Princeton Coalition Advocating Investor Responsibility aims to educate the University community about the social and environmental implications of investment decisions and to encourage the University and other investors to adopt ethical standards in their investment policies. 

Campaign for Endowment Investor Responsibility:

Read the PCAIR proposal (PDF).

Over 1,200 students have signed the PCAIR petition!

How does Princeton currently take ethics into account when making investment decisions?

· Our investment managers are told simply to maximize profits. They are not given any ethical guidelines regarding how they go about making those profits.  This applies to proxy voting, a mechanism through which shareholders influence the policies of the corporations in which they own stock.

What is proxy voting?

· Princeton’s endowment owns shares of stock in public companies.

· Every year, these companies hold annual meetings, at which shareholders vote on certain matters affecting corporate policy.

· Some of the matters on the ballot are "social issues," such as:

• Proposing that a company should adopt a human rights policy for themselves and their suppliers.

• Proposing that a company add sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy.

• Proposing that a company report on the environmental impact of their operations.

·   All shareholders have the opportunity to influence the company on these issues.

· Princeton has a significant shareholder voice to exercise, and should use this voice as an agent of positive social change.

How does Princeton currently proxy vote?

· Princeton’s voting record is not disclosed to the public.  In fact, even the board of trustees has no idea how we vote our proxies. However, voting purely to maximize profits traditionally results in voting against almost every social issues proposal.

· For all the board of trustees or anyone else in the Princeton community knows, we could be supporting such practices as slave labor and irreversible, harmful environmental destruction through our proxy votes.

·   Click here for a few examples of proxy voting issues that have come up in companies Princeton was invested in.

What can students, faculty, and alumni do about this?

· Support the creation of a proxy voting advisory committee (click here) to research any ethically controversial proxy voting issues that arise with our investments, and inform the board, who will be forced to confront these issues and actively vote.

· The committee would be composed of students, faculty, administrators, and alumni.

· PCAIR wants the University to vote in an ethically informed manner.  We are not advocating any particular outcome to these proxy votes, rather we believe that as a University, we should make sure that the positions we take in proxy voting are ethically acceptable to us as an institution.