April, 22, 2024 

Chicago, IL – Invest for a clean-energy future – or we will not donate.

That is the call from more than 100 alumni, and growing, from the University of Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman’s legacy of investor-first primacy. 

An opportunity to lead

This alumni movement is led by “UChicago for Climate Action” and parallels the on-campus student-led effort UChicago Divest, which has collected over 2,500 signatures from the university community. The alumni letter to the university notes that UChicago is behind other leading universities in fossil fuel divestment. If UChicago agrees with this alumni call, the university would join a number of leading institutions like Oxford and Cambridge who are working to divest from fossil fuels. 

Katharine Bierce, one of three co-founders of UChicago for Climate Action, shared: 

“If the University of Chicago wants to truly be a peer of Ivy League institutions, the board should approve this change and join the majority of Ivies like Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton in working to divest from or substantially reduce investment in fossil fuels.”

Michael Hendrix, one of three co-founders of UChicago for Climate Action, shared: 

“While the University was built with John Rockefeller’s oil money, it can choose – like many Rockefeller descendants today – not to use its wealth and prestige to prop up an industry that threatens life on this planet. Over a decade ago, my first campus job was calling alumni to fundraise. Many alumni today aren’t comfortable giving money to a university that invests its endowment in fossil fuel companies.”

Maureen Craig, one of three co-founders of UChicago for Climate Action, shared: 

“Oil and gas companies have used tobacco industry tactics to delay, deny, and obfuscate the science of climate change and the harms that are happening. An institution dedicated to creating and spreading knowledge is acting against itself by investing in an industry that can only survive by denying knowledge.”

A growing movement

The alumni movement is only the latest development in a steady ratcheting up of pressure on the University of Chicago. A legal complaint filed in October of 2023 by students against the University with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General argues that the University’s fossil fuel investments violate its responsibilities as a non-profit institution. 

Six months prior to the complaint filing, in April of last year, over 200 people rallied on campus on the main quadrangle to call for divestment. Over 50 professors and 60 local and national organizations such as 350.org, Better Future Project, Catholic Divestment Network, Campus Climate Network, Divest Princeton, Fridays for Future US, Green Faith, MIT Divest, National Lawyers Guild UChicago, Seeding Sovereignty, and Third Act Educators have joined the coalition of students to affirm that these investments contribute to the climate crisis and cause harm to UChicago’s students and community. 

The university’s investments in fossil fuel are at cross-purposes with its sustainability plan, established in 2022. While universities like Notre Dame, Ball State, and Princeton have committed to a net zero campus using solutions like electric heat pumps, thermal storage and geo-exchange technology, the University of Chicago still plans to rely on fossil fuels on campus via gas-fired central steam plant central heating. 

Nationally, nearly 100 educational institutions have committed to some form of fossil fuel divestment, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Georgetown, Cornell, Syracuse, and the University of Michigan. For a full list of higher education institutions divesting their endowments from fossil fuels, see: https://divestmentdatabase.org 

To read the full petition, see here: https://www.uchicagoforclimateaction.org/read-the-petition