Student divestment campaign Dores Divest has spent the past year highlighting Vanderbilt University’s complicity in supporting fossil fuel corporations amid increasingly dire reports about climate change.
This weekend, Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier was officially conferred the chancellorship by the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust in a process known as investiture. The administration released few details about the weekend’s events, keeping locations private and restricting in-person attendance. The Dores, identifiable by bright-orange hats, canvassed Diermeier’s reception Saturday afternoon. Administrative staff coordinated Diermeier’s entrance and swift exit around them.
The group — an unofficial student organization lacking a faculty sponsor — has built a presence on campus with direct actions and canvassing. Fluent in memes, student members have steadily escalated actions directed toward Diermeier and the board. Diermeier has a parallel career as a management consultant. His CV lists oil giants Shell, ExxonMobil and BP as past clients.
“We’re asking him to recuse himself from any votes on divestment because he has a very apparent and public conflict of interest,” says Aaditi Lele, a first-year student who got involved with Dores Divest the summer before coming to Vanderbilt.
In January 2020, a spoofed email went out to the entire student body that appeared to come from the Office of the Chancellor. In it, the Dores plugged their divestment petition and shared a viral pro-divestment cameo from Brian Baumgartner, the actor who played Kevin Malone on The Office. A few campus protests that spring grew the group’s numbers but got few results from the administration. In August, an activist backdrop framed the chancellor’s keynote address at the Founders Walk, a welcome ceremony for first-year students. Al Gore publicly endorsed the divestment effort on campus in December.
Two months ago, Dores Divest joined a formal complaint filed against Diermeier and the University with Tennessee AG Herbert Slatery. It explained conflicts of interest between Diermeier’s private capacity as a fossil fuel consultant and purview over fossil fuel investments as chancellor. This complaint was born out of an effort between Vanderbilt, Stanford, MIT, Yale and Princeton to coordinate campus divestment campaigns. Harvard, often invoked by Vanderbilt as a peer institution, fully divested last year after a protracted battle with student activists.
The administration has been largely mum, sometimes recasting events in press releases to avoid mentioning student activism. Diermeier routinely frames the issue as an open question, criticizing the Dores’ approach to debate. The university casts divestment as political expression but doesn’t apply the same standard to its active investments in the industry.
Some activists have faced disciplinary action related to certain aspects of organizing, like flyering in undesignated locations or violating COVID protocols during protests. Metro Nashville police officers kept would-be protestors out of an alumni event at a downtown hotel in the fall. Dores Divest co-founder and Ph.D. student Miguel Moravec is on indefinite disciplinary probation for his role in sending the spoofed email. On Thursday, Moravec was elected graduate student body president.
Celia Waldman, a sophomore, was cited for hanging posters on an undesignated area outside a dorm. The university built a case against her with video footage collected by school cameras.
“They clearly just wanted to scare me out of doing things,” said Waldman. “It actually got me more involved.”
Universities, especially the wealthy ones, often have billion-dollar endowments managed by a team of investors. Asset performance, including untaxed real estate, makes up most private schools’ legacy wealth. An unknown portion of Vanderbilt’s $10 billion endowment is invested in oil and gas companies, exposure that isn’t necessarily prudent given a return-based investment strategy. The power to govern Vanderbilt’s portfolio lies with the board’s committee on investment, where Diermeier sits ex officio.
Diermeier is a strategic and symbolic target for Dores Divest, but there are times when the campaign feels personal. Students plaster his face across campus and social media, target him with memes and get creative with Photoshop. At an alumni event in February, Diermeier faced direct questions about Dores Divest.
“They’re trying to inflict as much pain as they can,” said Diermeier at the event, in a recording obtained by the Scene. “That’s not civil discourse where I come from — that’s pressure and that’s bullying, and I have no intention of meeting with them.”
To the same group, Diermeier defended his conflicts of interest, which he says he cleared through the proper channels.
The students’ campaign has received coverage from CNN, Teen Vogue and Inside Higher Ed. Vanderbilt did not respond to requests for comment.
