The Push for Divestment: A History

Thirty-five years ago, a group of 50 students gathered outside the Allen Building, chanting, “Duke, Duke, we can’t hide. We know we support apartheid. Divest now.”

They demanded that Duke divest its holdings operating in apartheid South Africa. By May 1986, after campouts and class strikes, the Duke Board of Trustees, like those at hundreds of universities across the country, relented.

The combined divestments fueled international pressure, contributing to the racist South African regime’s ultimate collapse. College students, by leveraging their schools’ financial and social power, had helped drive real change.

In 2014, students once again called on Duke to sell holdings, this time in fossil fuel corporations that they condemned for funnelling billions of dollars into killing climate change legislation, polarizing the public and spreading disinformation. Duke declined.

Two years ago, Duke students made another push for fossil fuel divestment. But after thousands of petition signatures, dozens of events, 11 Chronicle op-eds, 96 pages of memos and a unanimous Duke Student Government Senate resolution, Duke refused to commit to divestment. (Both authors of this piece attended meetings of the Duke Climate Coalition, a prodivestment group, during this time period, and one wrote an op-ed in The Chronicle supporting divestment.)

We spoke to student divestment leaders and administrators to learn from their experience. Students told us a story about bureaucratic inertia, delay and what they consider a battle for the future of our fragile planet. Administrators, however, argue that divestment would accomplish nothing because Duke’s fossil fuel holdings are very small.

What follows is the history of the push for fossil fuel divestment at Duke, and of the clashing perspectives that have prevented it from happening.

2012: Doing the math

It was November 2012. Author and environmentalist Bill McKibben had booked a talk at Duke. His mission: convince the campus and the world to “do the math” on climate change, then mobilize to avert global catastrophe.

The math in question first appeared that summer in a viral front-page Rolling Stone article, where McKibben broke down the climate crisis in three numbers: two, 565 and 2,795. Two degrees Celsius, the conservative consensus for the rise in global temperatures beyond which consequences like extreme weather, rising seas and food shortages threaten civilization itself; 565 billion tons, the carbon dioxide we can burn and stay within that two-degree limit; 2,795 billion tons, the weight of known fossil fuel reserves. If you do the math, you will realize we have to keep 80% of known reserves in the ground.

Oil companies are betting against this goal, and they possess staggering geopolitical power. In 2011, oil producers spent $150 million lobbying American legislators against climate action and received $20 billion in direct federal subsidies from the United States alone. So McKibben, who has covered the ecological crisis since the 1980s, set out to take on Goliath with a new strategy—divestment.

In theory, divestment is simple: You sell any stock you or your company holds in the top 200 fossil fuel producers, then make a public commitment never to reinvest. A 2013 Carbon Tracker study showed that over the next decade, producers will spend up to $6.74 trillion tapping fossil fuel reserves that would be “unburnable” under the two-degree goal. By halting money flows from banks, governments and institutions like universities, divestment sends a market signal for clean energy transition.

Divestment may also make financial sense, with the energy sector underperforming the general market. Expensive fossil infrastructure risks becoming “stranded” as climate policies worldwide reduce demand and prioritize

cleaner alternatives. And divestment proponents argue it helps fight the far-ranging consequences of climate collapse, which include novel diseases, climate migration and food insecurity, among many others.

2012 and 2013: A Fringe Cause

Corrie Hannah, Nicholas School ‘18, got on board. In 2012, she was a first-semester Ph.D. candidate, researching Tajikistan’s water governance and trying to get involved on campus. McKibben, after wrapping up his speaking tour, dispatched a representative to recruit student divestment leaders. Hannah attended an interest meeting on campus, and Divest Duke was born.

In the beginning, it was slow going. The 10-to-15-person team relied heavily on the playbook (both figurative and literal—after we spoke on the phone, Hannah sent us a 34- page Duke Partnership for Service handbook

on “How to Advocate for Investment Responsibility at Duke”) of previous divestment movements, which included the South Africa protests of the 1980s, a successful push to divest from Sudan in 2007 and Duke’s 2012 commitment to shareholder advocacy against conflict minerals.

Divest Duke collected around 100 petition signatures, put flyers on cars during basketball games and worked for the revival of the Advisory Council on Investment Responsibility, which then-President Richard Brodhead eventually reinstated in December 2013.

In Spring 2013, Divest Duke drew up a proposal informed by the University’s broader environmental policy—since 2007, Duke has claimed to be on track for carbon neutrality by 2024, though this plan has notable caveats— and marched into Brodhead’s office hours.

“And they were like, ‘Well, that’s nice, but we can’t do anything,’” Hannah recalled.

They had hoped to secure Brodhead as an early ally, but Hannah said he talked about secret, not-to-be-tampered-with investment algorithms and said he would need more evidence to divest.

“I just felt like he was in this ivory tower that had no connection to the students at all,” she said. Brodhead did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Divestment, in those early days, was sometimes a hard sell even to fellow environmentalists. Laughing, Hannah told us how one meeting with an animal conservation club went rapidly south. “I mean, we were not popular,” she said. In Fall 2013, as her doctoral coursework intensified, Hannah took a step back from Divest Duke, but other Blue Devils flocked to the cause.

2013 to 2015: “It wasn’t enough”

One of those recruits was then-doctoral candidate Danica Shaffer-Smith, Nicholas School ‘18. Like Hannah, Shaffer-Smith joined Divest Duke for its 2012 beginnings. Her work centered on a ferocious research and awareness campaign spanning several months in Fall 2013.

Divest Duke scheduled a meeting with ACIR for December 2013. In the semester leading up to the meeting, they held an official campus launch—expanding their reach beyond the Nicholas School of the Environment—and began building student support with the help of a Green Corps organizer.

They protested the Keystone XL pipeline in front of Perkins Library. They persuaded alumni to call Brodhead’s office hundreds of times. They tabled for weeks, collecting 3,457 signatures on a divestment petition.

A scroll through the now-dormant Divest Duke Facebook page reveals dozens of striking portraits. One depicts a group of stone-faced students lined up in front of the Chapel, holding a sign with the phrase “it’s time to end this toxic relationship” scrawled in red and black. Other photos show students standing on Abele Quad, on the Marketplace steps, in the Bryan Center, signs aloft or arms linked with Durham community members.

The divestment campaign earned national attention, and student leaders, though unable to access data proprietary to Duke Management Company (DUMAC)—the corporation managing Duke’s investments—made real investigative progress. Shaffer-Smith estimates the core team devoted 50 hours per week to drafting a proposal for ACIR.

“It was comparable to trying to prepare to meet with the Senate,” she recalls.

And it wasn’t enough. Divest Duke met with ACIR once in December 2013, again in April 2014 and twice in October 2014 before ACIR, then led by James Cox, Brainerd Currie professor of law, published its November 2014 Report on Fossil Fuels, which stated there was “a lack of clarity that divestment will have the desired impact.”

“I feel like we did everything we were asked,” Shaffer-Smith said. “And it wasn’t enough, and we didn’t know what would be enough for the administration.”

She described a tantalizing dance between students and administrators. Just when leaders thought they had a handle on ACIR’s investment criteria, they would be met with a new counterargument, which, given their limited resources and data access, they couldn’t always parry.

“It was like jumping for a moving bar without having any sense of where it was,” she said.

Cox did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Throughout, Shaffer-Smith said she and the rest of the Divest Duke team felt exploited by administrators unwilling to share in the research work.

“It wasn’t a collaborative effort, though we would have loved for it to be,” she said.

2015 and 2016: Forging ahead

Though discouraged, the Divest Duke leaders forged on, writing administrators “divestment valentines” and hosting faculty panels on climate policy. In the fall of 2015, they merged with organizers pressuring Duke to use corporate shareholder power to push for renewable energy, forming the Duke Climate Coalition.

Rachel Weber, Trinity ‘16, had become involved that spring and led divestment efforts until her graduation. She remembered coalition-building with organizations like the Black Student Alliance, hosting a staged wedding between Duke and fossil fuels and attracting local reporters to ACIR open forums—but more than anything she recalled how working on divestment felt.

“[Administrators] make it purposely really hard to get the information that you need to do your job right, and you spend so much time wading through the bullshit of how that works just to uncover the information that you need,” she said.

By her senior year, she was burned out.

2017 to 2019: A New Hope

Following Weber’s graduation, divestment organizing lay dormant for about a year until Seaver Wang, Nicholas School ‘19, and Ethan Miller, Trinity ‘19, took up the mantle.

According to Weber and Miller, Cox had staunchly opposed divestment, but his replacement as ACIR chair, Lawrence Baxter, David T. Zhang professor of the practice of law, shared concerns about the climate crisis.

When we interviewed him, Baxter said that at the time he asked DCC to put together research on divestment because ACIR had “no resources” to work with. So Wang and Miller jumped through the hoops, drafting four research-heavy memos to address ACIR’s concerns.

ACIR’s 2014 report had argued divestment would serve a primarily symbolic function, claiming that divesting Duke’s minimal direct holdings would have little impact on the global market. In their 2018 response, DCC highlighted the collective momentum of divesting universities, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds. The students also proposed partial divestment from coal and oil sands, two industries notorious for heavy pollution and low profit margins.

In addition, the 2014 ACIR report claimed “sufficient discourse on the topic” had not occurred, and that Duke should offer companies “reasonable opportunity to alter [their] activities.” In response, DCC argued that fossil fuel corporations have undermined honest discourse for decades by funding misinformation. After citing several examples of coordinated industry attacks on climate science, the students argued that “such actions suggest that fossil fuel corporations are unlikely to debate climate policy in good faith, and that any efforts by Duke University to promote positive change via shareholder advocacy will likely fail to produce meaningful results.”

In April 2018, DCC met with ACIR, then responded to the committee’s concerns and drafted a formal divestment resolution. They won allies across campus: DCC collaborated with the Duke Interdisciplinary Social Innovators on a 40-page report summarizing the financial case for divestment, the DSG Senate voted unanimously to call for divestment and a majority of the Graduate and Professional Student Council supported the measure. Students also met with the Executive Committee of the Academic Council to discuss a faculty resolution backing divestment. Expecting support from ACIR, DCC leaders decided to delay the faculty vote so that any Academic Council decision could align with a pro-divestment ACIR recommendation.

to join the Fossil Fuel Investment (FFI) ACIR subcommittee, allowing them to see DUMAC’s proprietary investment data after signing nondisclosure agreements. Wang and Miller’s hope was that by bolstering community support with their hundreds of research hours, they could make divestment an irresistible position.

ACIR rejected the DCC resolution more than a year later, in May 2019. The report both reiterated existing talking points and added new objections. Divestment, ACIR argued, would constitute “polarizing” hypocrisy and set an “ambiguous precedent.” The report stated that “the [FFI] Subcommittee concluded that divestment would not be an effective contribution to the reduction of [greenhouse gas emissions]. Accordingly, the Subcommittee recommended, and the ACIR unanimously agreed, against a mandate to DUMAC to divest.”

After thousands of hours of activist work and support from two generations of students, every ACIR member had voted to oppose divestment. But why did the FFI subcommittee—which included DCC’s leaders—recommend against divestment?

Read the rest of this story, including the reasons divestment didn’t happen and the administrative perspective on the issue, at chron.it/divestment

Editor’s Note: Margot Armbruster, one of the authors of this piece, is also an opinion managing editor for The Chronicle.