Tin can telephone

Throughout its history, the Duke University endowment has faced scrutiny and been a target for advocacy. The movement to divest from apartheid in the 1980s, the more recent call for the endowment to be free of conflict minerals, the effort by Duke Open to increase investment transparency and the current campaign to divest from fossil fuels are all examples of advocacy with varying degrees of success. As Duke students and faculty raise concerns about what makes a responsible and ethical endowment, I argue that the difficulty in acquiring information about Duke University’s advisory processes is a major hurdle in reaching community contentment about what goes on behind Duke’s black curtain of investments.

The Responsible Endowments Coalition defines a responsible endowment as one that represents the community’s values and institutional beliefs and demonstrates intergenerational equity. In other words, upholding fiduciary duty is not solely acting in the endowment’s financial interest—though that’s part of it—but that it also means acting in a way that is socially and environmentally sustainable. As students, faculty and staff who receive resources and paychecks from the university, we all have an investment—pun intended—in the decisions that the Board of Trustees and DUMAC (Duke Management Company) make about our endowment.

If a student or faculty member did care about Duke’s investments, what is the best way for her to constructively enter the conversation about endowment issues? The structures for education and engagement are passive at best and obstructive at worst. Quite frankly, the Duke website for ACIR (Advisory Committee on Investment Responsibility) and the PSC (President’s Special Committee) has embarrassingly little information about ACIR and the PSC’s functioning activities. For example, the website now contains updated information on the current members of ACIR, but it contains no contact details for the mysterious PSC (including the committee’s chair) or information about its meeting structure or frequency, even though the PSC apparently has the power to refer issues to ACIR. As of this column’s run date, the website contains two outdated public forum announcements from 2012 and 2014 but no mention of the public forum happening next week. The incomplete list of documents that includes some resolutions, letters and proposals is a start, but if these committees “consider proposals from the University community regarding specific investment responsibility concerns,” why are we not privy to meeting minutes and notes from the previous public forums and committee sessions?

It is not so radical to demand transparency from the administration and its advisors; and no, I’m not even referring to the calls for increased endowment transparency that ACIR has plainly and repeatedly asserted is not needed to address social responsibility concerns. Even without full disclosures, I believe the community has a right to both procedural and substantive transparency. First, the advisory process must be clearly documented and accessible in a single, centralized, digital location. This includes meeting minutes that detail not only the committee’s process in making decisions (for example, whether they make decisions by unanimous consensus or majority vote) but also their detailed rationale for decisions issued—extending to, if outside references or expertise is required, the processes of choosing those sources or individuals. Objectively, if there is nothing to hide, then it should not be that difficult. There should also be a simple, navigable structure and contact information for directing concerns, questions and proposals. If this is our main conduit between the community and Duke’s investment practices, let’s remove the static from the communication lines. Right now, it seems like we’re working with two tin cans and a string.

Students become alumni, faculty and administration take offers at different universities and the members of committees like ACIR and the PSC rotate. The only way for us to preserve institutional memory is to properly archive and make not only the end results public but also the meeting minutes and the reasoning that goes into dismissing or moving along with a proposal. This is not only productive for student organizers at Duke who want to bring attention to particular issues with Duke’s investment decisions but also for members of these advisory committees who want to back up their track records and decision-making processes.

As members of the Duke community, we all have a stake in the implications of the university’s investments—ethical, financial and otherwise. This is a call to action to be an informed and active member of the Duke community and hold ACIR and the administration to a high standard when it comes to providing us with adequate information—whether that be ultimately process-driven or actual increased transparency regarding our disclosures. I have an easy starting place for you. This coming Monday at 6:00 p.m., ACIR will hold a public forum in the Holsti-Anderson Room of the Rubenstein Library. Come ready to listen and come with questions; but most importantly, come with the expectation that this should not be a checked box for annual public input and that we have the right to expect follow-ups to unanswered questions and concerns from Monday’s meeting.

Rachel Weber is a Trinity senior and the President of the Duke Climate Coalition. Her column runs on alternate Wednesdays.