Are U of T’s stocks bombing?

This month, the two gun clubs at Hart House will effectively be shut down, due to an administrative decision in June that said implements of violence had no place in universities.

Rini Rashid found this ironic, since the university has almost $2 million in stocks and bonds with Lockheed-Martin, an aerospace and advanced technology manufacturer cited by Defence News as the largest defense contractor in the world by revenue.

Rashid, vice-president of Investing in Integrity, a member of the rifle club last year who never found time to go shoot, is quick to point out that U of T has investments with a manufacturer of F-35 rifles widely used in armies and militias, but bans sport .35 rifles.

The University of Toronto Asset Management corporation manages the university’s $2.5 billion of investments in a roster of companies, including Lockheed-Martin, Chevron, and ExxonMobil.

Rashid claimed U of T’s investments would be more sustainable if they preferentially bought stock in companies with good environmental, social and political practices.

I in I works under the auspices of the Responsible Investment Working Group, an advocacy group composed mostly of law students at U of T, who are working to put forward a proposal for a new investment policy that would involve all stakeholders—that is, university staff, faculty, students and alumni, in the university’s investments.

According to a RIWG report, the university administration agreed to review its policies “to explore its role in promoting corporate social responsibility” in a meeting with the group in 2005.

Since then, the university has decided on a process for divesting its $10.5 million holdings in tobacco and tobacco-related companies, following pressure from the campus tobacco control group E-BUTT. However, it still has stocks in companies like Chevron, responsible for an ecological disaster now known as the Rainforest Chernobyl, in which some 18 billion gallons of crude oil were leaked into the Amazon.

Rashid emphasizes that the university must revise its policies mostly for to its own financial well-being. “By ‘responsibility,’ we do not only mean the moral kind,” says Rashid. “Bad governance will get you unsustainable business results.”