SLAM Hosts Endowment Event

Responding to a growing concern with the way universities invest their money, Harvard’s Student Labor Action Movement and Yale’s Responsible Endowment Project co-hosted a two-day Responsible Endowment Conference in Cambridge this weekend with the aim of demystifying university fund management.

The conference, which was also attended by Wellesley and Bowdoin students, included presentations from students from both organizing schools, Harvard faculty, and several individuals who work in the field of responsible investing.

“It became very clear early on that there was a lot of interest in endowments, even before the economic collapse,” said conference organizer Jonathan F. Bowman ’11.

The Harvard and Yale student groups that co-hosted the conference first connected through a nationwide campaign against investment in HEI Hotels and Resorts, a private equity company that buys and sells hotels. The company—which faces ongoing labor disputes for mistreatment of its workers—draws 80 percent of its funding from endowments, including those of Harvard and Yale.

“HEI is a piece of evidence, but the broader picture is responsibility for the whole endowment. [Bowman] put together this conference with some help from us basically to just train students in research methods,” said REP co-founder Hans J. Schoenburg. “We focused on transparency, or the lack thereof, around university endowments.”

Bowman called Boston “the epicenter” of socially responsible investing firms in America.

“There was a huge need, coupled with a lack of understanding, coupled with a huge amount of expertise available in Boston,” he said. “These factors provided ripe conditions for a conference here at Harvard.”

The conference began in Boylston Hall on Saturday afternoon and continued throughout the weekend. Between 40 and 50 students from the four schools were in attendance, organizers said.

“I think the most inspiring thing is seeing how much participation there is from other schools,” said Bowman. “When you’ve got kids from four different colleges all coming together and sharing, you really can see that the interest in endowments and investing responsibly is a broad, broad movement.”

The conference represented a “new kind of activism coming to Harvard,” said SLAM member Alyssa M. Aguilera ’08-’09.

“Even though our endowment is currently down, the way to rebuild is to make new investments, and it’s really important to make sure that Harvard does that as responsibly as it can,” she said.

—Staff writer Evan T.R. Rosenman can be reached at erosenm@fas.harvard.edu.