A generation ago American college students successfully pressured their schools to divest their multimillion-dollar endowments from apartheid South Africa, which helped bring an official end to the racist policies and proved to the world that economic sanctions work. However, despite being pioneers in socially responsible investing,
a new report from the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute and the Tellus Institute reveals that when it comes to investing based on environmental, social, and corporate-governance goals, the nation's colleges and universities are no longer leading the way.
The study which analyzed "existing data within present limits of disclosure" found that the number of schools that say they have some socially conscious criteria for their endowment investments was just 18 percent in 2011, a drop from 21 percent in 2009. IRRCI’s executive director Jon Lukomnik says that they "find a general
