Last year, students brought the University’s endowment spending into the public spotlight, and partly into students’ hands, with a new Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) committee. The Endowment Advisory Committee (EAC) is a small panel dedicated to deliberating and voicing student opinions regarding the spending of endowment money.
The EAC held its first meeting for the 2006-2007 academic year on Friday, focusing on the committee’s yearly goals and perceived legitimacy amongst administrators and students. Sam Astor ’07, the WSA’s newest elected member, spoke about the committee’s goals in an e-mail, emphasizing the need for student recognition.
“The primary goal for this year is to let students know that the EAC exists,” Astor said. “We want them to know that they have the opportunity to speak to the administration, that we can make them a part of the decision-making processes of the corporations in which Wesleyan invests.”
The committee has yet to fully define its relationship with the administration. Anne Fox ’07, EAC member who oversaw the committee’s creation last year, cited its recent creation status to explain its nebulous position.
“The relationship between the EAC and the administration is too new to be characterized,” Fox said. “After we convinced them that such a committee would be a good idea, they helped us a lot in creating it. We just don’t know yet how they’ll feel when we start collaborating on major decisions.”
Fox also emphasized the EAC’s hopes for financial transparency within the University, citing publicized spending as instrumental in helping student activist groups enact meaningful change on campus.
“I was sitting on the WSA Executive Committee when Gabe [Tabak ’06] brought the EAC idea to us, and I was very enthusiastic about it because I knew that activist groups like EON and WesSTAND had been trying to influence the school’s investments for some time,” Fox said. “We realized that a central committee to whom they could address concerns and find out information about University spending would make their jobs much easier. I also knew that groups like WesPrep had had concerns about the companies Wesleyan hires for things like construction, and I was enthusiastic about a group that could be a resource for other groups who want a better dialogue with the administration about socially responsible decision making.”
Vice President and Chief Investment Officer of the University Thomas Kannam echoed Fox’s sentiments regarding the EAC’s positive impact.
“Before the EAC all we had were occasional informal discussions with students where they provided input on endowment policy, primarily on proxy issues,” Kannam said. “There was not a lot of structure to this process. The EAC was developed to bring an architecture to student-administration relations, and so it’s been doing that admirably.”
Kannam also pointed to the relative quiet that has accompanied endowment decisions in the past couple of years, both before and after the EAC’s creation.
“There was no conflict over the past couple of years between students and administration regarding endowment money,” he said.
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