FALL SEMESTER IS IN FULL SWING at Tulane University. However, for senior Emma De Leon, it’s a bittersweet time.
Last year, De Leon dedicated her time to the construction of a document which was meant to convince Tulane to divest from fossil fuels in what she called the ‘culmination of many hours of research, discussion, writing, and collaboration’. But now in her last year, De Leon has to ensure that the momentum she gave the movement doesn’t die out when she graduates.
Last spring, that momentum came to a head on April 22, when students and alumni filed a legal complaint, calling on the state attorney general to investigate whether Tulane’s investments in the fossil fuel industry violate Louisiana’s Uniform Prudent Management of Institutional Funds Act (UPMIFA).
The legal complaint would be followed by a parallel student movement at Tulane, which – a week later, on April 29 – established a pro-Palestinian student encampment on Gibson Hall’s lawn dubbed the “Popular University for Gaza.” The camp made headlines when it was dismantled by Louisiana State Police.
The fossil-fuel divestment efforts have been slower and less public. De Leon started out the academic year by sketching out how last year’s struggle would continue. “Where are my goals for this semester, in terms of divestment? Where do we go from here?”
De Leon’s goals face serious hurdles including governmental indifference, Tulane’s longtime relationship with oil and gas families, the school’s academic partnerships with fossil-fuel companies – and Tulane’s location in the Gulf Coast. Though the region faces heightened risks from the effects of climate change, it is also laden with the industry’s infrastructure, including pipelines, ports, refineries and petrochemical companies.
At other schools across the country, similar student organizations are making inroads. So far, 72 schools of higher education have committed to fully divest from fossil fuels, including schools that have endowments that are nearly the same size as Tulane’s, including George Washington University in Washington, D.C., which committed to divest in 2020, as did University of California Berkeley and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
The divested schools span the nation, from both coasts and the Midwest. But there is a geographic gap in that list: the Gulf Coast.
“It’s no secret that the fossil-fuel industry has a very long history in Louisiana and the Gulf South,” De Leon said. “A quarter of Louisiana’s revenue, at some point, was coming straight from the oil and gas industry.”
The April complaint lodged with Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill argues that Tulane’s continued investment in the fossil fuel industry—despite the industry’s harmful impact on the region’s environment and public health—is an indicator that the university is not managing its investments in “good faith” and with the “care an ordinarily prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances,” as required by law.
It’s unclear whether the attorney general’s office will act on the complaint. To date, the attorney general has issued no statements about it and queries from The Lens received no response. The university has also declined to comment on the legal complaint, citing it as pending litigation.
This sort of indifference is almost expected for an anti-fossil-fuels complaint lodged in a state where Gov. Jeff Landry – like most of his predecessors dating back decades – openly supports oil and gas – or as he puts it, “defending American energy independence.”
To some, what is unexpected is that students at Tulane would think that they have a chance of getting a school in Louisiana, in the heart of the oil and gas industry, to divest from fossil fuels.
Louisiana touches much of the nation’s oil and gas
La’Shance Perry
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The Lens
The legal complaint against Tulane is not the first of its kind. But Tulane’s legal complaint is the first to be filed in the Gulf South, according to the nonprofit Climate Defense Project, whose pro bono attorneys assisted the Tulane students in drafting the complaint.
Students see an urgency, they say, motivated by scientific evidence: today’s climate crisis is primarily driven by fossil fuels.
Tulane professors teach about, and research, the connections between climate change and fossil fuels. De Leon, who majors in environmental studies and communication, sees a disconnect between Tulane’s academics and the university’s administration, which doesn’t use the school’s scientific expertise to guide its financial investments.
Yet Tulane is in Louisiana.
Though it’s not one of the top oil-producing states, Louisiana touches much of the nation’s imported and domestically produced oil and gas, through its deep-water port and through pipelines that transport fuel from elsewhere to Louisiana’s sprawling refineries and petrochemical plants.
Because of that, divestment from fossil fuels will not happen overnight in the Gulf Coast. Alicia Colomer of the Campus Climate Network learned that while working with student activists at the University of Texas at Austin, in the same oil-rich Gulf Coast area.
You have to be pragmatic, she said, and understand that every little victory means much more in fossil-fuel country.
On the Tulane campus, the work is hard, because so much remains unknown about Tulane’s position with the industry, said De Leon, noting that Tulane keeps its investments and ties relatively private and university officials aren’t open to disclosing the investment of their endowment. It is difficult to influence finances that they cannot see.
That’s why Colomer counsels that for students seeking divestment, the first logical step is disclosure: asking universities to reveal their investments.
To Colomer, the next logical step is industry dissociation: to limit industry’s reach, schools must stop accepting fossil fuel money for climate research; they must halt fossil-fuel industry job recruitment on campus; and remove anyone with a vested interest in Big Oil from positions of power at our universities.
Walking the Tulane campus, past the names of oil-company families, disassociation seems a world away. But De Leon is dedicated to moving forward.
An endowment reflecting Tulane’s past and location
Tulane’s endowment seems to reflect its location and history.
Its investments are also more than sheer financial deals, since many old New Orleans families, like the Murphy family, are loyal donors with roots in the petrochemical industry.
With an initial investment of $75 million, Tulane University’s endowed funds have held an investment in Murphy Oil Corporation common stock since 2009, according to a series of independent audits of Tulane’s financial statements from Deloitte & Touche LLP.
That’s the same Murphy Oil whose refinery spilled more than 1 million gallons of crude oil into the surrounding community in St. Bernard Parish, during Hurricane Katrina. It is also the namesake of Tulane’s Murphy Institute, located at the front of campus in Tilton Hall next to Cowen Circle, just off St. Charles Avenue.
A short walk away, within Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, sits another campus hub constructed by fossil-fuel fortunes. In 2014, the Phyllis M. Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking was created after an initial donation of $15 million from the foundation named for oilman Patrick F. Taylor and its chairman Phyllis M. Taylor, a Tulane law school alum and former Tulane board member, who also co-chaired Tulane’s $1.5 billion “Only the Audacious” fundraising campaign.
That’s the same Taylor Energy who may have spilled up to 148 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, in the longest-running oil spill in U.S. history, according to the Department of the Interior.
The bulk – 81% – of Tulane’s private and public real asset investments are in natural-resources partnerships, primarily oil, gas and mining, according to the most recently released financial statement, from 2022-2023.
Because of the sheer magnitude of climate change, De Leon and her fellow activists are committed to continuing their work at Tulane.
Yet they are realistic about the challenges they face, judging both from the edifices built on campus and the written position of the last two Tulane presidents. A few years ago, in 2021, President Michael Fitts said that the university “encourages the companies in which it is invested to support the development of new industries and technologies that will further the goal of a carbon-neutral economy.” In his letter, Fitts also noted that his decision not to divest was similar to his predecessor, Scott Cowen.
Yet what went unsaid in Fitts’ letters is that, once Cowen left Tulane, he promptly acquiesced to student demands to divest, while serving as interim president at Case Western Reserve in Ohio.
“I want to commend students from Undergraduate Student Government, and others, for advocating for this change with an approach that emphasized facts, research, and well-articulated arguments,” Cowen wrote in an online statement. “Our trustees and I agree that this step is the right one for Case Western Reserve and, in turn, the world at large.”
When contacted this week, Cowen declined to comment.
Louisiana, ‘the state with the most to lose in the western hemisphere’
La’Shance Perry
/
The Lens
Tulane does not believe in its ability to oppose the oil and gas industry, said Oliver Houck, a former Tulane law professor who founded its Tulane Environmental Law Clinic.
During 40 years spent at Tulane, Houck saw the environmental law clinic threatened by lawmakers and the Louisiana Chemical Association for its work representing Louisiana communities facing environmental injustice.
Though he’s now retired, he sees that throughline continue in Baton Rouge today, in the hostility to environmental regulation that’s brewing there.
“(Governor) Landry has got a mountain of folks so explicit about promoting oil and gas as his main agenda,” Houck said. “Climate change? Hell with it. He’s put in someone to head his DEQ [Department of Environmental Quality] who feels exactly the same way.”
The governor also renamed the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources, by adding the word energy into it. It’s now the Louisiana Department of Energy and Natural Resources. “That’s the political atmosphere here,” Houck said.
Houck has written critically of Louisiana officials in the past, “It is hard to say which is more impressive about the phenomenon of global warming, its particularly harsh consequences for Louisiana or the degree to which it is stonewalled by the Administration and Louisiana’s congressional delegation,” he wrote in 2006, in the essay, “Can We Save New Orleans?” for the Tulane Environmental Law Journal.
“Granted, we are an oil and gas state and never did cotton much to new-fangled ideas, but the mindset has gotten absurd,” Houck wrote then. “The state with the most to lose in the western hemisphere is out there pumping business as usual and calling climate change fantasy. As the rest of the world knows, though, it is coming and we are indeed bringing it on.”
Fueled by the ferociously anti-environmental sentiments coming from the state capitol, Tulane administrators may be even less willing to heed the calls for divestment, he said.
“If Tulane is going to go against the grain, it’s going to have to get persuaded,” he said. And if the persuasion was up to him, he would base his argument on precedent.
“I think that the primary obstacle here is persuading the board that – if they divest – the world is not going to end,” he said.
By divesting, Tulane would fall in line with what dozens of other schools have done, he said. And like those schools, he said, Tulane would find alternate possibilities for sound investments.
‘There’s too much power and money’ to buck fossil fuels
In April, when the legal complaint was filed with the AG’s office, only two Tulane faculty members signed onto it.
One was Michelle Kohler, an associate professor of English. The other, Professor Emeritus Thomas Sherry, believes that Hurricane Katrina should have been the wakeup call for the University to divest.
Tulane still hasn’t heard the alarm bell, said Sherry, who taught for 35 years in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. “There’s too much power and money there for them to buck the short-term interests of fossil fuels,” he said. “And that’s just extraordinarily disheartening to me, because in the long term, this is not good for Tulane. Not good for New Orleans, not good for Louisiana and not good for the globe.”
In 2015, spurred on by the student-led fossil fuel divestment movement spearheaded by Divest Tulane, Sherry tried to gather faculty signatures for a petition urging Fitts and the Tulane Board of Trustees to divest the university’s endowment from all fossil-fuel investments.
Sherry set a goal, of at least 50 signatures. He got nowhere near that, he said. So he put aside the petition and sent a letter that he signed along with two other Tulane professors, Oliver Houck and Laura Murphy.
There’s a reason for the paltry response from faculty in 2015 and today, Sherry said “I think there is a fear that by signing on to this, there could be recurring repercussions to their career, or their labs, or whatever,” Sherry said.
This reluctance goes far beyond the Green Wave, Sherry said. “Fossil fuels have got their tentacles, financially, in lots of universities across the country,” he said. “Tulane is not alone. It’s very hard when your funding comes from a particular locale to stand up and say things that might threaten that source of income.”
Academic research sponsored and leveraged by fossil fuels, report finds
Congressional research published earlier this year emphasizes that fossil fuels have a grip on many universities. According to a joint staff report from the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability titled Denial, Disinformation, and Doublespeak: Big Oil’s Evolving Efforts to Avoid Accountability for Climate Change, the fossil fuel industry has strategically partnered with universities around the country to “enhance their credibility, shape academic research programs to provide studies supportive of a prolonged life for oil and gas, leverage the resulting research to their advantage, and bolster access to policymakers.”
Tulane has previously taken donations from the fossil fuel industry through the Paul Tulane Society. Individuals and organizations who have made gifts of at least $1 million to the university are recognized and gain membership into the Society.
Honor-roll members of the society include Shell, Exxon, Murphy Oil, and ConocoPhillips (through its subsidiary, Louisiana Land and Exploration Company). Bringing it back to its namesake, Tulane’s Murphy Institute offers seed grants for faculty research, through its Center for Public Policy.
Tulane’s sponsorships can also be seen inside the classroom, with three facilities in the School of Science Engineering being named for fossil fuel companies: Amoco, Chevron and Texaco. Exxon Mobil has also funded three professorships in business, each for over 20 years.
These kinds of collaborations could also make it harder for Tulane to consider divesting from corporations, because the university now views them as “partners.”
The resulting research, though funded by fossil fuels, is viewed differently, said Colomer of the Campus Climate Network.
“When you read a report on an industry-friendly solution that says, Exxon Mobil or Chevron or BP, you’re probably not going to believe it, because you know that that’s biased,” Colomer said. “But if at the top it says MIT or Harvard or Tulane, like, you’re much more likely to believe that that’s true, and that’s why they [oil and gas companies] strategically use our universities’ prestige to put forth those ideas.”
Perhaps the university’s most direct partnership came earlier this year, at the beginning of 2024 when a regional team of partners – including Tulane, Louisiana State University, Shell, Exxon and Chevron – received a $160 million grant from the National Science Foundation called Future Use of Energy in Louisiana (FUEL), to “support the state’s energy industry through job creation and innovative solutions for environmental challenges”.
After the National Science Foundation announced the grant, Fitts, the Tulane president, released a statement saying that the university was “proud to offer its expertise to this vital effort which will help ensure both the economic vitality and environmental leadership of our home state.”
Though the legal complaint, filed in April, does not outline the extent to which fossil fuel has infiltrated classrooms, a portion of the legal complaint is dedicated to highlighting the professional and financial ties to the fossil fuel industry that members of its board — Tulane’s highest governing body — and the advisory board of Tulane’s Energy Institute maintain.
Three members of the Board of Tulane maintain ties or have been previously connected to the fossil fuel industry. The advisory board of Tulane’s Energy Institute has nine.
Daring to look at the damage caused by financial decisions
One of the National Science Foundation grant’s main areas of focus is carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) – a yet-to-be-proven technology that allows fossil fuel companies to continue producing natural gas while claiming to help the environment by piping emissions underground. Carbon capture is promoted as a way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the production of natural gas, though research has shown otherwise, at times.
Some of the method’s critics, skeptical of the true motivations of fossil fuel companies in their support of carbon capture, asked why Tulane, along with other key Louisiana universities, had partnered with the fossil-fuel industry on this project.
Though carbon capture is now being marketed as a “solution” to the fossil fuel industry’s emissions, its critics point to its early disasters in places like Sulphur, Louisiana, where more than 2,500 barrels of carbon dioxide leaked from an Exxon pipeline in April.
Roishetta Sibley Ozane, a resident of Sulphur and a vocal opponent of carbon-capture facilities in the state, had already been fighting the fossil fuel industry, whose crews cut criss-crossed paths through Louisiana’s coastal marshland, allowing saltwater to intrude and kill the marsh. That marsh eroded rapidly, leaving Sulphur and the rest of Louisiana’s Gulf Coast in ruins, she said.
The introduction of carbon capture left her wary, because it seems like an extension of the same destructive industry, she said. In April, her mutual-aid organization, the Vessel Project of Louisiana, was one of the only Louisiana community organizations to add their name to the legal complaint filed with the attorney general against Tulane.
Activists like Ozane – motivated by the tragedies that their communities face first-hand – remind Tulane students why divestment is not only important, but urgent, De Leon says.
Ozane, meanwhile, sees the Tulane students as allies. To her, an investment in fossil fuels is an investment in environmental racism and the continued destruction of the state’s wetlands.
From a bigger picture, Ozane started to wonder whether Tulane – and academia as a whole – had shifted from a place of facts to a place of business; willing to turn a blind eye to the damage caused by its financial decisions.
“They can’t really be looking at the science and the research if they’re still investing in the very thing that’s killing the communities and the state,” Ozane said.
This story was produced as part of the Lede New Orleans Fellowship 2.0 reporting fellowship, with support from Internews’ Listening Post Collective and Earth Journalism Network programs.