Progressive BC news!

Contents:

I. The ACE League no more?!?

II. BC alum and local activist hired as “Coordinator of Ecological Sustainability Education”

III. BC’s “Sustainability and Environmental Studies” (SENS) Program to host ground-breaking conference in April, 2006

IV. The Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) hosts its winter National Council meeting at BC

V. “Governance Conversations at BC”

VI. BC Alum Jessica Richardson TESTIFIES about the importance of a Progressive Alum network!

I. ACE League

Check out the below note from SA Throop, current President of ACE League. For those of us who cut our student activist teeth organizing w/ the ACE League, this statement is ill-received. I was involved w/ ACE League when it worked for passage of a BC non-discrimination clause that included sexual orientation, and participated loosely in ACE League during my final two semesters as a BC student. But in all honesty, I found a few of the key personalities in the group to be somewhat “toxic,” creating a very clique-ish and uninviting atmosphere. This atmosphere no doubt contributed to the group’s demise. Alas, student-based organizing often experiences such ebbs and flows, so hopefully ACE League will be revived in some form or another in the future.

From: SA Throop

Sent: Monday, February 20, 2006 9:24 AM

Subject: RE: Some notes on ACE League

(Please feel free to forward this to any mailing lists that might be interested. In fact, I'd appreciate it if you would.)

Hello all. I'd like to inform you of the decisions those attending our discussion last week came to.

After more than ten years of activism and community-building on the Berea College campus, we, the members of ACE League, have determined that our organization as it stands no longer reflects the needs or wants of the community it was created to serve. ACE has also fulfilled its original purpose, that of lobbying for an inclusive non-descrimination compact at Berea College and working towards domestic partner benefits regardless of sexual orientation for faculty and staff.

It is our intention that ACE League be closed on a positive note, that it may be remembered as an organization of great vision and accomplishments. Therefore, we ask to be added to the inactive section of Campus Life's Club and Organization files, effective immediately, 20 February 2006.

This is the letter I submitted to Campus Life this morning. The secondary decision we all came to was that, after ACE is officially closed, we will gather togather on Wednesday, 22 Feb, at 9PM in the Barton Room to work on creating a constitution for the new organization we want to put together, the Berea College Gay-Straight Alliance. To do this, we need your help and input, if you are interested in being a part of this new organization. Also, once we get our feet off the ground, we will create a new mailing list based on those interested and those who attend our meetings, so this one will be disabled. Please let me know if you'd like to be on this new mailing list.

One last thing: to say goodbye to ACE, we are going to have a farewell dinner in March. The planning of this will start at Wednesday's meeting, so come and help out!

Thanks everyone. If you have questions, please feel free to email me and I will do my best to answer them. SA Throop, ACE League President

II. BC’s new Sustainability Coordinator

Thanks to a pretty sizable corporate (Dupont) grant that BC received to further its sustainability efforts, a new office has been created on campus, the Office of Ecological Sustainability Education. In a pretty widely-anticipated decision, BC alum and former assistant to President Shinn, Tammy Clemons, was hired on a few weeks ago as the new coordinator of this office. The good news is that, in my opinion at least, Tammy is an excellent choice for the position. Aside from solid academic credentials, Tammy has been very actively involved in both BC and community sustainability initiatives for quite some time, including the MERJ Market (http://www.geocities.com/merjmkt/) and the BC Local Foods Initiative (http://www.berea.edu/localfoodinitiative/). I’m currently taking an “Eco-feminism” class w/ Tammy and think she is an ideal choice for the position.

Further, the creation of this office appears to be furthering the initial goals of the SENS Program, which was to integrate sustainability efforts campus-wide rather than simply relegating sustainability to an academic department. With only 3 faculty (albeit very capable faculty), SENS has appeared pretty overwhelmed in recent months just handling the SENS-related coursework and overseeing the Eco-Village. So while the creation of this new office is definitely a positive development, what I’m still in the dark about is its connection (or lack thereof?) to the SENS Program as a whole.

For more information about the Office of Ecological Sustainability Education and Tammy Clemons, check out: http://www.berea.edu/ese.

III. April 2006 SENS Conference

This conference is one of the things that’s keeping me in Berea for an extra few months. I’m working part-time under Richard Olson as the primary conference organizer. I think we’ve got a pretty good agenda put together for the conference, now we just need to make sure people turn up for it. That’s (hopefully) where you come in…

Please share with your networks:

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Campus-Community Partnerships for Sustainability Conference

April 21 - 23, 2006

Berea College

Berea, Kentucky

"Campus – Community Partnerships for Sustainability" will bring together college students, faculty and staff, and townspeople from throughout Kentucky and the surrounding region. In the face of global challenges, colleges and towns can work together to create sustainable local and regional economies and communities. At the conference, presentations and poster sessions will be combined with discussion groups and hands-on workshops to give participants the knowledge, skills, and contacts they need to make their campuses and communities more sustainable. Workshop themes include local food systems, transportation, energy, green buildings and green landscapes, and campus–community curricula, among others.

Speakers include Pat Murphy of "The Community Solution," and Michael Shuman, author of "Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age."

Co-sponsors include Bluegrass Community & Technical College, Centre College, Eastern Kentucky University Environmental Research Institute, Hazard Community & Technical College, Southeast Kentucky Community & Technical College, University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Appalachia-Science in the Public Interest, Berea Outpost, Community Farm Alliance, Envision Franklin County, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Heartwood, Kentucky Jobs with Justice, Kentucky Sierra Club, Kentucky Solar Partnership, Louisville Peak Oil Group, Mountain Association for Community Economic Development (MACED), Partners for Family Farms, Kentucky Office of Energy Policy, and the Kentucky Dept. of Agriculture.

For further information: www.berea.edu/sens/ccp

E-mail: sens@berea.edu

Phone: 859-985-3593

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IV. SEAC at BC

Last weekend the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) hosted its annual Winter National Council meeting at BC. The meeting was small, reflecting the overall rough shape that SEAC is in at the moment. But it seemed to be a good event, w/ logistics ably managed by Danielle Capillo and the HEAL crew, and a pretty awesome “solidarity panel” including mountain justice activists and a representative from the student-farmworker alliance, among others. For more details about the NC meeting, and to support SEAC financially (the youth-student movement as a whole could really use your $$$ right now, folks), go to: http://www.seac.org/.

V. Governance Conversations at BC

This excerpt is from a recent “Presidents Report” by Larry Shinn:

“Since more than half of Berea's employees are not part of either the College or General Faculties, I thought it important to share the status of current governance discussions in the two faculties that would affect all employees. The current governance system has one group, the College Faculty, who is responsible for most curricular and academic matters. It is made up mostly of teaching faculty and a number of academic and other administrators and staff. The second group, the General Faculty, is made up of all commissioned members of the College Faculty as well as those administrators and staff who are commissioned. Since commissioning is directly connected to who gets to be a member of the General Faculty and commissioning is currently not open to all employees, many employees are excluded from direct participation (whether formal voice or vote) in the current General Faculty. The Executive Council has been working for two years on a set of proposals that are now working their way through the two faculties. The early proposals passed in late 2005 faculty meetings sought to streamline

Berea's committee structure by making adjustments to current standing committees. What is currently before the two faculties are three proposals that would make all employees eligible to serve on committees and/or the General Faculty. To make this possible, the three major governance proposals before the faculties are (1) to end the connection of commissioning to voting in the General Faculty (and to then revisit commissioning as something that would be open to all employees or would end altogether); (2) to alter the voting membership of both the College and General Faculties; and (3) to create a Staff Forum where all staff minus teaching faculty would meet every couple of months to discuss their issues and concerns and/or issues before one of the governance faculties. The Executive Council has asked Diane Kerby and Carolyn Castle to create a trial "Staff Gathering" and invite all employees minus the teaching faculty to attend. That Staff Gathering will occur in early March and the two primary agenda items will be (1) healthcare insurance and other options now under consideration to keep costs low and benefits high; and (2) the usefulness of a staff gathering or forum for those who are not members of one of the two faculties. Please come to that Staff Gathering to make your voice heard in discussions about both healthcare and the governance proposals, including the Staff Forum. People Services will announce the date, time, and location of the Staff Gathering as soon as they have been determined.”

VI. TESTIFY!!

Quote from recent correspondence w/ Jessica Richardson:

“I was reading a news article in the Asheville Citizen-Times this morning about
Mars College, and the student group "GLBT" group was not permitted to become an official school organization because they were fearful of losing money from super-obnoxiously conservative donors, and were unsure because of their Christian association.

I immediately thought about how Berea students struggled to add an amendment saying that people could not be discriminated based on sexual orientation- And if Berea is not a Christian oriented school, I wasn't a student there. So, it made me realize that not only would it be good to remain connected with student organizations at Berea that rock, but also be able to connect student groups with each other when I learn of news like what came from Mars Hill. yeah, so, what can else can I do to get this started?”

Progressive Alums

The Associated Press recently reported that the President of the Un of Richmond, William Cooper, was pressured into resigning early because he made some comments that students and alums of the school found offensive. These students and alums combined forces with the University faculty and began a full-scale campaign against Cooper--complete with a website, online petition, and anti-Cooper paraphernalia (http://www.firecooper.com/main.html).

Reading about this campaign I was reminded of efforts by a group of Berea College students last spring. These students put together a well-organized a campaign [called “10x10” to reflect its goal of meeting 10% of BC’s energy from renewable sources by 2010] to convince the BC administration to begin placing solar panels on its buildings and to begin planning for the future procurement of renewable energy. As part of their efforts, the students scheduled individual meetings with administrators, organized an energy conservation campaign to help offset the additional initial costs of renewables, and solicited donations from BC staff, students, and faculty. While the administration eventually agreed to pay for the remainder of the solar array, and to place the array on the central “Alumni Building,” it balked at the rest of the proposal, including budgeting for future alternative energy installations and establishing an ongoing campus committee to study and implement renewable energy.

While the 10x10 participants should certainly be proud of their efforts, I couldn’t help but wonder how much more successful this group (and other, similar efforts) might have been had they of accessed the significant and growing population of BC alums who are sympathetic to issues of sustainability and social justice. As a “veteran” student organizer, I’ve witnessed firsthand how 99% of student activists end up losing touch with ongoing activist efforts at their alma mater. Within a few years of graduation, after their younger student activist friends have also moved on, the only real connection these alums are able to maintain are with the slick, image-conscious Alumni Relations office. So alums, who often bring significant amounts of prestige and money to their alma mater, receive a very one-sided and massaged image of the goings-on there, such as those provided in the alumni magazine and donor appeals. This situation is especially problematic for politically progressive alums, many of whom look to their student activist experiences as formative but who are wary of handing over money to be administered by the same bureaucratic structures they spent so much time opposing.

A possible solution to this quandary: Progressive Alum Associations. As I move on from my college experiences, I know I’m going to be much more interested in hearing from the activist groups on campus, from the gay-straight alliance, the Black Cultural Center, the Women Studies Program, and the Sustainability & Environmental Studies Program than I am the Alumni Relations office. I know I’ll want to use my status as a BC alum to support these groups’ ongoing efforts. I also know that while I’ll probably never give BC a dime directly so long as they invest their endowment in a slew of nasty corporations, I’d be more than happy to donate my hard-earned loot directly to initiatives that support sustainability and social justice.

So what might such Progressive Alum Associations look like? Well, I’ve started sketching out some initial visions along with current BC student and 10x10 activist Danielle Capillo. I’m utilizing CampusActivism.org as a host for both a basic webpage and listserv for the group (http://www.campusactivism.org/displaygroup-1669.htm & http://www.campusactivism.org/displayemaillist-90.htm), and its stated purposes are to enable progressive BC alums to:
1) support current BC student activists and help them connect with grassroots political work beyond college
2) pressure the BC to make socially and environmentally responsible decisions
3) network with one another
I also believe that if Progressive Alum Associations were to spring up more widely, they could serve as an excellent vehicle for supporting regional and national formations of youth and student activist efforts (e.g., the Student Environmental Action Coalition, United Students Against Sweatshops, etc.).

In addition to oppression based on race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and other identities, it’s important to keep in mind how young people are systematically oppressed and excluded from political opportunities at liberation. Yet unlike our other identities, youth is one that we will all eventually leave behind. Before I ever went to college, my initial political awakening came about through participation in the youth liberation movement. As I “retire” from active participation in such efforts, I maintain that there is no better way to keep youth empowerment at the forefront of our thinking than to remain connected and accountable to youth-led movements for social and environmental justice. In order to fully understand and support their efforts, we have to figure out ways to keep the dialogue going. Progressive Alum Associations are one vehicle for accomplishing this aim, and for continuing to change the educational institutions that will shape the lives of future generations.

Berea College’s Investment Policy: A Case-Study in Hypocrisy or the Ends Justifying the Means?

NOTE: This article was published in two segments in Berea College's (BC) student newspaper, "The Pinnacle," in April 2005. I was actively involved in pushing for an investment policy more consistent with the College's mission for several years, and this article was unfortunately my final word on the topic.


The question posed by this article’s title is one that every member of the BC community should wrestle with. After all, the income generated from the College’s endowment funds a tremendous portion what BC does, from the salaries of its professors and staff to our tuitions, many of the community service programs the College administers, all the way down to the laptop on which I am typing this article.

Shouldn’t we, the beneficiaries of the College’s investment policy, be at least interested in knowing how all this money is generated? What if we learned that all the BC goodies we so often take for granted are based upon profits from the pornography, gambling, or alcohol industries, from weapons-makers, environmental destruction, or sweatshop labor? Such a revelation might not affect our decision to be part of this institution, but it might bestow a greater sense of responsibility on our part; of course, it might also sully the College’s hard-won public image.

Like many troubling ethical questions, the complexities and implications of the College’s investment policies lie mostly hidden from public view, at times it seems intentionally so. After the 1980s, when divestment from South Africa’s Apartheid-based economy was all the rage amongst U.S. colleges and universities, there was little discussion about other societal evils BC may be supporting via its investment policies.

That silence came to an end in 1998, when a group of students, staff, and faculty garnered the support of the Student Government Association and the General Faculty and demanded that the College re-examine the issue of ethical investment. As often happens in bureaucratic institutions, a “fact-finding committee” was formed. In fact, over the course of 1999-2002, the Executive Council formed two separate on-campus committees to address these concerns. The rationale for forming a second committee, one can only surmise, is that the President and Board of Trustees Investment Committee were not satisfied with the results of the first one, which suggested, among other things, that:
• the College’s Christian foundation demands an intentional investment standard which reflects these values
• an ongoing ethical investment committee should be formed to work directly with the Board of Trustees to further study and recommend ethical investment standards

Unfortunately, these recommendations were considered by only a few people from the administration and a small subset of the Board of Trustees. The second on-campus committee, appointed nearly two years later, undertook a more thorough examination of the College’s investment policy and how it affects funding of the College’s programs and mission. Yet its conclusions were strangely familiar:

“…that Berea College appoint a permanent Ethical Investment Committee within the shared governance structure of the College… The goal of the process and the committee would be to incrementally increase the allocation of long term investments into areas where the College could make a positive impact in socially responsible areas while keeping the return and risk characteristics of the overall portfolio consistent with the investment policy and philosophies of Berea College.”

This committee also pointed to the College’s moral obligation to take its investment policies seriously, given BC’s mission and Christian commitments. One member of the committee, Loretta Reynolds (Campus Minister), stated that: "If our motto is more than just a motto: ‘God has made of one blood all people of the earth’ then it seems difficult to believe that we can invest in things that destroy or inflict harm on some of 'those people of the earth'. It is not only that we care about being socially correct but social responsibility should be an intrinsic part of who we are because of our foundational commitments."

Meta Mendel-Reyes, another committee member and head of the College’s service-learning programs, noted that: “The bottom line for me is that we agreed to recommend a permanent ethical investment committee. Despite the concerns about Berea's unique dependence on its endowment, all of us were persuaded that a committee is needed to assess, on an ongoing basis, what filters would allow us to achieve both fiscal and social responsibility. The reason for socially responsible investing goes beyond the fact that it is increasingly common in higher education; I believe that Berea's mission essentially requires it.”

Yet despite these sentiments and the wide range of options laid before the College to assist us in pursuing an investment policy commensurate with our stated mission, the response by President Shinn and the Board’s Investment Committee has amounted to little more than stonewalling. After basically ignoring the findings of the first on-campus committee, then waiting nearly two years to appoint a second committee, the President and the Investment Committee then sat on their recommendations for almost a full year before even discussing them. This long-awaited discussion amounted to a conference call (rather than taking the issue up during one of their regularly-scheduled meetings) and a flat refusal to implement or further consider the committee’s recommendations. We appreciate your concerns, thanks for your work, have a good day—end of discussion.

Though the Investment Committee’s official response to Jeff Amburgey (Vice-President of Finance) has not been made public, we did receive an inkling of their perspective from President Shinn’s January 2005 “President’s Report”:

”While trustees recognized the merits of selective investing to promote certain Berea core values, they simply could not see a way this could be done responsibly and practically given the way an endowment of Berea’s size must be managed.”

This statement does not satisfactorily explain why the 1980s-era Ethical Investment Committee was allowed to lapse, why repeated pleas to re-establish it have been denied, and why we are now essentially being told that discussion of this issue has run its course.

Stating that one can “not see a way” that something can be accomplished does not so neatly equate with discontinuing the search to find that way. Further, boiling the issue down to the practicality or impracticality of “selective investing,” which the President has repeatedly done, is a gross oversimplification of the range of options potentially available to the College, and one which obscures the issue in order to interrupt further, more informed conversation.

If President Shinn and the Board of Trustees Investment Committee were taking these concerns seriously, there are a number of important steps they could take to move us forward rather than bringing this conversation to an end. What follows are only a few of many possible steps:

• Utilize wider discussion of socially responsible investing (SRI) as an educational tool
Given that many of us will have to grapple with the complexities of ethical investment in our lives, and that this issue is one which is reflected in some of the College’s core programs (e.g., service-learning, sustainability, entrepreneurship for the public good), why not foster discussion that can thoughtfully involve much of the campus community rather than hiding the issue from public view? Why has the Investment Committee to-date failed to involve the entire Board of Trustees in the conversation? Why haven’t they made their full discussion on this issue public? How about a convocation or some academic-based seminars dedicated to this topic? How about giving us a peek at what companies or money managers BC has invested in, and how those money managers have voted as shareholders when issues that would be of concern to the BC community have been raised—that’d certainly make for an interesting conversation-starter?

• Form partnerships with sister institutions facing similar struggles
BC is not the first institution in history seeking to walk the fine line between making money and accomplishing a societal good. This question is one that many educational institutions and religious communities are grappling with, and we should look to them as partners in this struggle. Organizations and associations exist for just this purpose, such as the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies, and the Investor Responsibility Research Center, just to name a few. Thus far, the College has done little if anything to even open discussion with these organizations.

• Consider a wider range of options for potential action
Given the College’s reliance upon its endowment revenue, it may be that certain options are not available to us. But it’s hard to believe that we’ve given adequate consideration to the entire range of options. The SRI movement is a growing and evolving community of intelligent and creative people, and they have had several decades now in which to develop a variety of approaches to this problem. These approaches include selective investing, but they also include community investment, shareholder advocacy, and a greater diversification of one’s investment holdings (which thereby allows for “experimentation” with investment alternatives without seriously endangering overall revenue), among others. Once the full range of options has been examined, and a complete explanation offered as to why these would or wouldn’t work, only then should we be satisfied that the issue has been adequately addressed.

• Re-establish an ongoing ethical investments committee
It’s telling that two different groups of people have come away with the same conclusions, and we should hear them out. What harm might it do to establish a joint Campus-Board of Trustees committee to study socially responsible investment, make occasional recommendations, and involve the campus in ongoing discussions? To some, the idea of such a committee is probably deeply threatening because it highlights undemocratic structures which exist in the College’s governance. To others, there’s likely concern that examining this issue might open up a Pandora’s box of uncomfortable questions and realizations. But these consequences are trivial in the face of continuing to live a lie, which is exactly what BC does by keeping its investment policies hidden.

I recently received an action alert from a group called Corporate Accountability International (CAI). In the email they talked about how Coca-Cola is draining water resources from many of the world’s poorest communities for use in bottled water and soft drinks. This Spring CAI has plans to raise the issue at Coke’s annual shareholders’ meeting, and was asking for help from Coke shareholders. It saddened me to think that my education might be funded by the type of exploitation that Coke and many other corporations are guilty of, but what seemed a worse prospect was not even knowing if this is the case. If BC does own stock in Coke, it’s highly unlikely that our money managers can be relied upon to act on behalf of the world’s poor and in accordance with BC’s motto. Perhaps at its base, the ability to claim innocence through ignorance is what our current investment policy is really about. But I didn’t become a part of this community in order to learn how to use ignorance as a shield for my actions—did you?

POSTSCRIPT: Berea's grade on the College Sustainability Report Card, a project of the Sustainable Endowments Institute, has been stuck at a stubborn C+ for the past three years. Despite the College's ambitious efforts in other realms, its scores on "Endowment Transparency," "Investment Priorities," and "Shareholder Engagement" have been dismal.