I wish I were a humorist. A group of students at Swarthmore College would be a perfect foil for barbs.
It seems the group is leading a movement of peers to force the managers of college endowment funds to sell off all traditional fossil fuel energy company holdings to fight climate change. Fortunately, Swarthmore has responded with a firm no, but this brainchild has gone viral and administrators in some colleges have actually acquiesced.
That’s all we need — enabling students with half-baked ideas.
I don’t think many of us are under any illusions that this effort is going to have any impact on our government or private industry any more than the Occupy movement did, but it raises the question about what these kids are learning in the classroom.
Swarthmore is a small school with only 1,500 students, so perhaps the college and others like it do not have a course in common sense. If I am a parent, I am asking what the hell are these kids learning for $43,000 a year? Led by pied piper Bill McKibben, they are playing activist for the sake of activism. He wants to make “owning the stocks of these companies disreputable.”
My first argument has already been mentioned in other articles. By limiting the investment options of fiduciaries, this movement is effectively reducing the ability of managers to maximize gains within targeted risk parameters — doing their jobs.
The financial landscape is already littered with poor performing socially responsible investment funds. College endowments are the last places that should be relegated to meager financial performance given the ever increasing tuitions families must bear. Social-purpose capitalism is better managed under the umbrella of nonprofits.
Without economic incentive, even the most well-intentioned projects can be doomed to failure.
Climate change is important. It may be the most important long-term threat facing this planet and the economies that provide a decent standard of living for their citizens. However, our economy is driven in large part on energy production and consumption, and re-creating an infrastructure to support alternative sources is not an overnight project.
We live in a highly complex and testy geopolitical world. If these students were to succeed in some such ill-thought-out scheme, how many thousands of jobs would be lost? What would be the impact on their parents’ ability to afford their tuition or to the ability of colleges to provide financial aid?
And when these young men and women emerge from their $50,000 a year educations into deep recession, where would they go to work under their scenario? We are a global economy; we are a massive economy; and any disruption in our backyard has both domestic and international implications.
Instead of students from other schools gathering on the Swarthmore campus to get lathered up over a non-starter, wouldn’t it make more sense for a student group to invite companies heavily involved in fossil fuels to campus for frank discussions?
It would be a unique opportunity for students to learn about corporate research into less damaging forms of energy, or in the case of auto companies, new technologies. The students could then take an informed stand. That is what college is all about, isn’t it, learning?
I blame the college administrations and faculty. This isn’t law or economic theory or philosophy, all of which require a different way of thinking. It is stuff any good instructor should know and be imparting as a matter of course.
Much is written about the need for the U.S. to teach more math and science in K-12 and for colleges not to neglect the humanities while focusing on technology. I couldn’t disagree with any of that, but If I were a trustee of one of these colleges that has knuckled under to its students, I would be questioning who I have running the school and what is transpiring in the classroom.
Maybe it is a good time for Rebecca Chopp, president of Swarthmore, and the others to review their faculties to determine what is not being taught in the classroom and how well-prepared these kids will be to contribute to economic growth in this country.
It’s just common sense.
Russ Wigh is a professor of business. Email him at rdwigh@bellsouth.net.