The Daily digs deeper into the endowment - do we have the 'expertise' to have a say?

A two-part Tufts Daily feature on endowment transparency - one published on Friday, and one today - investigate the necessity of community involvement in the endowment process, which is exactly what STIR is all about.

Friday's article is titled "Tufts Behind on Endowment Transparency." The money quote:

There are deeper problems with the Tufts transparency policy than just the dearth of information publicized within the community, though. Tufts’ financial policies seem to be directly at odds with its goals as an institution that promotes active citizenship and student engagement.

"Financial transparency is about democratization,” Alissa Ayden, a sophomore at Amherst and chair of its Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI), said. “Every single member of a college or university community has a stake in the endowment. The students’ educations are made possible by the endowment, workers and professors are paid by the endowment, and alumni and even current university community members pay into it directly. Financial transparency says knowledge is power and everyone should have some. If the status of the endowment affects everyone, how come only a small number of people actually know what is going on with it?”

Ayden explained that, aside from democratizing knowledge, the main reasons for endowment transparency are practical.

“If we don’t know what our investments are, there is no way we can be engaged shareholders,” she said.

Today's article has some great coverage too, and illustrates perfectly the contrasting attitudes between Tufts and peer institutions:

Carmen Rose Duffy, investment associate at Swarthmore, agrees that student committees should keep colleges in check.

"The committees [at Swarthmore] were created as a learning process for the students, and [maintaining] transparency was to reassure them that our investments were ethical and responsible," Duffy said. "We didn't know that students were interested until they came to our door and asked how we do things. Transparency offered students an opportunity to learn about investor responsibility."

While these policies may look great on paper, one concern is that students are not qualified to be making such weighty financial decisions. While he believes that students may be capable of making some small investment decisions, Tufts Board of Trustees Vice Chair Peter Dolan fears that students are not qualified enough to understand larger investments.

"I don't think they have the expertise to do that, and we fortunately have alumni and trustees and donors who are actively involved in [those decisions]," he said.

In our opinion, Vice Chair Dolan's statement - and the somewhat misleading title, "Some administrators find students unqualified to handle investments" - imply that unqualified students are trying to take control of the endowment. But all that the ACSR does is offer nonbinding advice to the Board of Trustees - they have no actual power over our investments, and we are not advocating that they should.

If you have faith in our undergraduates, graduates, alumni, and faculty to show the professionalism to offer nonbinding advice to our Board of Trustees, then please join us and help us prove ourselves to the them. We put 100% of our faith in them; they should have more faith in us.