<a href="http://educationinthestreets.blogspot.com">Education In The Streets</a>

Monday, April 05, 2004

Several days after students confronted an indignant David Swensen at the ACIR meeting to ask for disclosure, Saqib demands to know if Yale is invested (through Farallon Capital Management) in Haliburton.

It's infuriating to think that Yale might be directly profiting from the war in Iraq. On a campus where over 2,000 students signed a petition against the war and where the administration repeatedly made assurances of neutrality, it's disheartening to learn that those promises may have just been lip service. To Yale's credit, we don't know for sure if Yale's money in particular is invested in Halliburton. All we know is that Farallon manages up to a quarter of Yale's endowment and that Farallon has over $3 million in Halliburton.

At last Friday's meeting of the ACIR, students asked the committee to find out whether or not Farallon was investing Yale's money in Halliburton. The ACIR did not respond to the request. We hope this means that they will look into it and get back to us, but this in itself raises a larger issue. If all we can do is hope, we shouldn't hold our breaths. We know that before there was a campus-wide campaign to force Yale to divest from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, Yale held substantial holdings there. The more recent example of the Sudanese civil war and statements by members of the ACIR and President Levin himself are not any more encouraging. If left to its own devices, we have little reason to hope that Yale will be a socially responsible investor. It is for this reason that disclosure of Yale's investments is necessary. We have a right to know if wars are funding our education.

(The YDN headline, "Yale Defends Record Privacy" is flawed. From whom is this "privacy to be defended -- the university's own students? The workers whose pension funds are being placed in such sickening projects?)

Alyssa, meanwhile, in an excellent column, explores Yale's corporate power and takes on the Office of New Haven and State Affairs, calling for an equal partnership.

Meanwhile, if Yale wants to negotiate a new relationship with New Haven, the University needs to stop insisting that its contributions come in the form of "voluntary dispensation[s] of goodwill," and actually establish a contractual relationship with the city. I have no doubt that Yale wants to contribute to the community, but if it doesn't want to be portrayed as a gilded-age tycoon, its contributions need not to come at the pleasure of the University. It's time for Yale to stop insisting that New Haven come to it with a hand out, unless it's to shake hands on an agreement negotiated by two equal partners.

¶ 10:11 AM

Smash Yale-[ comments.]

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