As an alum who has gone on to pursue a career in environmental education, I am proud that in just the few years since my graduation, Wesleyan has created the College of the Environment and turned itself into a leader in sustainability. Wesleyan is a [model] for other universities across the country not only for these recent initiatives but in its commitment to inculcating in its students a strong sense of social and environmental justice.

I am thus especially excited about, and thankful to, the students in the Wes, Divest! group who have been working over the past year and a half to urge Wesleyan to divest its funds from any enterprises that extract, transport, process, or distribute fossil fuels. These students, having chosen to stand at the front lines of the growing climate change movement, are doing some of the most necessary and important work of our time, and alumni, faculty, administration, and other students should stand with them.

With all these stakeholders working together, Wesleyan can become a leader in the nation-wide divestment movement. Climate change is a crisis of slow violence, the majority of its devastating impacts being incremental and accretive. In particular, the long-term casualties of climate change disproportionally are, and will continue to be, poor communities, communities of color, and future generations. To address climate change, we thus need a different set of responses, ones that take it for what it is: a moral problem.

Divestment is one of these necessary responses. As during the struggle for Civil Rights in the United States or the fight to end Apartheid in South Africa, the more that we can demonstrate to the world that climate change is a moral problem, the more likely we are to solve it. In this context then, divestment at Wesleyan is not primarily an economic strategy, but a moral one.

Efforts to transition away from fossil fuels have been hindered by the fossil fuel industry’s money, political power, and well-funded organizations of denial. While selling Wesleyan’s stock holdings might never have an immediate or direct impact on the bottom line of fossil fuel companies, especially ones as gigantic as Exxon or BP, doing so will begin to scrub away the fossil fuel industry’s semblance of social respectability and thus sow uncertainty about the viability of their business model: profiting in the present by discounting the future.

Furthermore, divestment will start to build momentum for moving money into clean energy, community development, and other more sustainable investments. I am hopeful that the WSA resolution on divestment will pass, and if it does, I urge President Roth and the administration to take active steps to pursue University divestment. Such a process will take some time to be done right, but it is crucial that deliberation not be used as a delaying tactic.

Divestment is about marshaling the energy of our students and our institutions against what Edward Said has called “the normalized quiet of unseen power.” Personally, I will be asking the University to hold my next contribution in escrow until that time when it will not be used for any new fossil fuel investments. I hope that other alumni will support this important issue and stand by the principled and bold students who are leading the way.

Siperstein is a member of the class of 2006.