The University of Massachusetts Foundation — the private, non-profit corporation that manages the public university’s $1.5 billion endowment — has pledged to offer two sustainable investment options to donors following a years-long campaign by student and faculty activists.
The two funds were recommended by the Move Our Money campaign, a student and faculty group aimed at severing the UMass system’s ties with fossil fuels and “dirty banks.” The funds both have A ratings on fund screening tools from the sustainable investing non-profit As You Sow, meaning they have no ties to polluters, arms manufacturers, or the tobacco industry. Student and faculty organizers told The Shoestring they see the move as a “small win,” and that they will continue to target the endowment’s indirect investments in the fossil fuel industry and arms manufacturing.
The foundation’s move is the most significant development for UMass climate activists since the university system announced it was divesting from direct fossil fuel holdings in 2016 following pressure from students. However, a Shoestring investigation of federal filings earlier this year found that the UMass Foundation still has indirect holdings in fossil fuel giants, as well as dozens of companies on a list of firms with ties to war, occupations, and border policing around the globe. Two of the funds UMass was invested in received a D rating in environmental sustainability from As You Sow and two others received an F.
Kevin Young, a history professor at UMass Amherst, arrived at the university in 2015 as student calls for fossil fuel divestment were reaching their peak. He participated in a 2016 sit-in that led to the UMass Foundation’s direct divestment move. Yet, with indirect holdings in fossil fuels remaining, Young and other activists continued to push for further severing of ties with polluters.
In the spring of 2021, the school’s faculty and librarian union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors, announced the creation of the UMass Amherst Environmental and Social Action Movement, or ESAM. The group is a coalition of on-campus unions and student organizers that tackles issues ranging from voter registration to community outreach, with a focus on sustainability and climate justice.
Young leads the Move Our Money campaign, a group under the ESAM umbrella calling on the UMass system “to cut ties with dirty banks, insurers, and asset managers,” on top of divestment from fossil fuels, according to the union’s website.
“We definitely see ourselves as a continuation and an extension of that campaign that won the one partial victory in 2016,” Young said.
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In 2021, Move Our Money began to research banks and insurers complicit in the climate crisis that were associated with UMass, according to Young. This early research consisted of public records requests to the UMass system and compiling pre-existing academic scholarship on the role of big banks in climate change.
“Then we had a second strand of that research that was about the foundation’s investments,” Young said, with newer members expanding the group’s focus.
Move Our Money’s research culminated in a detailed “Request for Review,” drafted by Young and Noy Holland, a professor in the university’s English department. The group submitted the request through the UMass Foundation’s Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee on April 5.
The Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee was established in 2014 as an official divestment channel following student protests over the university system’s fossil fuel ties. A document detailing the committee’s principles says it “shall address allegations of social injury resulting from Foundation investments,” but also clarifies that the “objective for the Endowment Fund is to achieve the highest long-term investment return on investment assets.”
Move Our Money discovered that in 2014, the same year the committee was established, the UMass Foundation had adopted one “environmental, social, and governance” investment fund. ESGs, as they’re known, are funds that take societal and environmental considerations into their investment practices, though some firms who sell the funds have been accused of “greenwashing,” the practice of obfuscating an ESG’s ties to polluters.
While the fund the foundation adopted in 2014 — the Neuberger Berman Sustainable Equity Fund — is advertised as an ESG, Young and Holland’s request alleged that “the fund invests in fossil fuels, fossil fuel finance, and fossil fuel insurance, in an amount currently valued at $151.64 million and constituting 11.23% of its portfolio.”
“You can’t invest in the destruction of the planet and call it environmentally and socially responsible,” Holland told the Shoestring.
Young and Holland’s request called on the foundation to “populate the endowment with fossil-fuel-free ESG offerings.” It also asked that “the selection of ESG funds also exclude funds that score poorly along other indicators of social and environmental responsibility, such as investment in weapons,” and “that the ESG funds be the default destination for all donations to UMass, with an option for donors to opt-out.” The second half of the request focused on what the request described as “financial accomplices” to the climate crisis, like banks and insurers, calling on the foundation to sever their relationships with institutions like the insurance and finance giant American International Group and the financial services firm Wells Fargo & Company.
On July 12, the Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee responded, writing in an email that “upon review and after careful consideration of the issues contained in your submission, the Committee decided to respectfully deny the Request for Review.”
Young saw the response as “deeply disrespectful to all of the work [Move Our Money] had put into it.”
“More importantly, the terseness of the response seems vulgar given the magnitude of the crisis we’re facing,” he said.
In email correspondence Young provided to The Shoestring, the UMass Foundation’s general counsel Paul Dawley declined to provide Move Our Money with the names Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee members or their rationale for denying the request.
“The University of Massachusetts Foundation is a private, non-profit organization and is under no requirement to make such a disclosure,” Dawley wrote. “Where I am concerned that this information could potentially lead to hostility toward committee members, I respectfully decline to provide such information,” he added.
Holland stayed in touch with Dawley after the rejection. She said that Dawley and the foundation became more receptive to the idea of investing in sustainable funds when she pledged to withhold money raised through the English department from the foundation’s coffers if it didn’t offer sustainable investment options to donors.
The money was raised to support an ecological writing prize, according to Holland. The prospect of those funds being invested in fossil fuels “makes no sense,” she said.
After months of email correspondence, Dawley confirmed to Holland on Nov. 1 that the UMass Foundation would make two of the recommended funds available to donors. Though the Nov. 1 email does not specify which funds, Dawley said in a Sept. 25 email to Holland that the foundation will adopt the Parnassus Mid Cap Growth Fund. Dawley also indicated that the foundation would adopt the Impax Small Cap A fund during a phone call, Holland said. Both of these funds earned A ratings from As You Sow’s Fossil Free Funds index and Weapons Free Funds index.
The Shoestring was unable to find any information about these funds and how donors can opt-in to them on the foundation’s website.
The UMass Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
When asked how she reacted to the decision, Holland says it “felt a little like more of a wedge in the door than a door opening” for the Move Our Money campaign.
Young said that the UMass system “views it as advantageous to their brand image to be seen as environmentally responsible.” Though Move Our Money remains focused on environmental issues and their links to UMass as an institution, he said the group’s concerns extend to weapons divestment pushes from groups like UMass Dissenters and UMass Students for Justice in Palestine.
Young was less optimistic about the prospect of UMass divesting from the weapons industry in the near future.
“They don’t see it as advantageous to their image to be criticizing war profiteers, or imperialism, or settler colonialism,” he said.
Other environmentalists on campus have expressed similar feelings about the UMass Foundation’s latest move.
Brendon Post, a UMass Amherst undergraduate student and environmental activist on campus with the group Sunrise Movement, said he was impressed with the school’s divestment move in 2016. But he began to question the university’s commitment to sustainability when he learned of its remaining ties to the fossil fuel industry.
Post said the adoption of two sustainable ESGs is “scraps compared to what should be next.”
“Putting that responsibility on donors rather than the foundation itself is frustrating,” Post said.
Dan McGlynn is an investigative reporter covering social movements and institutional power in western Massachusetts. He can be reached at danmcglynn@protonmail.com. Follow him on Instagram @danmcglynn_ or on X @danmcglynn_.
