Op-Ed: Does Middlebury College really care about the planet and its people?

It’s quite easy nowadays to vilify Big Business and conglomerated corporate interests. In fact, in a way, it’s become even fashionable — certainly not much of a surprise after watching the financial giants pull enormous profits out of thin air, cause a near collapse of our economy and then steal (under the guise of a federal bailout) our taxpayer money. Can you even feign shock that they are now actively (and productively) lobbying to ensure regulatory reform never sees a congressional agenda?

And it’s not just Michael Moore running around with an empty sack, pestering the old white boys at Goldman Sachs either. On the other side of the spectrum, Republicans are winning elections on the premise that they are “small government,” riding the tide of Wall Street v. Main Street sentiment falsely peddled out to a frustrated electorate, tossed around as pawns in a game of consolidating private wealth. As if any politician was for small government (do I hear private military contracting, anyone?).

However, under our current growth-driven economic system, it’s necessary for institutions to invest capital in order to support those industries that construct the fabric of our material lives. Moreover, in a globalizing society, commerce and trade are becoming even more important, as the means of production become more geographically diffuse (regardless of the condensation in ownership).
But industry, as we are all well aware, looks mostly at short term profits and ignores externalities — environmental and social costs not directly borne by the producer or consumer. Cheap goods from Wal-Mart rely on cutthroat competition, leading to the promotion of unsafe sweatshop labor and unparalleled pollution. Private transportation and energy inefficiencies are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere on a massive scale, causing global climate change and ground level ozone pollution, etc. Coal companies are blowing up mountains, the global fisheries stock is drying up and industrial farming is ruining our water supply (think swine flu, MRSA and E. coli are bad?). It’s almost too much to handle. Meanwhile, these costs are invisible to the accounting sheets of industry. Managers pursue record rates of return on investments, increasing the bottom line to the applause of the short-term profit seeking shareholders.

Sound like a bad Bernie Madoff-esque screenplay? If only that were the case — rather, it’s the story of our very own Middlebury College and the rest of our peer “growth-olympian” institutions. This Ponzi scheme is broader only in the sense that we’re borrowing profits from natural resources and sinks, societies and cultures — setting up to watch the problems mount and collapse over civil society in the near-future. It looks like sour grapes have been sitting in clear sight for a while now. And the speculative economic bubbles will leave more than a couple hundred New Yorkers without a 401(k).

Middlebury revels in its image as a school that projects social responsibility, internationalism and sustainability. Subsequently, you may think that with an institutional endowment of $740 million, the community would have some clue as to what companies this collective legacy of ours is funding. We don’t. The College Sustainability Report Card gives us a “D” for endowment transparency, and we lack accountability for any so-called “investment priorities.” Something needs to be done.

We pretend to actively address the problem by consolidating our investments under a single management group, Investure LLC, which features pretty pictures of rolling hills and smiling people on its Web site. The Board of Trustees repeatedly ignores the cries from student groups, the Faculty Council and our beloved scholar-in-residence, Bill McKibben. As an educational institution with a motto that reads “Knowledge and Virtue,” Middlebury cannot help but look like a complete and utter hypocrite unless it addresses the need for Socially Responsible Investing through our endowment.

To me, this gets at the heart of the problem. Our $740 million legacy is silent as to where its priorities lay but represents the future of a school running its mouth at every opportunity it gets. Sustainability this, global responsibility that. Diversity. Social work. Environmental justice. Clap it up, friends, we’ve got one hell of an image to be thankful for. We claim to embrace global challenges, training students and thinkers who will go off into the world and make it a better place. Yet our legacy, as embodied by our current investment strategy, is paradoxically at odds with our institutional message. I’m sorry, but while I may have chosen a liberal arts college for an interdisciplinary education, I do not need a duplicitous lesson in morality.

Worse yet, our endowment is, in effect, subsidizing the very powerful inequities that we simultaneously send our students out to defeat. Not only are we saying one thing and doing another, we are saying one thing and doing many things to ensure we’ll never be able to stop saying it. As a college with a conscience, we are literally firing guns at a reflection of ourselves that we don’t like, and accordingly training students in making sure nobody steps barefoot on the shattered glass. It’s a terrible contradiction to be getting for the hefty $50,000-a-year price tag I’m paying.

Of course, there was no mention of an SRI Sustainability Fund in the president’s Trustees update e-mail, and instead merely the laughable suggestion by Frederick Fritz ’68, the chair of the Trustees, that something with any transparency or autonomy had been created. The Campus’s characterization of whatever decision the board made as a new opportunity for students “to evaluate whether or not certain companies the College invests in live up to Middlebury’s sustainability standards, something they were able to do only minimally in previous years” is patently untrue and misleading. Furthermore, contrary to some reports, the recommendation by the ACSRI that one percent of the endowment be moved into a separate fund was outright rejected, and any move made will be a fraction of that number, remaining within Investure’s Global Equity Fund.

But hey, what can you expect when the money’s on the line, right? And just for the record, I’ve been sincerely trying to (but just can’t) see how $200 million disappearing virtually overnight can be conceived as a viable investment strategy. If you’d like to let me know, I live in Hepburn 110, and would be delighted to have the conversation.