I am a first-year student at Harvard College and a leader of the student campaign, Fossil Free Divest Harvard. We are calling on Harvard to eliminate coal, oil and gas companies from its nearly $40 billion endowment.

Since 2012, our movement and other student movements on campus have called for the university to take action to no avail.

In a recent public forum about fossil fuel divestment, Larry Bacow, the university’s president, reiterated the same tired arguments we’ve heard for the last six years, about “engaging” with fossil fuel companies and not using Harvard’s endowment as a tool for social change. Meanwhile, there continues to be virtually zero transparency about how the university invests its endowment, or any recognition of the growing public urgency around the stark reality of the climate crisis.

President Bacow, and his predecessors, have long called for “civil discourse.” We believe it’s time for action.

On April 23, Divest Harvard students live-paint a map of what they identify as Harvard’s unsustainable and unethical land investments. (Courtesy of Caleb Schwartz/Divest Harvard)

On Earth Day, we stood alongside faculty and alumni allies, including former Sen. Tim Wirth (D-Colo.) and former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy (who is on the faculty at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), to announce an intergenerational coalition that's calling on Harvard to divest. In the days since, we have held banner drops, hosted panel discussions on climate justice, a civil disobedience training and live-painted a map of Harvard’s unsustainable and unethical land investments.

Harvard likes to position itself as a global leader, but the university has a history of being behind the times. It was also reluctant to divest from companies doing business with the apartheid South African regime. It was one of the last universities to divest, and it only did so in part. If the egregious human rights violations of apartheid South Africa barely motivated the university to action, you can imagine the challenge our organizers face. This year, we’ve had our calls for action dismissed, our requests for meetings ignored and our protests characterized as silencing free speech.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is taking action. More than 58,000 individuals worldwide and 1,000 institutions — including 40 U.S. colleges and the entire country of Ireland — have divested $8 trillion from fossil fuel companies.

Harvard, however, hasn’t the will nor the leadership to confront climate change. It's embarrassing. The university cannot claim to be a leader of innovation, if it limits its own climate solutions to “campus resource efficiency” programs or, as President Bacow has repeatedly suggested, having students organize around “eliminating the trays” in the dining hall.