Word: divestment
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...also generates cold hard cash. Harvard’s endowment surpassed the billion-dollar mark in 1970 and has increased twenty-fold since. The University’s practice of aggressive and creative investment, though, has often garnered criticism from the liberal-leaning student body and faculty. Protests and divestment campaigns began in the 1960s when the University founded the Harvard Management Corporation and diversified its assets into stocks and property. The campaigns have ranged from a 20-year, public effort to force the University to divest unconditionally from companies with ties to the apartheid government in South Africa...
...students have responded to the paper’s call for local action. Just last week, two students launched a website that urges Harvard to divest its endowment holdings in Chinese energy firm PetroChina. PetroChina, which has a long history of oil exploration and production in Sudan, lost billions of dollars because of its Sudanese operations during its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in 2000. So far, the student petition has more than 180 student and faculty signatures...
...Harvard is part of an institutional investor community that exacerbates human rights abuses in Sudan and sustains terrorist-sponsoring states by investing in PetroChina, Sinopec, and dozens of other companies active in the world’s pariah states. According to the Center for Security Policy’s Divest Sudan initiative, 87 U.S. public pension funds have invested more than $90 billion dollars in 83 public companies that maintain active business projects in Sudan...
...University’s holdings in PetroChina have drawn criticism from human rights activists who say the company’s close links to oil ventures in Sudan have helped finance that government’s slaughter of its own people. A petition calling on Harvard to divest its shares of PetroChina- had garnered the support of 38 faculty members and 214 students as of yesterday evening...
Benjamin B. Collins ’06, who helped found the petition to divest from PetroChina two weeks ago, said several professors had signed on over the weekend...