Climate Activists Have a Target: Harvard’s Endowment

Climate change activists delayed the storied Harvard-Yale football game by rushing onto the field in protest last fall. This month, Harvard’s largest faculty group overwhelmingly urged the university to divest its massive endowment from fossil fuel companies. And earlier this week, five pro-divestment candidates captured spots on the ballot for election to Harvard’s powerful board of overseers. Environmentalists have been encouraging Harvard for years to divest from fossil fuels. But the campaign has intensified in recent months, and the university is being hammered on multiple fronts to pull its endowment — with $41 billion in assets at last count — out of investments in oil, gas, and coal companies and those that drill and extract fossil fuels.