Princeton University's $37.7 billion dollar endowment is supposedly the largest per-student endowment of any American university. While the the nearly 300-year-old Ivy League has enough money to continue passively reproducing its own wealth for many, many years to come, at least it won't do so to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry. As announced in a statement at the end of September 2022:
The Board of Trustees of Princeton University voted earlier this month to dissociate from 90 companies pursuant to a fossil fuel dissociation decision made last year that focused on the most-polluting segments of the industry and on concerns about corporate disinformation campaigns.
As a step toward the Board's related commitment to achieving a net-zero endowment portfolio over time, the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO) will also eliminate all holdings in publicly traded fossil fuel companies. PRINCO will also ensure that the endowment does not benefit from any future exposure to those companies.
The companies subject to dissociation (listed below) are all active in the thermal coal or tar sands segments of the fossil fuel industry, which are among the sector's largest contributors to carbon emissions. The quantitative criteria used to determine the dissociation list were based on recommendations made by a panel of faculty experts in a report submitted in May.
What follows is a list of 90 (!!) companies that the university is cutting off from their investments. Not all of the companies had existing relationships with Princeton — the university's note specifies the ones it was actually dealing with — but it's still a pretty significant move.
Princeton dissociates from segments of fossil fuel industry
Image: Matt Brown / Flickr (CC-BY-SA 2.0)
