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NEWS
THE TUFTS DAILY
VOLUME LXXXII, ISSUE 46
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MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, MASS.
Tuesday, december 14, 2021
tuftsdaily.com
Smith reflects on progress, future of divestment from fossil fuels
by Liz Shelbred and Peri Barest
News Editor and Deputy News Editor
University President Anthony Monaco announced in February that Tufts would prohibit direct investments in 120 coal and tar sands companies. In addition, the university committed to investing between $10 to 25 million in positive impact funds, which seek to make a positive environmental impact in addition to generating a return on investment over the next five years. These efforts to advance sustainability come after demands from student groups, faculty and a Responsible Investment Advisory Group (RIAG) to divest from fossil fuels. This semester, the Tufts Investment Office has continued to pursue these goals, publishing a website and dashboard with updates on their progress and explanations of how the endowment functions.
Tufts’ endowment and investments
The endowment is a pool of money maintained over time to provide long-term financial stability for the university. Each year, a sum of money called the payout is taken from the endowment to fund the university’s operation. The remainder is invested to generate more money for the university. In recent years, the payout has represented around 5% of the endowment and has provided about 10% of the university’s revenue, although these amounts vary by year depending on the value of the endowment.
Chief Investment Officer Craig Smith emphasized the importance of the stability and flexibility that the endowment provides.
“Last year, [with] the pandemic, the university was able
see ENDOWMENT, page 2 Bendetson Hall is pictured on Feb. 14, 2021.
ANN MARIE BURKE / THE TUFTS DAILY
Tufts reports 463 COVID-19 cases this semester
by Chloe Courtney Bohl and Peri Barest
Deputy News Editors
Tufts reported 463 cases of COVID-19 across campuses this semester, or approximately 33 per week, according to Patrick Collins, Tufts executive director of media relations. This represents a 12.6% decrease in the number of cases compared to last spring, when the university reported 530 cases.
According to Collins, 321 of these cases came from the Medford campus, 32 came from the Grafton campus, 105 came from the Boston campus, and five cases were not attributed to any campus, as of Dec. 11.
Christoper Sedore, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, told the Daily that as of Dec. 7, an estimated 1,720 students have been considered close contacts of COVID-19-positive individuals.
Cases reached their peak this semester the week of Sept. 13, the first full week of classes, when the university reported a positivity rate of 2% compared to the semester’s average positivity rate of 0.25%. The number of students in isolation peaked at 93 during the same week.
The university announced it would increase testing frequency from one to two times per week for undergraduate students on Sept. 14. Students continued testing twice weekly for the rest of the semester. In addition to the increase in testing frequency, the university announced on Oct. 4 that it would add a third modular housing unit with 44 additional beds on the Medford/Somerville campus in response to the increase in COVID-19 cases.
Unlike last fall, students who traveled off campus for Thanksgiving break were not required to quarantine or take any additional safety measures beyond regular surveillance testing. The number of students in isolation on the Medford campus more than tripled — rising from 17 to 52 — between Nov. 27, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, and Dec. 8.
A new variant of the COVID19 virus was detected in South Africa on Nov. 24. Two days later, the World Health Organization convened, naming the new variant omicron and urging countries to enhance surveillance for the variant.
The Boston Globe reported the first case of the omicron variant in Massachusetts on Dec. 5. Michael Jordan, university infection control health director, said that the tests Tufts
see CORONAVIRUS, page 3
ARTS / page 5 Melt gives heartwarming performance CIRCLE survey shows media creation encourages confidence and civic engagement in teens
by Madeline Wilson
Contributing Writer
A study by Tisch College’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) examined how teens below the voting age engage with social media in ways that encourage political engagement and activism. The survey, conducted from September to November of 2020 and published in October of 2021, found that teens who engage in media creation about social and political issues feel politically informed and empowered to engage in political conversations.
The study was spearheaded by Abby Kiesa, deputy director of CIRCLE; Madeline McGee, a diverse democracy fellow with CIRCLE; and Sara Suzuki, a postdoctoral research fellow with CIRCLE. A total of 1,847 teens in the United States aged 14 to 17 were surveyed between September and November of 2020. They were asked about their online activity, their engagement with social and political activism online and their experiences with media literacy in and out of school.
The study found that nearly 45% of teens surveyed have engaged in at least one of three forms of media creation or sharing on the subject of social or political issues, including submitting content about politics or social issues to a website or media platform, creating a visual to raise awareness for a social or political issue or sharing an experience online to raise awareness.
Ruby Belle Booth, a research assistant at CIRCLE, discussed how teens engage with politics and activism online.
“Teens specifically get a ton of information about politics online,” Booth said. “More teens said they saw information about the 2020 election on these platforms than they heard from their family and friends or at school.”
The survey also found that 82% of teens who created media in the past month said they felt more informed about politics and 80% said that their voice was more powerful as a result.
McGee explained how media creation translates to other forms of political participation among teens.
“Online engagement does translate to offline engagement, and young people who take part in some of these conversations in online spaces are actually more likely to go on to participate in [what] some people might call ‘realer’ forms of civic participation,” McGee said.
Kiesa highlighted the importance of encouraging teens below the voting age to become civically engaged and elaborated on why
NICOLE GARAY / THE TUFTS DAILY The Tufts Cannon is pictured on Sept. 24, 2020. The cannon was painted with a message encouraging people to vote in the 2020 presidential election.
see CIRCLE, page 3
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ENDOWMENT
continued from page 1 to increase the payout, which helped tremendously on the financial side of support and all the additional costs and all the complications we ran into,” Smith told the Daily in an interview.
The pool of money that the university invests is divided into three different forms of ownership. About 1% of this money is invested as a direct holding, meaning that the university has direct influence over that money and uses it to buy stocks in whatever company it chooses.
Separately managed accounts, or SMAs, are a form of indirect investment that represent another 10% of the money Tufts invests. Each SMA is controlled by a third-party manager, who is a specialist hired by the university to make decisions about where and how much to invest on the university’s behalf. Tufts can work with the third-party managers to outline its investment goals and values and customize its investments within the SMAs.
The remaining 89% of Tufts’ investments are in commingled funds. Like SMAs, commingled funds are a form of indirect investment, but, unlike SMAs, in commingled funds the university’s money is pooled with other investments for a more efficient, cost-effective investment strategy. Of these commingled funds, 56% are marketable, meaning they are invested in stocks and bonds that are publicly traded. An additional 28% are invested in private equity and venture capital, with 11% invested in private diversifiers and 5% held as liquidity.
“This is, … for institutions of our size, how the vast majority of money is invested,” Smith said of commingled funds. “Customization is very hard to achieve in that space.”
Since 99% of the university’s invested funds are in indirect investments — where the university has less control over the technicalities of the investments — divestment from the fossil fuel industry can be challenging, Smith said.
Current indirect investments in energy
The RIAG’s recommendation that Tufts divest from and prohibit future investments in the 100 largest coal reserve and 20 largest tar sands reserve companies — which was approved by the board of trustees in February — specifically concerned Tufts’ direct investments. While Tufts now has zero direct investments in coal and tar sands companies, it continues to hold indirect investments in these sectors. In fiscal year 2021, 0.7% of Tufts’ assets were exposed to the 120 coal and tar sands companies that the RIAG identified as the main contributors to fossil fuels via indirect investments in commingled funds, according to the Tufts Investment Office’s website.
In addition to coal and tar sands companies, Tufts invests both directly and indirectly in companies within the broad energy sector, including oil and gas companies. According to the investment office’s report on its portfolio’s exposure to broad energy sector companies, 2.9% of Tufts’ total assets — including both indirect and direct investments — were exposed to this sector in fiscal year 2021. 0.3% of Tufts’ total assets were directly invested in this sector.
Smith expressed that, in the context of Tufts’ entire portfolio, the scale of the university’s investments in the broad energy sector is “exceedingly small.” He further noted that companies classified as being in the broad energy sector are not solely main contributors to climate change like exploration and extraction companies but could also include companies that provide supplemental services to energy companies, such as midstream distribution of oil.
The future of Tufts’ indirect investment
In addition to prohibiting direct investments in coal and tar sands companies, Tufts said in February 2021 that it would attempt to influence its indirect investments, including commingled funds, by communicating with investment managers. Smith outlined steps that the investment office will take to ensure that the university’s values are considered in future investment decisions.
“As we move forward and we make new manager hires in the portfolio, we have embedded … diligence on [environmental, social and governance investment criteria],” Smith said. “We would certainly never hire a manager who has an active focus [in fossil fuels].”
Smith said that it is difficult to predict if Tufts will ever completely divest from fossil fuels but that there is potential for change in the future.
“My perspective is, over time, there will be greater ability to be able to make those sorts of changes,” Smith said. “Honestly, the most important thing is that we took the first step. … The fact that we’ll have another window in a few years’ time to revisit this and talk about it again is a really positive thing.”
Smith said that divestment has a strong symbolic role in pushing the market away from fossil fuels.
“Divestment is important,” Smith said. “I think it’s the symbolism of it more than anything else that’s really important; it is a message to send to the market, and collectively, when everyone sends us messages, it can create change.”
Professor Paul Joseph, who was a member of the RIAG, echoed Smith’s sentiment that colleges and universities have an important symbolic role to play in divesting from the fossil fuel industry.
“I think if a critical mass of colleges and universities divested, then it’s a critical signal for investment markets and for the country as a whole,” Joseph said.
However, divestment does not actually reduce the demand for fossil fuels, Smith said.
“The limitation of divestment is … it doesn’t alter what actually creates the continuation of fossil fuels, and that is the demand for fossil fuels, the consumption of fossil fuels,” he said. “We need … massive investment in green energy production … to get in place the capacity to replace fossil fuels, and that is what will ultimately cause a change.”
Therefore, the university has also pledged $18 million to positive impact funds since the RIAG recommendations were made. An initial commitment of $10 million was made to a private infrastructure fund focused on wind and solar energy projects. The other $8 million were committed to a venture capital fund which invests in technologies focused on carbon neutrality.
Students’ fight for full divestment
Members of the Tufts community, including student activists, have continued to call for full divestment from fossil fuels. Tufts Climate Action (TCA) is one such student organization that works with the Tufts community to fight for full divestment. Grace Abe, a member of TCA leadership, said that TCA wants Tufts to commit to divesting their indirect funds.
“[We are] really trying to take as many avenues as possible to put pressure on Tufts from within and outside of the Tufts community to try to get them to divest,” Abe, a junior, said.
Abe said that TCA hopes to pressure Tufts to speed up their timeline for reconsidering divestment by spreading awareness and gaining support from the student body. TCA is currently working on building a faculty and student coalition, which would create a broad climate plan for Tufts.
While deliberating on the actions that Tufts could take in regard to its endowment, Smith said that the RIAG and the investment office fully agreed on the severity of climate change.
“[The effects of climate change were] really not in the debate during the time,” Smith said. “The debate was around what are the best actions to take.”
When putting together their recommendations for the board of trustees, the group considered what policy changes would be most effective for creating real change. Smith said that weighing the efficacy of pure divestment versus instant positive impact investment was a key part of this deliberation.
Reflecting on the RIAG’s recommendations and the investment office’s performance since, Smith expressed pride in the group and its accomplishments.
“I recognize that there is certainly a range of views in terms of how people like the outcome of the decisions and recommendations [of the RIAG],” Smith said. “But I would say that the process was … really quite effective in terms of achieving what it was intended to achieve.”
Fossil fuel divestment at other universities
In September, Harvard University announced that it would fully divest from fossil fuels, a considerable feat for environmental activists at the university. Harvard plans to let legacy investments in fossil fuels expire and prohibit future investments in the sector. The decision to completely divest came about six months after the university announced that it would longer invest directly in fossil fuels — around the time that Tufts declared the same.
Since Harvard’s announcement, institutions across the country have followed suit. The University of Minnesota, the MacArthur Foundation and Boston University are among those that committed to full divestment in the weeks following Harvard’s decision.
Activists, including those at Tufts, have used this momentum to demand further divestment at their own schools. Abe commended Harvard’s commitment to full divestment and expressed her hopes for change at peer institutions as a result.
“We’re hoping that this Harvard decision will be a catalyst for so many other schools to also divest,” she said. “The fact that [Harvard committed to full divestment] shows that Tufts really has no excuses to not fully divest by saying it’s too complicated or they don’t have control over indirect funds.”
Compared to Harvard’s announcement that it would fully divest from fossil fuels, Joseph said that Tufts waited too long to begin its own divestment process.
“We’re falling behind our peer institutions in terms of their commitments for direct divestment,” Joseph said. “I think Tufts really had an opportunity to be a leader in this. … I think our status could be further consolidated if we went to a full divestment.”
Transparency in Tufts’ investment portfolio
In line with the RIAG’s recommendations, the investment office expects to release a formal report on the university’s progress toward sustainable investment between February 2023 and February 2026. This report will assess the university’s achievements in divesting from fossil fuels and investing in positive impact funds, as well as how the market has changed in relation to overall investments in fossil fuels.
Smith is hoping to increase the investment office’s transparency about the university’s endowment by conducting guest lectures in classes, holding meetings with student groups and collaborating with Tufts Eco Reps.
CORONAVIRUS
continued from page 1 administers are able to detect the omicron variant.
On Dec. 13, Jordan sent an email to the Tufts community encouraging people to wear 3-ply disposable masks instead of cloth masks, given the recent increase in cases in Massachusetts and around the country and the emergence of the omicron variant. In the same email, Jordan stressed the university’s mask mandate and urged people hosting events on and off campus to serve food to go rather than in person and not to serve alcohol in order to minimize viral spread while eating and drinking.
Tufts implements vaccine mandate, pooled testing; relaxes quarantine and screening policies
This semester saw the university adopt a COVID-19 vaccination requirement and move to a twice-weekly pooled testing regimen for undergraduate students.
Tufts announced in April that it would require all on-campus students, faculty and staff to demonstrate proof of a COVID19 vaccination for the fall 2021 semester barring a religious or medical exemption. According to Sedore, 96% of COVID-19 cases this semester were breakthrough infections.
Jordan described the university’s other COVID-19 protocols and how they helped keep the community safe this semester.
“The COVID protocols for the fall semester evolved in accordance with local, state and federal guidance but continued to be stringent and rigorous to keep students, faculty and staff, as well as the surrounding community, safe,” Jordan said in a written statement. “We required COVID vaccinations, continued to require surveillance testing and indoor masking, have conducted rigorous contact tracing, emphasized good hand hygiene, urged students to avoid crowded indoor spaces, and have strongly encouraged students to obtain COVID booster shots and flu vaccinations.”
Jordan explained that taken together, these protocols helped the university avoid a major COVID-19 outbreak.
“While vaccinations have played an important role in minimizing spread this fall, it’s the combination of these protocols — and our community’s compliance with them — that have worked to prevent major outbreaks on our campuses this fall,” Jordan said.
Medical Director of Health Services Marie Caggiano explained Tufts’ decision to move to a pooled testing system this semester, a shift from the individual testing the university conducted last semester.
“Combining samples from multiple people into a single test is more environmentally sustainable and offers significant resource and cost savings without sacrificing the accuracy or speed of individual testing,” Caggiano said in a written statement. “The environmental impact is significantly less, with one larger tube being used in the pooled test vs. 10 smaller ones being used in the individual test.”
Caggiano also reported the university’s pooled testing strategy costs about one third of the previous diagnostic testing strategy.
Tufts also modified its quarantine and isolation procedures this semester. Previously, students identified as close contacts of a COVID-positive individual were asked to self-quarantine or isolate in the mods. This semester, those identified as close contacts were asked to take an individual COVID-19 test but were not required to quarantine while they waited for their test result.
In December, Tufts stopped asking community members to fill out the daily COVID-19 screening survey, which asked a series of questions about COVID-19 symptoms and exposure. Students had to fill out the screening survey in order to enter the Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center, performing arts events and other spaces on campus.
“In general, symptom screening surveys have not proven to be as effective a public health tool as anticipated,” Jordan said. “Tufts guidance continues to be that nobody – including visitors – should come to campus if they have COVID symptoms.”
PERI BAREST AND CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL / THE TUFTS DAILY Between Nov. 27, the Saturday following Thanksgiving, and Dec. 8, the number of people in isolation on the Medford/Somerville campus more than tripled, rising from 17 to 52. Since then, the number of people in isolation has fallen to 44.
PERI BAREST AND CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL / THE TUFTS DAILY Tufts reported a total of 463 COVID-19 cases this semester, with 321 of those cases coming from the Medford/ Somerville campus.
University plans to continue current policies into Spring semester
According to Jordan, the university is in the process of determining whether to require COVID-19 booster shots for the Tufts community next semester. The CDC recommends that everyone aged 18 and older should get a booster shot six months after receiving two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, or two months after receiving the Johnson and Johnson vaccine.
“We are carefully evaluating CDC and state guidance and have not yet made a decision regarding booster requirements,” Jordan said. “However, getting a booster is probably the single most important thing that … any eligible individual can do to decrease their own risk and to protect their loved ones. We very strongly encourage eligible individuals to receive a COVID19 booster.”
Despite many unknowns about the transmissibility and severity of omicron cases, Jordan expects the university to continue its current COVID19 policies into the spring semester.
“At the moment, we anticipate no changes to the protocols or the cadence of testing for the spring semester,” Jordan said. “However, we will continue to watch daily case numbers and trends and make data-driven decisions that prioritize the community’s health.”
CIRCLE survey points to importance of media creation, media literacy for civic engagement
CIRCLE
continued from page 1 CIRCLE chose to study this demographic.
“These building blocks of civic engagement build over time and are not bestowed on someone magically when they turn 18,” Kiesa wrote in an email to the Daily. “It’s critical to start earlier because … if we don’t we’ll probably have a continuously difficult time reducing existing inequalities in political voice and power.”
The survey results also emphasized the economic and sociocultural inequalities that can impact the ways teens engage with social and political media online.
“There are a lot of disparities in media literacy education and those opportunities are not distributed equally across schools and across geographies, and they exist also along racial and educational lines,” McGee said.
A previous CIRCLE study found that 37% of young people do not feel that they are qualified to share their political opinions online, a sentiment that is disproportionately felt by white women and men of color.
“Who is told that their voice matters in these spaces is important,” Booth said. “That’s not just what teachers and media is putting on different racial or gender identities, but it’s also what people perceive as a threat from their friend groups and their social spheres, and that’s highlighted in the finding about the anxiety to post because of social pressure.”
McGee stressed the importance of implementing media literacy into school curriculum.
“We think of [media literacy] as the ability to responsibly access and evaluate and analyze and create media,” McGee said. “A little more than half of students who responded had had some sort of media literacy education in schools, with most of those saying that they had learned about the differences between fact from fiction online, how to create things like digital graphics, how to create their own media.”
By bringing media literacy into the classroom, the CIRCLE researchers believe that teens will be better able to engage with the politically and socially active content they find online and even create their own.
“The cool thing about implementing media literacy and media creation into the classroom is that it creates inroads for different students who have different interests,” Booth said. “It creates all these different opportunities for young people to find their own interests and the things they’re good at, and the things they want to do, and foster those interests and maybe that’ll go outside the classroom.”
Booth also noted an interesting and unexpected piece of data. The survey found that 25% of teens surveyed had learned about or worked with a local news or media outlet in their community, and 41% of teens said they had not but would like to do so.
“There’s this narrative that young people don’t read the news or don’t watch the news, especially local news, and we found that that’s not entirely true,” Booth said. “There’s a lot of young people who are interested in working with local news and local outlets to produce more content or just to learn about the process.”
One of the study’s conclusions was that teens who create media that deals with social or political issues not only have more confidence in using their political voices, but are more civically engaged.
“When you have a situation where you are empowered to recognize the power of your own voice and to feel more informed about public issues and to take part in some of those civic conversations, that’s really a starting point for all kinds of civic participation,” McGee said.
