Cambridge Executive Rebels Against Academic Climate Divestment Vote

The Executive of Cambridge University, England, which was originally founded in the year 1231, has rejected a demand by academics to divest from fossil fuels, because they are worried such divestment will impact future ability to fund teaching and research programmes.

Cambridge clashes with own academics over climate change

University executive refuses to implement governing body’s carbon divestment motion

The University of Cambridge has become embroiled in an internal battle after executives at the UK’s richest educational institution clashed with academics over proposals to divest from fossil fuels.

Last month the university’s governing body, which is made up of senior academic and administrative staff from its 31 colleges, passed a motion to divest Cambridge’s £5.8bn endowment from fossil fuels.

The decision came amid investor concern that fossil fuel companies will suffer large losses as governments around the world seek to tackle global warning.

But in an unprecedented break from university tradition, Cambridge’s council, its executive arm that sets policy, has said it will not follow through with the governing body’s calls for divestment within the next 12 months.

The council is reluctant to cut investments in fossil fuel companies without assessing how this would affect funding for its teaching and research programmes.

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According to the Cambridge Zero Carbon Society, the following is the text of the divestment motion;

“That the Regent House, as the governing body of the University, resolves that none of the University’s Endowment Funds should be invested directly or indirectly in companies whose business is wholly or substantially concerned with the extraction of fossil fuels, and requires the Council to publish a Report to the University within twelve months setting out how this is to be achieved”.

Source: http://zerocarbonsoc.soc.srcf.net/?p=4146

Cambridge is the university which brought us the irrepressible arctic ice alarmist Professor Wadhams.

While I acknowledge the effort by the executive to protect the integrity of the research and teaching fund against pointless virtue signalling, I believe in democracy. People in a cooperative institute like Cambridge should be free to vote their own financial self destruction, even if the institute in question has lasted almost 800 years.