A new campaign, Divest Vic!, was launched by student activists on January 25, calling for Victoria College to join UofT’s commitment to divest from all fossil fuel investments.
UofT’s divestment plan does not extend to federated colleges
Last October, the University of Toronto’s president, Meric Gertler, announced the University’s plan to divest from all fossil fuel investments by the year 2030. This statement, however, does not include federated colleges like Victoria College.
Victoria College operates as financially independent from the governance of UofT’s central administration. Thus, while the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM) has committed to taking an active role in shifting UofT’s investment policies, the pledge does not extend to Vic’s endowment fund.
Victoria College has been open about its sustainability goals, including active promotion of recycling and waste diversion alongside replacing electrical lighting fixtures with more efficient LEDs. Spokesperson Liz Taylor Surani told The Varsity in early February that Victoria College supports addressing climate change and respecting the environment, recognizing that they “need to play a vital role.” However, any divestment plans have yet to be publicly addressed despite efforts of the Divest Vic! coalition, raising concerns amongst the student community.
Divest Vic! Campaign
Surani informed The Varsity that the Board of Regents are in charge of Victoria College’s investments. When unofficially meeting with members to discuss plans to divest in 2021, students reported being met with resistance. “There was never necessarily an explicit statement that Vic wouldn’t divest, but there was certainly resistance to the idea of it,” Leila Tjiang, a student representative on the Board of Regents and co-organizer of the Divest Vic! campaign, said in an interview with The Strand.
This reluctance, she said, ultimately motivated the push for this petition, aiming to garner student support across campus and spread awareness of this ongoing issue that has yet to be addressed by the College. In an interview with The Strand, Jerico Raguindin, another co-organizer and President of the Victoria University Students’ Administrative Council (VUSAC), added that a lack of student engagement and active interest is largely what sanctions committee governance bodies to avoid the question of divestment, operating under the assumption that students “don’t care or that they will eventually forget and move on.” Raguindin suggested that this not only perpetuates the dismissal of the topic, but also allows the University to move forward without being held accountable for the shortcomings of its climate initiative.
Tjiang asserted that Victoria College’s financial statements are unclear and difficult to decipher. Despite being publicly accessible, these documents make it arduous for students to find information about where the University is investing its money. Students, who are ultimately the institution’s main stakeholders, want to see more transparency when it comes to investments, said Tjiang. “Vic not only has the largest endowment of the three federated colleges, but it also likes to portray itself as having a progressive reputation,” she continued. Given that UofT has divested, Tjiang feels that there is adequate reason for Victoria to divest and that the College is failing to live up to its forward-thinking reputation, as well as standards set by UofT regarding the divestment movement.
“Arguments that [divestment] is too difficult to understand are … basically answers to silence students,” stated Tjiang. “Because if the University really cared, they could probably spend the money to figure it out. Those funds are there.”
Surani told The Varsity that the Board of Regents’s decisions regarding investment are guided by “Guidelines for Incorporating Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG). According to her, the committee will conduct its annual review of the ESG guidelines in the coming months, and any new decisions surrounding investment would reflect these updated guidelines. “All decisions are informed by the recognition that the Board of Regents holds the fiduciary responsibility for the long-term viability of Victoria University,” she wrote to The Varsity.
This is not the first time that Vic is being criticized for its climate policy. Julia DaSilva, a Victoria College alum and former organizer of the 2018 Divest Vic! campaign, told The Strand that this call for action is part of a battle for climate justice that has been ongoing since 2012. According to her, that campaign fell through primarily as a result of the University not taking student activism seriously, coupled with waning student support for the initiative during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time, focus shifted away from Victoria College in favour of a UofT-wide push for divestment.
The value of divestment
Even though UofT’s commitments are a step forward in tackling climate change with “cautious optimism,” DaSilva feels that there is still a lot of work to be done on behalf of the federated colleges. Rivka Goetz of Leap UofT told The Strand that at Victoria College, there is a student representative on every committee in the Board of Regents except the investments committee. “UofT can do better by taking student activism seriously and creating more transparency and accountability to its students,” said Goetz. She also criticized UofT’s failure to mention the political and social implications of divestment, such as the role of the fossil fuel industry in land disputes, FPIC violations, and colonial violence in their announcement, implicating that there is still room for progress in the divestment movement.
Tjiang suggested that Victoria College can step up and set the divestment standard for the other federated colleges and even universities across Canada, turning a mere drop in the pond into a sizable splash. She stated that divestment stands to delegitimize the fossil fuel industry by “removing the social license that companies rely upon to operate,” with the goal that fewer investments will result in a collective shift towards more sustainable energy sources. Essentially, this negative stigmatization of the extraction of fossil fuels will help position climate change as a pivotal issue that needs to be universally addressed.
How can students become more involved?
DaSilva offered an especially important message to consider on Valentine’s Day: we need to make room for possibilities of love beyond the boundaries of romance and consider the power that emanates from a community coming together to fight for their planet, manifesting a unifying love for the environment—a relationship that must be nurtured and cultivated to avoid disaster.
If you are a student looking to become more engaged with climate activism, here are some environmental groups across campus you can join, along with the Divest Vic! petition:
