The Sustainable Endowment Institute (SEI) recently released its College Sustainability Report Card. According to its Executive Summary, the Report Card “seeks to encourage sustainability as a priority in college operations and endowment investment practices by offering independent yearly assessments of progress.”

Institutions of higher education have played a significant role in SRI at least since the South African divestment movement of the 1980s. The Report Card examines both the investment practices of these schools and the sustainability of core university operations.

SEI finds that “the level of campus sustainability initiatives far outpaces that of endowment sustainability activity.” Responsible food-service and recycling practices, for example, earned “A” grades for 29% of schools. Only 4% of colleges achieved the same grade for their “Endowment Transparency.”

25 colleges are Campus Sustainability Leaders, including my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. Go Tartans! (Yes, our teams are named after plaid.) The school’s profile, though, shows that it “makes neither its proxy voting record nor its list of endowment holdings public.” It earns “F” grades for both “Endowment Transparency” and “Shareholder Engagement.”

Only 3 schools are cited as Endowment Sustainability Leaders: Carleton, Dartmouth, and Williams. What does A-level Shareholder Engagement look like? From Dartmouth’s profile:

“The Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR), which is comprised of faculty, administrators, students, and alumni members, deliberates and makes voting recommendations on all proxy resolutions pertaining to social and environmental issues pending at companies in which Dartmouth directly owns shares. The ACIR forwards those recommendations to the college’s investment office; the recommendations have never been rejected.”

The complete Report Card can be downloaded here, and the Executive Summary pdf is here.