Harvard University students are pushing the school to divest in companies with ties to prisons. But they are struggling to convince Harvard to take action. Initially, the students thought the school would be open to discussions about divesting in the industrial prison complex. After all, the school has already divested its multibillion-dollar endowment from the tobacco industry and South Africa during apartheid. But student activists have been met with a brick wall.
Earlier this year, students had an open office hour with President Lawrence S. Bacow during which time they asked him students asked him: “How much of Harvard’s almost $40 billion endowment is invested in companies that profit from the mass incarceration of Americans? And would he commit to withdrawing the school’s investment funds from prisons and related companies?” NBC News reported.
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The students, members of the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign, expressed their concerns that their school should not benefit financially from investments tied to the criminal justice system, which “incarcerates more than 2 million people, about a third of them Black.”
But the students say they got less attention that other students demanding Harvard divest from other industries, ranging from fast food to corn sweeteners.
According to campaign organizer and Harvard student Xitlalli Alvarez, Bacow was “dismissive.”
“It was as if he was equating our concern for the suffering of people in prison with corn syrup,” Alvarez said.
A Harvard spokesman responded by saying Bacow “appreciated the opportunity to meet with advocates for prison divestment” and offered to organize a meeting between the students and the Harvard committee that decides on the school endowment.
Other universities have moved to divest in companies associated with prisons.
Columbia University, in 2015, announced a policy of divesting from companies involved in the operation of private prisons and to stop making new investments in the industry. It became the first university to do so.
It got rid of its shares in two firms, including the Corrections Corporation of America (now CoreCivic), one of the country’s largest private-prison operators. Columbia student activists say the university’s divested shares were worth roughly $8 million.
“Over the past four years, at least five university networks or schools — including Columbia University — have agreed to divest endowments or refrain from business with companies that profit from private prisons, said Daniel Carrillo, the executive director of Freedom to Thrive, a Portland, Oregon-based group that began a nationwide prison divestment campaign in 2010,” NBC News reported.
But at other schools — such as Harvard — it has been much more of a fight.
“It is an uphill battle,” Carrillo said of the student effort. “Administrations are not typically receptive to student mobilization, student activism or the student voice influencing how things should be done.”
