TEXAS UNIVERSITIES SCORE POORLY ON SUSTAINABILITY TEST

By Ella Tyler

The Sustainable Endowments Institute, a special project fund of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, has released its report card on the sustainability practices of the country’s 100 best-endowed colleges and universities. These schools hold more than $258 billion — approximately 75 percent of all higher education endowment investments.

The University of Texas earned a C+, the best grade of the eight Texas schools on the list. Southern Methodist University and Texas A&M made Cs, and Rice University made a C-. Baylor University earned a D+, Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Christian University made Ds and Trinity University made a D-. No other Texas colleges were rated.

Nationally, the highest grade, A-, went to Harvard University, Stanford University, Dartmouth College, and Williams College.

The grades are based on seven main categories: climate change and energy, green building, food and recycling, administration, endowment transparency, investment priorities, and shareholder engagement.

The only A that any Texas school earned was on Endowment Transparency. The report said, ”The University of Texas states that the open records law requires proxy voting records and a list of endowment holdings to be available to the public. This information is emailed to individuals upon request.”

Interestingly, Texas A & M, which is subject to the same open records law as UT, got a C in Endowment Transparency. The report says, “The university makes its proxy voting record available only to trustees and senior administrators. Investment managers must be posted on the website per statute, while individual holdings are generally shared only within the treasurer’s office.”

SMU and Baylor did well in Investment Priorities, earning Bs for inventing in renewable energy activities, but most schools studied scored poorly in Endowment Transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement. For example, Rice earned Bs in Administration and Green Building but failed Transparency and Shareholder Engagement.

Even if these categories seem unrelated to sustainability, they are important factors in this report because these schools’ combined endowments total more than $300 billion in institutional investor capital. The institute encourages schools to consider climate change in their investments as well as their campus activities.

The report says, “While school trustees and investment professionals carefully weigh financial data, the risk that climate change poses for the bottom line of endowment returns is largely being overlooked. Thus, few schools have exercised their proxy votes on climate change and no schools have introduced shareholder resolutions on this vital issue.”

Each schools report specifies the reason for the grade assigned, allowing readers to argue about their school’s grade or find out how to get good grades themselves. As an example, Rice’s B in Administration is “because a former Rice president signed the Talloires declaration in 1995 and the board of trustees adopted a sustainability policy in 2004. The university employs a full-time sustainability planner and the facilities engineering and planning department excels in green cleaning practices and in creating a socially sustainable working environment for its custodians. Rice is working to connect campus environmental performance with class projects, independent study projects, and student extracurricular activities so that the campus acts as a hands-on laboratory for students to learn about sustainability and to make real changes.”

The entire report and each school’s report card are available online.

Sustainable Endowments Institute is engaged in research and education on the sustainability of higher education endowments. It has also conducted a survey of officials at the top 331 college and university endowments regarding proxy voting, transparency of endowment holdings and related policy issues. It creates case studies analyzing the best practices of college and university endowment shareowner programs and offers workshops in how students can make their schools more sustainable.