The effort looked like a dud–no massive rallies, no speeches. At least Cornell students braved the cold for several hours to man the table, and it was a much better event than the whiteboard campaign of last semester. At Yale, divestment day activities were cancelled due to the extreme cold.
In the short time Review correspondents watched the table, only a handful of bundled up students stopped by. In the frigid, sometimes sub-zero temperatures on campus, most students seemed more interested in getting inside as quickly as possible. The reason why any stopped by can be attributed to the free hot cocoa, which, undoubtedly, was heated using electricity that was produced by burning…
In response to a question regarding how much of Cornell’s $6.2 billion endowment is invested in the fossil fuel industry, students affiliated with Divest!Now stated, “[We] don’t know.” Skorton has stated on numerous occasions fossil fuel investments make up less than 1% of the endowment, meaning $6 million or less is invested in these companies these students so virulently detest. Furthermore, divestment doesn’t actually negatively affect a company’s ability to earn money. All it does is make a whole lot of shares available on the market, which might temporarily send stock prices down, but some other enterprising, smarter investor will scoop them up soon enough. All divestment really does is make the divested party lose out on the gains from these normally-lucrative investments.
Also, why is it that students and professors who advocate divestment are never willing to pay a little more in tuition, or give up some financial aid, or forgo a salary raise, in order to make up for the University’s loss in investment income? I wonder.
. . . or drink their cocoa cold.