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Now With Added Menace!
Issue 19.4: Home For The Holidays
Posted:

Columbia's Investments Are Really Shady (Another Surprise!)

Your Tuition Funds Baby Killers

Matthew Lippert

Columbia often presents itself as an institution laboring for human progress. The Committee on Socially Responsible Investing is supposed to be an entity within Columbia dedicated to insuring that it never loses sight of this commitment to making the world a better place. And yet, it fails horribly to do so.

Let me explain. Columbia owns a lot of stock in a lot of different companies. The SRI Committee is supposed to help the University to make its investing decisions. This includes recommending how Columbia should vote in proxy questions and shareholder referenda.Now, I wouldn't always expect Columbia to be able to change the way companies do business, but it seems that if the University has an SRI Committee, the Committee should recommend that Columbia vote in favor of reforms that promote things that it supposedly values. This is not what actually goes on, however.

There is a simple chart appended to the SRI Committee's annual report (carefully hidden on the Columbia website) that outlines all of the various shareholder referenda in which Columbia was eligible to vote. These referenda contain all manner of labor, environmental, and corporate governance study and reform proposals. Of the 135 referenda listed, the SRI Committee chose to support 18. "Hold on!" you say. "What if those referenda were about advocating child labor or human-monkey cross-breeding? Surely not all of the referenda were worth supporting." Those were my thoughts as well when I first heard about the low number of referenda being supported.

Consider these facts, though. The SRI Committee routinely rejected other worthwhile proposals, such as the creation of independent board chairmen at numerous companies (at this time when independence is so lacking in the corporate world). It voted against asking Eastman Kodak to develop a plan to eliminate virtually all pollutants from their products, opposed a proposal to get Chevron-Texaco to develop renewable energy sources, and took no position on a similar proposal to Exxon Mobil. It abstained on a propositio} to require General Electric to disclose the costs of delaying the cleanup of PCB's, and even opposed requiring General Electric and PG&E to report on and take steps against nuclear hazards.

There is another disturbing aspect to the CommitteeÕs report. It seems that even when the SRI Committee recommends that the University support something "socially responsible," the University doesn't necessarily follow the Committee's recommendation.Consider the case of a PG&E shareholder referendum on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Committee recommended that the University approve the referendum, but the University wound up abstaining.

While this doesn't relate to the Committee's voting record, I do find the number of ethically questionable companies that the University owns stock in interesting. There's defense contractor and known Hudson River polluter General Electric, the White House's favorite no-bid contractor Halliburton, and labor abuser Wal-Mart, just to name a few. Apparently, "socially responsible investing" is a euphemism for "doing whatever the fuck we want with out money in a totally ad hoc manner." That clears a lot up.

In the spirit of Fox News' mantra, I don't want to minimize the positive nature of the Committee's actions regarding those 18 proposals that it did recommend be approved. It voted to get companies to clean up dioxin, report on and reduce their emissions, and adopt sexual orientation anti-bias policies. It even voted to make Disney adopt a code of conduct for operations in China. I just wish it would apply the notions of responsibility ostensibly underlying these recommendations more uniformly. DonÕt take my word for any of this. You can find it yourself athttp://www.columbia.edu/cu/secretary/SRI/. I can only guess that they make it deliberately tough to find the report, but log in and click on the "reports" link at the top of the page. Then select 2002-03 annual report item from the pull down menu. The chart is Appendix 3 of the report, towards the bottom.

Word. Clearly "playing the game" doesn't work. The only solution?Revolution!

Columbia often presents itself as an institution laboring for human progress. The Committee on Socially Responsible Investing is supposed to be an entity within Columbia dedicated to insuring that it never loses sight of this commitment to making the world a better place. And yet, it fails horribly to do so.

Let me explain. Columbia owns a lot of stock in a lot of different companies. The SRI Committee is supposed to help the University to make its investing decisions. This includes recommending how Columbia should vote in proxy questions and shareholder referenda.Now, I wouldn't always expect Columbia to be able to change the way companies do business, but it seems that if the University has an SRI Committee, the Committee should recommend that Columbia vote in favor of reforms that promote things that it supposedly values. This is not what actually goes on, however.

There is a simple chart appended to the SRI Committee's annual report (carefully hidden on the Columbia website) that outlines all of the various shareholder referenda in which Columbia was eligible to vote. These referenda contain all manner of labor, environmental, and corporate governance study and reform proposals. Of the 135 referenda listed, the SRI Committee chose to support 18. "Hold on!" you say. "What if those referenda were about advocating child labor or human-monkey cross-breeding? Surely not all of the referenda were worth supporting." Those were my thoughts as well when I first heard about the low number of referenda being supported.

Consider these facts, though. The SRI Committee routinely rejected other worthwhile proposals, such as the creation of independent board chairmen at numerous companies (at this time when independence is so lacking in the corporate world). It voted against asking Eastman Kodak to develop a plan to eliminate virtually all pollutants from their products, opposed a proposal to get Chevron-Texaco to develop renewable energy sources, and took no position on a similar proposal to Exxon Mobil. It abstained on a propositio} to require General Electric to disclose the costs of delaying the cleanup of PCB's, and even opposed requiring General Electric and PG&E to report on and take steps against nuclear hazards.

There is another disturbing aspect to the CommitteeÕs report. It seems that even when the SRI Committee recommends that the University support something "socially responsible," the University doesn't necessarily follow the Committee's recommendation.Consider the case of a PG&E shareholder referendum on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Committee recommended that the University approve the referendum, but the University wound up abstaining.

While this doesn't relate to the Committee's voting record, I do find the number of ethically questionable companies that the University owns stock in interesting. There's defense contractor and known Hudson River polluter General Electric, the White House's favorite no-bid contractor Halliburton, and labor abuser Wal-Mart, just to name a few. Apparently, "socially responsible investing" is a euphemism for "doing whatever the fuck we want with out money in a totally ad hoc manner." That clears a lot up.

In the spirit of Fox News' mantra, I don't want to minimize the positive nature of the Committee's actions regarding those 18 proposals that it did recommend be approved. It voted to get companies to clean up dioxin, report on and reduce their emissions, and adopt sexual orientation anti-bias policies. It even voted to make Disney adopt a code of conduct for operations in China. I just wish it would apply the notions of responsibility ostensibly underlying these recommendations more uniformly. DonÕt take my word for any of this. You can find it yourself athttp://www.columbia.edu/cu/secretary/SRI/. I can only guess that they make it deliberately tough to find the report, but log in and click on the "reports" link at the top of the page. Then select 2002-03 annual report item from the pull down menu. The chart is Appendix 3 of the report, towards the bottom.

Word. Clearly "playing the game" doesn't work. The only solution?Revolution!

Columbia often presents itself as an institution laboring for human progress. The Committee on Socially Responsible Investing is supposed to be an entity within Columbia dedicated to insuring that it never loses sight of this commitment to making the world a better place. And yet, it fails horribly to do so.

Let me explain. Columbia owns a lot of stock in a lot of different companies. The SRI Committee is supposed to help the University to make its investing decisions. This includes recommending how Columbia should vote in proxy questions and shareholder referenda.Now, I wouldn't always expect Columbia to be able to change the way companies do business, but it seems that if the University has an SRI Committee, the Committee should recommend that Columbia vote in favor of reforms that promote things that it supposedly values. This is not what actually goes on, however.

There is a simple chart appended to the SRI Committee's annual report (carefully hidden on the Columbia website) that outlines all of the various shareholder referenda in which Columbia was eligible to vote. These referenda contain all manner of labor, environmental, and corporate governance study and reform proposals. Of the 135 referenda listed, the SRI Committee chose to support 18. "Hold on!" you say. "What if those referenda were about advocating child labor or human-monkey cross-breeding? Surely not all of the referenda were worth supporting." Those were my thoughts as well when I first heard about the low number of referenda being supported.

Consider these facts, though. The SRI Committee routinely rejected other worthwhile proposals, such as the creation of independent board chairmen at numerous companies (at this time when independence is so lacking in the corporate world). It voted against asking Eastman Kodak to develop a plan to eliminate virtually all pollutants from their products, opposed a proposal to get Chevron-Texaco to develop renewable energy sources, and took no position on a similar proposal to Exxon Mobil. It abstained on a propositio} to require General Electric to disclose the costs of delaying the cleanup of PCB's, and even opposed requiring General Electric and PG&E to report on and take steps against nuclear hazards.

There is another disturbing aspect to the CommitteeÕs report. It seems that even when the SRI Committee recommends that the University support something "socially responsible," the University doesn't necessarily follow the Committee's recommendation.Consider the case of a PG&E shareholder referendum on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The Committee recommended that the University approve the referendum, but the University wound up abstaining.

While this doesn't relate to the Committee's voting record, I do find the number of ethically questionable companies that the University owns stock in interesting. There's defense contractor and known Hudson River polluter General Electric, the White House's favorite no-bid contractor Halliburton, and labor abuser Wal-Mart, just to name a few. Apparently, "socially responsible investing" is a euphemism for "doing whatever the fuck we want with out money in a totally ad hoc manner." That clears a lot up.

In the spirit of Fox News' mantra, I don't want to minimize the positive nature of the Committee's actions regarding those 18 proposals that it did recommend be approved. It voted to get companies to clean up dioxin, report on and reduce their emissions, and adopt sexual orientation anti-bias policies. It even voted to make Disney adopt a code of conduct for operations in China. I just wish it would apply the notions of responsibility ostensibly underlying these recommendations more uniformly. DonÕt take my word for any of this. You can find it yourself athttp://www.columbia.edu/cu/secretary/SRI/. I can only guess that they make it deliberately tough to find the report, but log in and click on the "reports" link at the top of the page. Then select 2002-03 annual report item from the pull down menu. The chart is Appendix 3 of the report, towards the bottom.

Word. Clearly "playing the game" doesn't work. The only solution?Revolution!