Harvard students to file lawsuit demanding school pull investments from prisons – By Erik Ortiz (NBC News) / Feb 18 2020
While this isn’t the first time students who favor divestment have sued Harvard, supporters now are using a different tack to propel their case.
They’re taking their fight from the campus to the courtroom.
A group of Harvard University students plans to file a lawsuit Wednesday to force the Ivy League school to withdraw its investment funds from companies that profit from the prison industry — ratcheting up past efforts that included a petition drive and protests.
The Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign wants a judge to require the university to divest its $40 billion endowment — the largest in academia — from prisons and related companies and produce a report outlining its direct and indirect investments in the industry.
In addition, the group is accusing the school of violating its fiduciary duty and breaching its charter and falsely advertising itself as an institution that wants to redress the harms of slavery, while still benefiting from the prison system, which incarcerates more than 2 million people in the United States, about a third of them black.
“Instead of helping to dismantle the entanglement of profiteering, government interests, and the system of human caging, Harvard makes profit off of it,” the five student plaintiffs, who are representing themselves, wrote in a draft of the complaint to be filed in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County. “That money funds the opulent lifestyles of Harvard’s top administrators who are prison profiteers.”
This isn’t the first time that students who support divestment have sued Harvard.
In 2014, seven student activists filed a lawsuit attempting to compel the school to withdraw its holdings from the fossil fuel industry because of how it contributes to climate change.
Continue to article: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/harvard-students-file-lawsuit-demanding-school-pull-investments-prisons-n1137996
