Students mount pressure on Investments Office

At 11:30 a.m. on Thurs., Oct. 28, Dean J. Takhashi, the senior director of Yale's Investments Office, found a letter under his door. It began: "We're asking that Yale reveal the complete contents of its investments and its votes on shareholder resolutions." The rest of the paper elaborated on the demands of the Student Alliance to Reform Corporations (STARC). "Having repeatedly asked the Yale Administration for a list of companies that the University holds stock in, and having been repeatedly denied, we have taken to researching the legally required disclosure of statements of large multinationals," it continued.

The members of STARC are not happy with what they've discovered. According to STARC member Hannah Karman, JE '00, Yale uses its $6.8 million endowment to invest in Phillip Morris, Exxon, Chrysler, and American Home Products, among other companies. Karam and fellow STARC member Ben Siegler, PC '00, believe that these companies engage in "socially injurious" activity. Phillip Morris is a tobacco giant; Exxon, according to Karman, only cleaned up three to four percent of the oil after the spill in Alaska 10 years ago; and American Home Products is the parent company to the makers of Premanin, a widely prescribed menopause drug whose primary ingredient is pregnant mares' urine (PMU). "While the presence of this compound in the drug is surprising, the treatment used to provide PMU is horrifying," Karman said.

COURTESY PHILIP MORRIS Exxon is one of the companies which STARC criticized Yale for investing in.

STARC members also believe that Yale has an obligation to tell the public what companies it invests in. "There is no reason why the University should be secretive about its investments," Kathryn Kline, BK '03, said. "The fact that it is increases our suspicion that it has something to hide."

Siegler thinks that by investing in companies like Exxon and Philip Morris, Yale may be violating the guidelines of the Ethical Investor, which the University adopted in 1972. The guidelines, which were written by Yale Law School Professor John Simon, provide a nebulous definition of "socially injurious." But, they clear-ly assert that "if after a certain number of years a company has resisted attempts to reform its socially injurious practices, a university should sell its holdings and notify the company as to why this action was taken," Siegler said.

The administration, however, claims to be following the Ethical Investor guidelines and refuses to reveal its investment holdings to the public. Tashaki has explained on various occasions that this is necessary because Yale has a unique investment strategy that it does not want other institutional investors to copy.

STARC members, nonetheless, continue to do their own research, to call on Yale to disclose the full contents of its investment portfolio, and to demand that a democratic committee review them. They await the reaction of the Investment Office to the paper they gave Tashaki, who was not ready to respond by press time. STARC is also holding a major conference at Yale from Fri., Nov. 5 to Sun., Nov. 7.

Back to News...