Co-authored with Prof. Matt Bakker
This editorial is different from the countless Catalyst articles you’ve read lamenting injustice and indifference. This is a call to action.
It is a simple demand that Colorado College change its investment policy to comply to the fullest extent possible with our College’s “core values,” including our “ethic of environmental sustainability” and our commitment to “social responsibility at local, national, and global levels.”
As Wyatt Miller put it in the February issue of Cipher, “[the] fantasy is over… the bubble is burst.” The release of information about the types of industries and corporations that the Colorado College endowment is invested in has a certain shock value, triggering the proverbial “WTF?!” moment in many of us.
Such reactions, these immediate sensations of anger and frustration all too often lead to nothing more than individualized discontent and resignation. If we are lucky, we engage in some heated, if fleeting, conversations about the issue in our classrooms and amongst our friends.
However, it has always been an illusion that our conversations, interactions, and educational trajectories could in any way be disconnected from the broader social problems plaguing our world — from poverty and inequality to injustice and exploitation, human and environmental. The relatively comfortable lifestyle so many of us live implicates us in these broader social issues and processes; as the end users of products flowing through global commodity chains connecting distant peoples and places across the world, we are all constantly involved, consciously or not, in the global economic processes generating sickening profits for a few and grotesque poverty and destitution for so many.
The endowment can no longer be CC’s dirty little secret; we must take responsibility for it and its consequences.
We reject the notion that the management of our endowment must be driven by a singular focus on “return on investment” and ignore the social and environmental consequences of the corporations and investment funds where we place the institution’s money. We reject the idea that CC must conform to a vile status quo that puts our comfort above the lives of those less fortunate.
It is high time that our community engages in an open and honest discussion of our endowment’s impact on the wider world; it is time that we take action to divest from interests that we as a community abhor.
Our shared revulsion must be channeled into something more sustained and intentional: a collective conversation amongst all of us who make up Colorado College (students, staff, faculty, administrators, and trustees) to identify our values and our expectations regarding the investments made in our name, to make explicit our demands for the “responsible investment” of the College’s endowment funds in ways that reflect our community’s core values.
Beyond our individual roles as consumers, the endowment question brings to light an even more significant manner in which our lifestyle is connected to and implicated in the creation and reproduction of so many troubling aspects of our global economic system. Our collective community and institution is investing in and profiting from, a set of industries and corporations that operate with blatant disregard of the human and environmental consequences of their practices and moneymaking operations. In essence, the comfortable conditions in which we live and work on this campus are being paid for through social injustice and environmental degradation.
The question becomes: are we, as a community and an institution, comfortable with this situation? Are we willing to continue with the fiction that our investment decisions can be guided solely by a single-minded pursuit of profit maximization, without any concern for the social and environmental practices and consequences of the businesses we invest in?
We hope not. And we dare to imagine that things could be different.
Alex Kronman 