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Harvard Management Company, which controls the largest university endowment in the country, will let its fossil fuel investments expire, Harvard University president Lawrence Bacow announced Thursday.
The university's legacy investments in private equity funds with holdings in the fossil fuel industry are in "runoff mode and will end as these partnerships are liquidated," Bacow wrote. Such investments make up about two percent of the university's $41 billion endowment. The university will not seek new fossil fuels investments in the future.
"Climate change is the most consequential threat facing humanity. The last several months have laid at our feet undeniable evidence of the world to come -- massive fires that consume entire towns, unprecedented flooding that inundates major urban areas, record heat waves and drought that devastate food supplies and increase water scarcity," Bacow wrote. "We must act now as citizens, as scholars, and as an institution to address this crisis on as many fronts as we have at our disposal."
The announcement comes after more than a decade of student activism urging the Ivy League institution to let go of its fossil fuel investments. Bacow did not acknowledge this ongoing effort in his Thursday letter.
"Harvard likes to think of itself as a leader, but it was dogged activism that forced the university onto the right side of history," said Isha Sangani, a sophomore at Harvard and organizer with Fossil Fuel Divest Harvard. "That it took over a decade of unrelenting demands, protests, votes, sit-ins, and meetings speaks to the administration's intransigence and lack of accountability to its community. So, yes, we are celebrating this massive victory. But we are not letting up pressure on the administration."
