Brandeis Climate Justice, a coalition of students and faculty which advocates for the university to divest from fossil fuel corporations, staged several protest events on Monday and Tuesday to earn the attention of the Board of Trustees during their annual fall meeting this week.

On Monday night, protestors stood outside the entrance to the Faculty Club and gave Trustees copies of a letter to the Board explaining their reasons for urging divestment, according to an email to the Justice from BCJ member Dan Klein '18. Students and faculty marched to the Shapiro Campus Center from Rabb Steps on Tuesday morning and later stood and chanted outside the Faculty Lounge when the Trustees moved there for lunch.

An adapted version of the letter ran in the Justice last week, stating “Brandeis’s energy investments today are literally shaping the climatic future of the University’s students and stakeholders. Fossil fuels are not 'investments' if they are eroding the ecological foundations of our future.” Brandeis Climate Justice also hung a banner from the Martin A. Fischer School of Physics building on Oct. 26, which read “Trustees: Climate Justice Cannot Wait. Divest Deis,” according to the Facebook page for Brandeis Climate Justice.

Senior Student Representative to the Board of Trustees Grady Ward ’16 told the Justice in an interview, “I don’t think they [the Trustees] really understood what it [the protest] was. Or, at least, most of them didn’t. I saw a lot of posts afterwards about how the Trustees were laughing at students — that is not the case.” According to Ward, the Trustees most educated about the divestment issue are those on the investment and students and enrollment committees, and these trustees consider themselves well-informed of students’ concerns. “I don’t know exactly what their [the trustees] opinions are, but I can say that it’s not as if they’re trying to dismiss student concerns on this,” Ward said, adding: “I do think that they feel that student concerns have been heard.”

Ward specifically cited the report from the University’s Exploratory Committee on Fossil Fuel Divestment in April as a tool for showing campus interest in the issue. The report was the result of two years of research into the socioeconomic impacts of Brandeis divesting — both on the school and on the companies it invests in — and was written by Professors, Ph.D. students and undergraduates from the International Business School, Heller School, and departments of History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies and Sociology, among others.

In the interview, Ward said he felt campus activists had “really done a good job presenting their case much stronger than they did last year … I think last year it focused a lot on the idea of solvency, saying ‘this will stop global warming,’ which, I think, …. it doesn’t. That just doesn’t hold up. But I think the argument of ‘we shouldn’t be profiting from things that are immoral or essentially exploitative,’ that’s a much stronger argument.”

A University referendum in 2013 found that 79 percent of participating students supported Brandeis divesting its endowment from the fossil fuel industry, according to an April 28 op-ed published in the Justice by Brandeis Climate Justice members Michael Abrams ’17, Iona Feldman ’17 and Philip Wight, Ph.D. candidate.

Klein wrote to the Justice in his email that he felt "the vast majority of [Trustees] ... have already come to the decision that divestment will not benefit the university." Though he added that some Trustees may be willing to engage with students on the issue, he condemned the bureaucracy seperating students from Trustees.

At noon on Tuesday’s rally, the roughly 20 protesters formed a circle in the SCC Atrium, where they recited their letter to the Trustees. As they read, Trustees came down the stairs in the SCC to go to the Faculty Lounge, walking around the circle and taking little notice of the activists.

Prof. Sabine von Mering (GECS, GER) spoke at the rally about the importance of action against fossil fuel companies to fight global warming. She began her speech by praising Interim President Lisa Lynch for “her serious commitment to address campus sustainability during her tenure,” at which point Lynch — who was passing through the building to go to the Alumni Lounge — briefly entered the circle and waved to the activists. When asked if she would support a University-wide divestment initiative in an August interview with the Justice, Lynch stated “I hope that over the course of the fall semester we will organize some sort of forums discussing divestment … We need to really look at the pros and cons of divestment, to help inform our Board of Trustees if they want to consider action on that front.”

Under Lynch, the University has hired full-time Sustainability Manager Mary Fischer.

Mering continued her speech at the rally to note that “fossil fuel divestment is not primarily an economic tool. It is primarily a political tool.”

Mering told the Justice in an interview after the rally that she views the divestment movement as a way to spread awareness of the seriousness of climate change, specifically noting that recent projections estimate that even if U.N. member nations follow through on all their current commitments against climate change, the earth will still gain 4 degrees celsius worldwide.

“I think there are still way too many people who don’t know how bad the situation is,” Mering said. “And this is here to wake them up. If Brandeis chose to divest, it would be a humongously positive statement and would make us the leader that we claim to be.”

Ward said the he hoped discussion on divestment would be “public, well-informed and transparent, and [I hope it] happens in a way that students feel that even if they don’t get the outcome they deserve, they get an answer as to why. … Kicking the can down the road on this issue really only increases the vitriol and frustration of people who don’t necessarily need to be that frustrated with each other.”

More than 220 Universities and colleges worldwide have committed to divesting from fossil fuels through the 350.org movement since it started in 2012, according to a May 19 Guardian article.