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As reported here yesterday, Yale University’s endowment grew by 12.3 percent in fiscal 2018, a rate of return that yielded a total of $29.4 billion as of June 30.
That return rate would delight the average private investor, though it actually slightly lagged endowment performance of a number of peer institutions, including Princeton (12.5 percent), Stanford (13.1 percent) and MIT (13.5 percent).
However, some at Yale care less about their endowment’s performance than about how it is achieved. Specifically, they would like the university to divest its portfolio of holdings in companies of whose products and/or services they disapprove.
Now, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, which recommends university investment policy changes, will deliberate Yale’s stance on investing in electronic nicotine delivery systems (aka e-cigarettes) as well as policies related to private prison investments.
In June the Yale Corporation, the university’s governing body, adopted new proxy voting guidelines for investments related to private-prison operations. These outline that the governing body will support “reasonable and well-constructed shareholder resolutions related to improvements in the corporate social responsibility of private prisons.”
Companies that operate private prisons have been a bête noire for student activists since the dawn of, well, private prisons — even though Yale’s chief investment officer, David F. Swensen, wrote in a March Yale Daily News op-ed that the university currently holds no such investments.
Formed based on recommendations from the 1972 manual The Ethical Investor, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility drafts recommendations for the university’s investment policies based on whether the subject of the investment causes a “grave social injury.”
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