Brown Divests from Companies Tied to Sudan

Brown University’s highest governing board voted Saturday to divest its holdings in companies doing business in Sudan—becoming the second Ivy League university to do so in the last month.

In an e-mail sent to the Brown community shortly after the Corporation’s decision, University President Ruth J. Simmons wrote that Brown will “exclude from [its] direct investments, those companies whose business activities can be shown to be supporting and facilitating the Sudanese government in its continuing sponsorship of genocidal actions and human rights violations in Darfur.”

“We declare our solidarity with the peoples of the Darfur region of Sudan whose struggle to live in peace, freedom and security is an issue of pressing global concern,” Simmons said in a statement.
Brown’s advisory committee on corporate responsibility issued a recommendation for divestment to the Corporation earlier this month, which was seconded by Simmons.

Brown’s announcement follows similar moves made by Stanford, Amherst, Dartmouth, and, most recently, Yale, which announced Feb. 11 that it was divesting its shares in seven oil companies that do business in Sudan.

While divestment from PetroChina this past April made Harvard the first university to divest its holdings from companies tied to Sudan, its divestment has not been as comprehensive as that of either Yale or Brown.

The Crimson reported earlier this month that Harvard increased its holdings in another Sudan-linked Chinese oil firm, Sinopec, by 1,150 shares during the last quarter of 2005. As of its latest filings with federal regulators, Harvard owned a total of 134,050 shares in Sinopec. Those shares are now worth over $8.1 million.

—Staff writer Paras D. Bhayani can be reached at pbhayani@fas.harvard.edu.