President Marx has said that one aspect of the mission of Amherst College is “to fire in [students] a lifelong desire for learning and moral reasoning and action.” This is a noble sentiment, and one that the College lives up to admirably. In order to educate principled, service-oriented leaders, however, Amherst should set an example for ideological and moral consistency by ensuring that it does not pursue business relationships that compromise the integrity of its beliefs. Historically, Amherst has altered its investment decisions in response to the outrages of especially unsavory regimes, such as apartheid South Africa and Sudan. Currently, though, there is room for improvement in the way Amherst approaches shareholder responsibility. The investment interests of the College are not as accessible to students as they should be. Additionally, members of the campus community ought to have a greater voice in determining investment choices.

At the very least, students have the right to know where the College keeps its money. According to the 2008 College Sustainability Report Card, released by the Sustainable Endowment Institute, Amherst received a D for endowment transparency. The group claimed that “the College makes neither its proxy voting record nor its list of endowment holdings public. Detailed information ... is only available to trustees and senior administrators.” While the trustees and the administration dispute these contentions, it has proven hard for students and student organizations to get access to the list of Amherst’s investments. Both The Amherst Student and the Amherst College Responsible Endowment Coalition (ACREC), an umbrella group meant to foster more socially aware investment at the College, have had recent attempts to garner information on College investments stymied, more by seeming institutional confusion than by active hostility. It should not be this difficult for students to get access to the school’s investment portfolio. The relevant documentation should be linked to the school’s Web site. At least, it should be immediately available on request from the Treasurer’s Office. If the information is more accessible than it currently seems, it is up to the school to publicize this. Greater transparency is completely within the logistical capacity of the College and there is no good reason why the campus should not have the school’s business records at its fingertips.

Similarly, there is no reason why the campus community does not play a larger role in ensuring that the school acts as a socially responsible investor. The ultimate goal of the ACREC is to create a committee of students, faculty, staff and administration to advise the trustees and the Investment Office on how the school ought to influence the businesses in which it invests, to attempt to bring them into greater conformity with the principles professed by the College. Ideally, this committee would have the power to submit proxy resolutions, using Amherst’s shareholding position to force corporate votes on practices of concern to the school. In extreme cases, the committee would be able to compel the College to divest from especially egregious corporate miscreants, if any such situations were to exist.

It is appropriate that such power devolve to a body representative of the campus community. Amherst College likes to conceive of itself as a collaborative effort at learning, with its end, to quote the motto, as the illumination of the world. When the money used to achieve those goals is placed in companies that violate corporate ethics, it calls into question the integrity of our purpose and our expressed beliefs. As we all bear moral responsibility if funds used to our benefit are tainted, we should share the right to determine what constitutes responsible endowment management. If that means we lose a little money off our gargantuan nest egg, so be it.

But, there is no reason why that must be so. According to Jacqueline Zaneri of ACREC, Harvard, Williams and Yale are among the many top colleges that have committees to advise or decide on responsible investment. Nobody can pretend that this has put a dent in those schools’ sizeable endowments. These institutions all allow the ethical reasoning of their campus communities to bolster the sound business decisions of their investment managers. Why should Amherst not join their number?