Momentum Builds Behind Renewed Divestment Push

Pressure mounted on Harvard to cut its remaining ties to Sudan this past week, as the University of California system moved to divest from the oil firm Sinopec and over 1,100 students, alumni, and professors here pressed Harvard to do the same.

The University of California’s Board of Regents voted unanimously on Thursday to sell holdings in nine companies currently operating in Sudan—including the Beijing-based Sinopec, in which Harvard has an estimated $7.8 million stake, and the Russian oil firm Tatneft, in which Harvard’s holdings are estimated at $5 million.

The Regents also voted to send letters of concern to four other companies linked to Sudan—including the Paris-based global oil-field services provider Schlumberger, in which Harvard’s stake totals an estimated $13.8 million.

The Regents’ vote marked the first move by a public university to divest from Sudan in the wake of genocide allegations against that country’s regime.

Meanwhile, a student-led petition calling on Harvard to sell its holdings in Sudan-linked firms garnered its 1,000th signature this past weekend. That total is more than the roughly 800 names that a similar petition targeting Harvard’s holdings in PetroChina garnered last year. Harvard divested from PetroChina last April due to concerns about the firm’s ties to the Sudanese government.

Chad J. Hazlett, a Kennedy School student and organizer of the Harvard petition, said the Regents’ decision “means a lot” for the divestment effort here.

Hazlett said he predicted the student-led petition, posted online at harvarddivest.com, would continue to gain traction.

Statistics released by the organizers of this year’s petition showed that Leverett House led all upperclassman Houses in signatures and that 33 faculty members had lent their names to the effort.

Richard F. Thomas, chair of the Classics Department and one of the faculty members to sign the petition, said there has been no effort that he knew of to circulate it through the faculty but predicted that many would sign if they knew of its existence.

“Faculty are not generally a unified element,” Thomas said. “We don’t e-mail each other as a group.”

Hazlett agreed that the lack of faculty signatures did not reflect a lack of interest among professors.

“We are always a little weaker in getting faculty on-board because we find it easier to table and mass e-mail and recruit our fellow students, and because we can be a little shy about approaching faculty,” according to Hazlett. But he predicted that “faculty will become a powerful and moral voice for divestment right alongside the students.”

After the Regents’ meeting in Los Angeles Thursday, student board member Adam Rosenthal said in a statement, “Today’s vote puts the university on the right side of history, in the position to exercise powerful and practical action to help end the murder, torture, and genocide in Darfur.”

University of California, Los Angeles student Adam B. Sterling, co-chair of the task force that led a year-long divestment campaign, said it was important that other universities follow the Regents’ lead and take a stance against genocide.

“We’re working with students at other university campaigns. We’ve built momentum. Now is the time to really coordinate,” Sterling said.

University of California spokesman Trey Davis wrote in an e-mail that the divestment would target between $29 million and $2.6 billion, a small fraction of the $66 billion endowment held across the system’s 10 campuses.

“As with most divestment actions, the symbolic value is also significant and the intent is to catalyze similar action among a wider spectrum of investors, decision-makers, elected officials and the public,” wrote Davis.

The move wasn’t universally popular across the system. For instance, a senior history major at the system’s Davis campus wrote in a column for the UC-Berkeley student newspaper, the Daily Californian, that divestment would divert funds from reconstruction efforts in the war-torn country.

Amherst, Brown, Dartmouth, Stanford, and Yale have also moved to divest from Sudan.

—Staff writer Cyrus M. Mossavar-Rahmani can be reached at crahmani@fas.harvard.edu.