Faculty and Staff Support

 

“At Middlebury we honor the strength of the hills. We engage the world. We produce sustainable, equitable solutions to global challenges. Given such values, it is time for us to stop investing in fossil-fuel companies. As Schumann Distinguished Scholar Bill McKibben lays out in his acclaimed 2012 article “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” these companies plan to extract fossil-fuel assets that would produce five times the greenhouse gasses that our planet can handle. The result? “Substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security, and … compromising normal human activities, including growing food” (from projections in the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report). 

 

 

When the board of trustees of University of Dayton unanimously approved the divestment of coal and fossil fuels from its $670 million endowment in 2014, President Daniel J. Curran said that Dayton’s “values of leadership and service to humanity call upon us to act on these principles and serve as a catalyst for civil discussion and positive change that benefits our planet.” As faculty and staff, we believe that Middlebury’s values of environmental stewardship and global engagement should compel us to divest as well. 

 

 

Further, we believe divestment is consistent with the trustees’ fiduciary responsibilities to Middlebury. The proportion of the endowment invested in fossil fuels is small, the difference in returns is not substantial, and these responsibilities are to all stakeholders, including future generations.​”