without explaining why.
The requirement that divestment proponents must document “consensus” with “concrete and detailed evidence” within the Dartmouth community, while ostensibly well-meaning, is impossible on a practical level. Neither alumni nor staff have participatory governance bodies to establish consensus. Further, placing this burden of proof on divestment advocates is ridiculous. A more reasonable proxy would be to count signatures from students, faculty, staff and alumni, or a resolution passed by the Student Assembly — an established mechanism of participatory governance.
Indeed, one of the main issues with the divestment process lies in the criterion that this board bases their decisions on. One criterion requires the exhaustion of all practicable shareholder rights to modify a company’s behavior, or the determination that pursuing such rights would likely be futile. Given that divestment proponents would have no input into shareholder voting ahead of full-scale Board approval of divestment, this criterion is both misleading and irrelevant. Another criterion is that divestment must materially impact and correct the company’s injurious behavior. This criterion both makes the moral statement that something must be impactful in order to be right — divestment works to revoke the social license of unethical companies in addition to its material impact. Because of the inclusion of poorly crafted, irrelevant criteria, it becomes very difficult for any divestment proposal to be adequately reviewed.
In addition, the committee responsible for reviewing divestment proposals completely lacks transparency. This lack of transparency is problematic for a committee tasked with weighing divestment proposals that reflect the Dartmouth community’s values and priorities. The President has sole discretion to appoint and remove Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility members, with no process for ensuring a balanced representation of students, faculty, staff and alumni. Instead, Dartmouth should open up spots on the ACIR based on election results, ensuring that the community is able to maintain a voice in decisions regarding divestment.
Over the last handful of decades, divestment has proven to be a vital tool for the College to participate publicly via denouncement of extraordinary injustices across the world. However, under the current policies governing decision-making around divestment and ACIR membership, Dartmouth will be unable to use this power. There should be no burden to prove “consensus” among the Dartmouth community; instead, a threshold number of petition signatories should deem a divestment proposal worthy of review. Finally, the criteria for evaluating divestment must be reworked such that the Dartmouth community can amplify its “voice in the wilderness” with a powerful tactic.
Edel Galgon ’22 is a former member of Divest Dartmouth, a student environmental justice advocacy group. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
