By Gabe Frumkin

Submitted Spring 2008

As a first-year student at Tufts, I became very involved in the campus anti-war movement. Students in that movement became interested in how the university might benefit financially from war, specifically in profiting from endowment investments related to military industries. We saw the university’s endowment as an area where we could make appreciable change on campus, but were disappointed to find that Tufts made none of the endowment public, stymieing our ability to build a project around the endowment.

As we continued searching for a way to proceed forward with our efforts we began to attract the attention of students with other interests, particularly in genocide relief and human rights. We got in contact with a graduate student at Tufts who was particularly interested in the genocide in Sudan who had done some research on the endowment the year before. With her help, we had a meeting with the director of investments for the university in late October. We did not expect to garner very much information from this meeting, but we considered it an important first step in what we envisioned to be a lasting dialogue between concerned student activists and the university’s administration.

As predicted, our meeting with the investment director was not particularly informative, but it did serve as a springboard for our movement. I contacted the president of Tufts to express that students were not satisfied with the meeting. In his reply, he offered to help arrange a time where students concerned with the endowment could present our ideas to the Administration and Finance Committee of the Board of Trustees, Tufts’ governing body. Very excited, we told him that we would begin to prepare for the presentation immediately. This was mid-November, and the meeting was scheduled for mid-February. We started doing research and planning our next moves right away.

Our planning consisted of two separate but related segments. The first was the presentation to the Board itself. As we prepared for the presentation, our ideas shifted, demonstrating how our movement was maturing with time and effort. What had been a movement essentially advocating for divestment from weapons manufacturers and companies doing business in Sudan became a movement for endowment transparency and democracy. We realized that we could have more significant and lasting impact both at Tufts and abroad through advocating for the creation of an advisory board on shareholder responsibility, as well as seeking more transparency of the endowment to engender interest and activism. We planned to stress the educational benefit of endowment transparency and democracy, and framed our ideas as great opportunities for Tufts to increase its commitment to social and environmental justice.

While we planned for the Board presentation, we shaped a campus movement to demonstrate to administrators we had significant support and to serve as a base for future actions if we were ignored at the Board meeting. Building on the enthusiastic support of anti-war activists, anti-genocide activists and others, we attracted attention to our movement by writing op-eds for our student newspaper, offering ourselves for profiles in student magazines, and holding meetings and vigils. Prepared with good strategies of how to proceed if our requests were not granted, two other students and I presented to the Board in mid-February.

Fortunately, the Board agreed with our requests, and granted us the opportunity to start organizing a committee. This semester, we have been working to lay the groundwork upon which the advisory committee will function, including recruiting members, establishing relationships with people in the school administration and Tufts’ student government, and creating a Charter document. I am excited to say that next semester we will have our first formal meetings, where we look forward to working with a sub-committee of the Administration and Finance Committee to advise the university on how to vote on proxy resolutions, set the amount of endowment transparency, and fine-tune the workings of the committee.

Our campaign was successful because we:

1.    Planned ahead and prepared. At every point of our campaign, not only did we know what we were going to do, but we had a few options of how to proceed to the next point.

2.    Communicated with the university administration. By avoiding a confrontation and working through the channels they provided to us, we ended up with a fantastic opportunity to speak with the Board.

3.    Formed a coalition of student organizations to help us. One of the exciting things about endowment democracy is the range of different interests and concerns that it can address. Capitalize on that!

Gabe Frumkin is a Peace and Justice studies major at Tufts University and chairs the committee he successfully established as a freshman.