On Jan. 23, the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility had its first meeting.
Composed of 10 members including undergraduate and graduate students, alumni, faculty and staff members, the Advisory Committee labored under the impression that it would be making investment recommendations to the Board of Trustees in an effort to ensure that Tufts' undisclosed investments are ethically sound. However, the Board of Trustees expressed its desire to impose restrictions on the type of information Advisory Committee members would be able to access and what they would be able to do with such information.
Then, when members of the Advisory Committee met with Board of Trustee liaisons on Feb. 8, they were told that the trustees wanted the committee to be restricted to three undergraduate members. As previously discussed, Advisory Committee members would not have access to commingled funds could not disclose any information about Tufts' investments to the public or publish reports on the subject.
Sophomore and Advisory Committee representative Gabe Frumkin said that the trustees' decision was quite a "disappointment" to the students of the Advisory Committee. But Executive Vice President of Tufts Patricia Campbell contends that "the procedures ... are consistent with those outlined by the [Board of Trustees] last May when they agreed to meet with the student committee," adding that the Advisory Committee is not an oversight board, but an educational opportunity for students.
So which is it? Clearly, one - or both - of these parties has its wires crossed, and until the Board of Trustees and the members of the Advisory Committee come to an explicit agreement as to the Advisory Committee's purpose and nature, there is no point in having such a committee at all. If the two groups continue to approach their work from such different perspectives, how can they expect to ever be productive?
Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, if the groups agree to carry on as planned with the Advisory Committee serving as an ethical barometer for Tufts' investments, the Board of Trustees must allow the committee more access to the information it needs.
After all, the reason the Advisory Committee was formed in the first place was to make more transparent the process by which the trustees invest Tufts' endowment money. Currently, the Board of Trustees does not disclose information related to its investment strategies, which worried students like Frumkin, who feared the complex maze of hedge funds and mutual funds which currently account for part of the university's investments might be allocating Tufts' dollars to immoral institutions like corrupt African dictatorships.
How is the Advisory Committee supposed to investigate and advise against such ethically unstable investments if it doesn't have access to information regarding the university's commingled funds? And wouldn't it be more effective if the responsibility of such oversight also extended to alumni, faculty members and grad students, rather than being concentrated in the hands of three undergraduates who probably don't have much experience with hedge funds?
This, of course, then begs the question: If the Advisory Committee isn't allowed to disclose its findings to anyone outside its own three members, how is it supposed to deal with potential problems it may uncover?
When faced with such puzzling questions, one can't help but think that the trustees are just trying to do an end run around the Advisory Committee - that this agreement was merely a superficial move to placate a concerned student group. The Daily certainly hopes that this is not the case.
That said, the Board of Trustees and the Advisory Committee need to start back at square one; they should sit down and come to a consensus once and for all about the role the Advisory Committee will have in overseeing Tufts' investments.
And if, as a result of such discussions, it is decided that the Advisory Committee should be able to make recommendations to the Board of Trustees about the destination of invested funds, the Board's should grant the Advisory Committee all necessary access to carry out that task in the most efficient and socially responsible way possible.
Both parties have the best interest of the university at heart; we hope they will not allow their differences in opinion to prevent them from accomplishing a worthy end.
