Three recent Canadian university graduates, Kyuwon Kim, Yasmin Parodi, and Elysia Petrone, have launched a petition on change.org advocating that Maclean’s magazine add an “ethical investment” category to their annual university rankings issue.
Almost 10,000 people have signed the petition since it was first posted last month.
Universities are often criticised for investing in fossil fuel, tobacco, and weapons companies.
“Students are attending universities to be future human-rights activists, environmentalists, economists, said Kim, who has a degree in natural resources conservation.
“It is backwards that the institution that we attended, where we learned to better the world, is investing in activities that are contributing to problems that we are trying to solve.”
Debate surrounds what exactly the phrase “ethical investment” means. However, Kim would like to see Maclean’s model their criteria off of the Sustainable Endowments Institute’s “Green Report Card.”
Before it was suspended in 2011, the report card ranked schools on a range of sustainability issues.
“Universities […] have a moral obligation to educate people and lead by example,” said Kim.
Maclean’s doesn’t have any plans to add ethical investing to its rankings, the magazine said in a press release.
“Interest in Maclean’s university rankings is always very high among students and we appreciate all the feedback we get. However, we believe this is an issue best explored in an article.”
Maclean’s has published two articles on their On Campus website regarding the issue. In one, Professor Todd Pettigrew of Cape Breton University argues that activists tend to oversimplify the issue. He said he once believed universities had a responsibility to invest ethically, but has recently concluded that there are too many factors to make the idea work.
In the other article, Torrance Coste, a graduate of conservation geography at the University of Victoria, and a Vancouver Island Campaigner with the Wilderness Committee, disagrees.
“Investment information should be made public so that prospective students can take it into account when making decisions about where to study,” Coste wrote.
“It’s not something that a lot of incoming students know about and thus they wouldn’t really consider it a factor in choosing their school,” says Daniela Spagnuolo, a first-year international development studies student at the University of Toronto.
“By making information like that accessible to students it may help hold universities accountable for making ethical investments into the future.”
Tyler Girard, a first-year University of Windsor student said students want positive change to be part of their university experience.
“If a university works to improve its own standards on all levels it shows how much they care about providing students with top-notch post secondary education.”
