climate change

Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust is offering to meet with student activists and environmentalists if they end their blockade of her office and stop disrupting university business.

For the past five days, the student-led group Divest Harvard has been blocking Massachusetts Hall, Harvard’s oldest building, demanding the university sell off fossil fuel stocks in its $36 billion endowment. The goal, organizers say, is to address climate change.

Many universities hold large endowments that have significant positions in fossil fuel companies or funds that hold fossil fuel assets. But universities also support most of the research that has identified the existence, nature and consequences of climate change, and the principal purpose of the university is to educate, particularly the young adults who will live and work in the climate of the future.