Letter to the Editor

A committee created by the PSU administration to address the demands of student protestors is preparing to wrap up despite having little actual input from students. The Committee on Socially Responsible Investments and Partnerships (CSRIP) is due to make a recommendation regarding divestment at the end of February. However, its attempt to solicit student feedback was anemic at best, leaving students wondering whether they actually wanted to hear from us or were just looking for an excuse to drop talks of divestment.

Protests erupted at college campuses across the US last spring in response to the invasion and indiscriminate bombing of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. PSU joined the fray in April, with protesters demanding that PSU end its scholarship program with Boeing, the fourth largest weapons manufacturer in the world. Students also demanded divestment of PSU’s investment capital from various Israeli corporations as well as defense contractors and fossil fuel companies.

On May 31st of 2024, the administration made a promise to create a committee to examine PSU’s investments and partnerships. The Committee on Socially Responsible Investments and Partnerships officially convened on November 12th in fall term. It is made up of four students, three faculty, and three staff members. The committee’s task is to “recommend practices and procedures PSU could implement to develop a framework around investment and partnership to support and enhance alignment with our university’s mission and values.”

At the end of February, it will make a recommendation to President Ann Cudd, who will then make a recommendation to the Board of Trustees.

The recommendation format means that the committee has no real power other than giving advice to administration based on student and staff responses. We believe this was by design. The intent was not to actually create lasting change for the university, but rather to appease student protestors and take pressure off the administration in a tense moment. One could argue that at least the Committee gave students a voice, but this unfortunately turned out not to be the case.

The Committee’s outreach effort to the student body has been suboptimal to say the least. The link to the survey was sent out in a mass email in which it was one item among many, and not well advertised, being just plain text. It was so nondescript we missed it the first time we read through the email. The comment period lasted a week from January 13th to January 20th, with “listening sessions” planned at various buildings throughout the week. Within the email there was no mention of protests or divestment. The “listening sessions” consisted of people tabling with flyers for the Committee on Socially Responsible Investments and Partnerships who were there to direct students to fill out the survey. There was no space for students to actually talk to the members and give their opinions face to face.

To nobody’s surprise, only about 0.22% of the student body responded to the survey, or around 150 students (out of 18,000). There are two inferences that can be made from this. We expect the administration to say that the student body simply does not care—which looking back at the past eight months—sounds ridiculous. The other inference that seems more logical is that the outreach was intended to not engage a majority of students. Not only was the survey difficult to find, it was also poorly designed.

A common complaint from students about the survey was that it used leading language and forced ranking of non mutually exclusive subjects. For instance, the first question on the survey reads, “PSU’s investment returns are essential for supporting students and the university’s overall financial well-being. How should PSU balance maximizing financial returns and investing in companies or funds that align with social and environmental sustainability goals?” We believe this creates a false choice between having divestment and having good financial returns. Multiple studies have shown that fossil fuel divestment has not had a negative impact on most divesting institution’s bottom line.

Technical errors made in the survey design show that it wasn’t designed or checked by a social scientist despite having many on staff at PSU. A PSU social science professor, we asked to look over the survey, pointed out several flaws. These included inconsistent question ordination (ranking least to greatest or vice versa) throughout the survey. This is a basic error which can lead to survey takers accidentally ranking the wrong answers. They also pointed to questions 4 and 6 of the survey which use the word “and” which makes the question less informative because the survey taker may only agree with one of the premises of the question. This is a sad showing for an institution which prides itself on research.

President Cudd has recently allowed the CSRIP to re-open the survey to the student population, hopefully to be marketed better, but likely with the same questions to keep it consistent. Despite the aforementioned problems with the survey, we implore the student body to respond, especially to the open-ended questions which only a small portion of the original respondents answered, even if only as a show of force. We don’t know when it will be sent out again, but we know that CSRIP’s deadline for a recommendation to Pres. Cudd has not been postponed past February 28th, which means at the most it will be open for only a few weeks.

Notwithstanding the administrative negligence of this issue, students truly care about how our money flows, and the externalities of our degrees. In Fall ‘24, student government (ASPSU) created a parallel sustainability ad-hoc committee focused on examining PSU’s ties to militarism and fossil fuels, which is in the process of writing a resolution on divestment. The goal of this committee is to put further pressure on CSRIP and administration, while also properly engaging the student body on these issues. We believe a resolution by students will further this fight by having a succinct and focused set of declarations to rally around. Student participation is imperative to let the administration know that we have not forgotten our demands.