CMC Gets C in Sustainability, F in Transparency
By Shelby Leighton • October 6th, 2008
The College Sustainability Report Card, an independent organization that provides sustainability profiles for hundreds of American and Canadian colleges and universities, has given CMC less than spectacular grades in their 2009 report.
CMC’s overall grade was a C, an average of the grades in nine other categories, which ranged from A to F.
The report highlights some of the new initiatives at CMC for sustainability, but it also draws attention to the lack of transparency and accountability for where our tuition dollars are being spent and how our endowment is being invested.
According to the Report Card website, “The profiles of 300 schools were created using information gathered through independent research as well as through voluntary responses from school administrators to three surveys.” Grades assess performance across 43 indicators divided into three main categories: Administration, Climate Change and Energy, Food and Recycling, Green Building, Student Involvement, Transportation, Endowment Transparency, Investment Priorities, and Shareholder Engagement.
The Report Card defines its goals in the following way:
Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Are these considerations guiding how resources are managed in campus operations and endowment practices? The Report Card is designed to identify colleges and universities that are leading by example on sustainability.
The highest score for CMC came in the Green Building category, where it scored its only A. This grade is due to the new dorm and the rennovations to the towers, all of which meet LEED silver certification, and the plans for the Kravis Center and the new athletic center, which both will be LEED certified as well.
CMC received B’s in two categories: Food and Recycling and Student Involvement and got a C grade in Transportation and Energy and Climate change. These are all areas where the college is working on improving (think new to-go containers and solar trash compactors), but still has a long way to go. It mentioned that CMC is “planning for a parking lot covered by a solar array.” Interesting.
The College also received a C in Investment Priorities and received F’s in the areas of Endowment Transparency and Shareholder Engagement. Currently, CMC does not disclose how its Endowment is invested or what guidelines shareholders use to vote on the way money is spent. For the purposes of the report card, transparency is important for greater accountability for voting for sustainable investment. For us as students, knowing how our endowment is invested and who is making the decisions where to invest it is extremely important, especially in uncertain financial circumstances.
When I attempted to contact the Chief Investment Officer at CMC multiple times, to find out for another article, at the request of multiple students and faculty members, how the CMC endowment was doing in this current financial crisis, I was met with no response. In fact, the contact information of the CIO is not even listed on the CMC website and there is no reference to him. Nowhere is information made available to students at CMC about how the endowment is being invested or how shareholders are voting.
It is important for CMC to set a positive example and make a difference by making socially responsible and sustainable investments. However, the lack of transparency in CMC’s administration goes beyond sustainability to infringing on our right to know how our endowment is being spent and the economic status of the school we attend.
Overall, CMC fared poorly compared to other prestigious liberal arts colleges and universities in the U.S., primarily because of its poor grades in investments and transparency and its lackluster performance on Energy and Climate Change, where many schools did very well due to their use of alternative energy. It appears that the college needs to pay more attention to its future impact, both environmentally and socially. One step toward this goal would be making information about the endowment available to students.
Oh. And not watering the sidewalks every night.
Also, check out what the CMC website says about sustainability.
Tags: Endowment, Environment, Sustainability
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October 7th, 2008 at 5:27 am
Well, let’s hope that Claremont picks up on this and changes their efforts. It is not that hard to get a higher grade on next years sustainability report card, and it will do honor to the earth and the students.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:45 am
I think you’re absolutely right to highlight the failure to disclose what is happening with the schools endowment. The list of the members of the board of trustees disappeared in mid-Semtember from the CMC website, and asking about how we are doing is really important right now.
The chairment of the board of trustees, Harry T. McMahon, was the Vice Chairman Merrill Lynch. Think we may have had a little bit of the endowment in Merrill Lynch stock before it was shipped off to Bank of America? Who knows? All I know was that I didn’t see McMahon hoisting a shovel at the ground breaking for the Kravis center. A concerted effort for more transparency of the endowment is only going to be achieved by massive student concern.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:42 am
Too bad we didn’t fail it.
Sorry but the only criteria that ought to be assessed on the endowment is whether or not it is high or low performing.
October 7th, 2008 at 9:54 am
I think there might be something to keeping our endowment investments and performance somewhat secret as we are in competition with hedge funds, pension funds, other college endowments, etc. There’s no need to disclose our strategies to the public. I think it is more important to most CMCers and alumni that our endowment prosper than to be invested in noble causes, but that’s open for debate.
It might be helpful for students to know something about the endowment, however. In ‘99, our endowment was within a hundred million dollars or so of Pomona’s endowment. Our CIO, Joe Cardoza (who still has his job), and Trustees made some decisions that led to a huge collapse in the value of our endowment, while Pomona shot ahead to over a billion dollars.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:55 am
“Sorry but the only criteria that ought to be assessed on the endowment is whether or not it is high or low performing.”
I disagree that that is the only thing we ought to care about, but surely we can both agree that the current system which doesn’t tell us anything about how our endowment is doing isn’t very helpful. High performing? Low performing? No way to tell, we just get to take the administration’s word for it. Say what you will about enviromentalism/sustainability, a poorly invested endowment has real impact about the long term stability of the school.
@Josh
There are a wide variety of ways that CMC could make it’s endowment more transparent. What this article correctly points out is that CMC got an F in endowment transparency: “The college has no known policy of disclosure of endowment holdings or shareholder voting records.” Take a look at the specific page that my name is linked to. Colleges across the country have found ways to maintain confidentiality while still offering some transparency to students and faculty. And it’s hard to see how Amherst or Swarthmore’s endowment has suffered because of public disclosure. Bottom line, we can’t evaluate Cardoza’s performance without actually being able to see where we are invested and what is happening. Throwing up our hands as a college community and saying that the administration will make sure our endowment prospers is naive at best and negligent at worst.
For a campus so heavily focused on accounting practices and leadership, recieving an F in endowment transparency speaks to how unengaged we are as a school to the single most important campus issue.
October 7th, 2008 at 10:57 am
“It is important for CMC to set a positive example and make a difference by making socially responsible and sustainable investments. However, the lack of transparency in CMC’s administration goes beyond sustainability to infringing on our right to know how our endowment is being spent and the economic status of the school we attend.”
This paragraph is a brilliant call to action and cuts to the heart of the issue.
October 8th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
We don’t have a right to know what the endowment is as few of us donate to it.
November 8th, 2008 at 6:56 pm
[...] constraints would affect students substantially, ranging from tuition rates to faculty ratios, so student concern is reasonable. And so is student [...]