The anatomy of Divest McGill’s successful student movement

Written by Shani Laskin, Managing Editor & Designed by Mia Helfrich, Design Editor

For over a decade, Divest McGill ignited defiance against institutional apathy. The student-led activist group, founded in 2012, took on the task of convincing McGill’s Board of Governors (BoG) to withdraw direct investments in the university’s endowment fund from the fossil fuel industry, specifically from the Carbon Underground 200 (CU200)—a list of the world’s top publicly-traded oil, coal, and gas companies based on the potency of their reserves.

Divest McGill used various tactics over 11 years, including sit-ins, walk-outs, petitions, an occupation, and formal presentations to the Board—which has the final say over all university affairs. In the process, the group galvanized thousands of McGill community members. Support for the movement came from both students and staff, including governing bodies such as the Students’ Society of McGill University (SSMU), the Post-Graduate Students’ Society (PGSS), and even the McGill Senate—the university’s highest democratic governing body. Despite this, the BoG remained steadfast against the demand for divestment.

Following divestment announcements from institutions such as Université Laval (ULaval), Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), University of Toronto, and Harvard University, it was clear that McGill was lagging in taking a meaningful stance against the fossil fuel industry.

In Fall 2023, Divest McGill went quiet, in anticipation of a decision from McGill’s BoG.

Then, on Dec. 14, 2023, the BoG approved a motion to divest from direct holdings in CU200 companies. The university had seemingly heeded the calls of dissent.

But what made the BoG change its tune after years of opposition?

Divest’s actions can be understood as a network of pressure on the BoG. Consistent efforts had kept this issue at the forefront of campus consciousness, building awareness as broader trends threatened McGill’s reputation as a leader in sustainability. Divest’s assets were the longevity of the movement, support from the McGill community, ultimately including administration insiders, and just the right amount of reputational damage to the university to make the BoG listen. Though universities are often quick to dismiss student activism, Divest’s successes make it clear that with the right mix of strategy and circumstance, these movements make change.

The early days

Divest McGill started as just a few activists committed to calling for institutional divestment. They saw this approach as both a move toward sustainability and a strong political stance that could chip away at societal acceptance of the fossil fuel industry. At the time, there was little precedent for institutional divestment from fossil fuels in Canada, but calls for change were beginning to emerge.

“It’s about having a clear moral message that profiting off climate change is wrong,” David Summerhays, B.A. ’05 and an original member of Divest, told The Tribune.

The fledgling organization’s first steps were to appeal to the Board and gain community support. Summerhays explained the group’s first petition, pitched to what is now called the Board’s Committee on Sustainability and Social Responsibility (CSSR) in February 2013. They gathered 1,200 signatures for the motion, which called for the Investment Committee to get rid of its holdings in fossil fuels corporations within three years. To keep up the momentum, the group then hosted a Valentine’s Day rally calling for the university to “break up” with fossil fuels—the first of many campus demonstrations. Summerhays explained that the group’s initial actions were light-hearted, aimed at gaining the attention of the McGill community. As the group received rejection after rejection from the administration, however, their actions ramped up.

In April 2013, Divest McGill made its first formal presentation to the Board, outlining the social and environmental reasons that divestment was necessary. One month later, the Board unanimously denied the request. In 2015, Divest submitted a second petition, this time supported by 1,300 signatories and a 150-page report detailing the reasons that fossil fuel investment could constitute “social injury,” mandating the university to divest. The Board rejected this too. Summerhays told The Tribune that part of the group’s strategy following this second rejection was to better understand the Board and cater communications to their interests. According to Summerhays, the group was aided by a McGill administrator at the time, who helped clarify the opaque, bureaucratic processes of the Board.

“We had to both negotiate and get to know the administration and their ideas and sort of build pressure on them,” Summerhays said in an interview with The Tribune. “There just came a point where not only [were these] channels not working but also we just had the support of everybody.”

In the first five years of the campaign, Divest secured the support of the SSMU Legislative Council, PGSS, AUS, hundreds of professors, and many faculties including the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Law. Despite rejections from the administration, the McGill community was beginning to champion an institutional severance from fossil fuels.

Divestment goes mainstream

On the national level, divestment grew from a fringe idea into a tangible goal in the mid-2010s as charitable foundations, cities, and cultural, religious, and educational institutions started committing to divesting from fossil fuels.

In 2018, Divest achieved a major victory with an endorsement from the McGill Senate. SSMU President for the 2019-20 school year Bryan Buraga explained in an interview with The Tribune that the university was initially critical and concerned that the Senate was overstepping its purview.

“It actually came in the face of a lot of institutional pushback from the McGill administration, because at the time they were trying to say, ‘Oh, the Senate shouldn’t interfere with the Board of Governors. The Board of Governors is purely financial, whereas the Senate is academic,’” Buraga said. “But through intensive lobbying efforts […], we were able to successfully convince enough of the Senate members to vote in favour of this resolution for the first time, calling upon the Board of Governors to divest and I think that was a really big turning point.”

Buraga explained that SSMU even withheld a student levy for the administration’s Fiat Lux project, using the leverage of student government to express discontent with McGill’s decision to remain invested in fossil fuel companies.

“Admin was very much against fossil fuel divestment, saying that it was the purview of the Board and a lot of the board members are external—the majority of them are with various corporate ties,” Buraga said. “There’s also a paradigm in which politics is outside of the purview of finance. ‘We[’ve] just got to do what’s best, diversify, minimize financial risk, and that also includes investing in fossil fuels.’ That was very much the mentality at the time.”

From 2018 to 2020, rallies ensued even more frequently, including a months-long boycott of Metro Inc. because of BoG member Maryse Betrand’s role on the corporation’s Board of Directors. Around this time in 2019, McGill rejected a third motion to divest. In addition to student mobilization, professors Darin Barney and Derek Nystrom resigned from their positions on the Board due to its refusal to divest, and Greg Mikkelson, a tenured professor in the Bieler School of Environment, resigned from the university entirely.

The final push

“[These are] sustained campaigns,” Ashrafuzzaman said. “[McGill] can’t delay forever. Each [action or news article] chips away at their reputation, which they really love to preserve. Each little action makes some impact, especially when taken broadly in hindsight.”

Then in Fall 2023, Divest organizers received an invitation from a Board member to present again, pushing up the date that the Board had previously committed to reconsidering by two years. It seemed that the internal attitudes of the Board had shifted.

In September, three Divest members made their fourth formal presentation to the Board, this time with an invitation and an additional presentation from Political Science Professor Amy Janzwood. The students presented the moral, scientific, and political basis for divestment, including the precedents set by institutions like ULaval in 2017 and UQÀM in 2019.

“This presentation that we had given was basically done three times before us,” Emily Hardie, U3 Arts, and current Divest member said. “The evidence was already provided for years […] and that just really shows McGill’s continued hesitation to make this decision again—shows their weakness, which is that it’s really reputation that they are prioritizing.”

Janzwood added the financial reasons to divest including changing regulatory landscapes and that the fossil fuel industry in Canada is projected to decline.

“Moral arguments can be very persuasive, particularly around mobilizing students. But divestment is not just a moral issue, it’s also a financial one, and so making that argument, I think, works very nicely with the broader argument about reputational risk,” Janzwood said in an interview with The Tribune.

Janzwood explained that she also relayed the climate anxiety that her students face to the Board.

“I teach exclusively around environmental politics. I teach hundreds of students and every time I teach a course, I ask them how they are related to the climate crisis, how it makes them feel, and I’m always very affected by what they talk about,” Janzwood said. “And so I just concluded by reminding the Board how we are constantly [hearing from] the student body that climate anxiety, despair, dread, these are feelings that my students experience, sometimes on a daily basis.”

Divest’s campaign proved that students take the behind-the-scenes of McGill’s operations seriously, and are willing and able to engage in sustained mobilization for important causes. The movement’s actions set a precedent for the student body’s ability to question the institution’s financial investments and revealed McGill’s pressure points—publicity and reputation—to open avenues for future protest efforts.

“I think [the Board approaches this] sometimes, with the perspective that students are naive about the climate crisis, or naive about how systems work or how decisions like this are made,” Hardie said. “But the perspective that we’re coming from is that we ultimately care very much about preserving life and our collective well-being. And I don’t think it’s us being naive in any sense.”

Lesson Learned

“The perennial question for all divestment movements is the implementation, making sure that the university does what it says it will do. Transparency is always a concern,” Janzwood said.

According to the McGill Media Relations Office (MRO), the divestment process has already been completed. The university will detail the transition in a report slated to be released in April 2025.

“Though divestment from the McGill Investment Pool (MIP)’s minimal remaining direct CU200 holdings sends an important symbolic message, McGill has long held that maximizing its impact means minimizing its carbon footprint,” the MRO wrote to The Tribune. “This has involved shareholder engagement with companies on decarbonization targets, and focusing divestment efforts on firms that may not extract fossil fuels directly but use them in highly emissions-intensive industries (cement and steel manufacturers, coal and gas-fired electricity generators, and other firms that drive global fossil fuel demand).”

For student organizers such as Lola Milder, U3 Arts, and Hardie, the next steps are still unclear. To many organizers, however, Divest’s journey revealed what they see as an undemocratic structure of decision-making at the university.

“Especially because when so many hundreds, thousands of student hours have gone into asking these institutions, these forums, like the Board of Governors to divest […] you start to ask, maybe my hours are better spent trying to actually change the shape of this system,” Milder said. “Because right now, it seems like it does not bend to the community’s will or interest.”

What is noteworthy, however, is the success and longevity of Divest. Student movements are notoriously complicated due to high turnover as new students join and veteran organizers graduate. By sustaining the campaign, Divest McGill sent a clear message that the university can not simply wait out one cohort of passionate activists. Rather, the Board had to reckon with persistent student demands and the reality that divestment was a viable pathway.

“Divest McGill is a long-standing campaign [….] It was very visible, it was very sustained. These are hard things to do,” Janzwood said. “[With] student turnover, it is hard to keep the institutional memory alive.”

While students’ time at university is short, McGill’s eventual divestment from the CU200 shows that this time can still make an impact lasting long after graduation. Divest’s goal was lofty; one that the university may not have achieved had it not been for years of pressure, spearheaded by students called to fiercely question their institution.