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After years of activism without results, students at several colleges — including Yale, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — file legal complaints with their state attorneys general to force fossil fuel divestment.

Students at five top universities have filed legal complaints against their colleges for investing in fossil fuel companies that contributed to climate change.

Students at five top-rated universities working with The Climate Defense Project have filed complaints with their states' attorneys general to investigate whether their schools' fossil-fuel investment holdings violate state laws governing investments by charities, according to a press release Wednesday.

Students at five prominent universities on Wednesday filed legal complaints about their schools' fossil fuel holdings, part of a wave of divestment campaigns targeting academic endowments.

Novel legal strategy argues that top schools including Princeton and Vanderbilt are legally obliged to put the public interest first

Student activists in the Endowment Justice Coalition claimed in a complaint filed Wednesday that the University’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry violate state law.

Students fighting climate change have been trying to pressure universities to divest from the fossil fuel industry for years: They have shouted slogans, marched, rallied, waved signs. They have signed petitions and passed resolutions and referendums. They have disrupted Zooms and football games and board meetings and administration buildings. They have covered themselves in oil.

"Their investments in the fossil fuel industry—an industry whose actions place the health and future of students and the entire planet at risk—amount to nothing less than complicity in the climate crisis."

Students and faculty have been asking universities to divest from fossil fuels for more than a decade now. But what started as a campaign to erode the industry’s “social license to operate” is developing more sophisticated arguments about fiduciary duty and prudent investing.

On November 23, 2019, we risked arrest alongside 120 of our peers, storming the field of the annual Harvard-Yale football game to call for an end to higher education’s profiteering from the climate crisis and demand climate leadership from two of the world’s richest and most prestigious universities. Two years later, Yale has taken critical steps toward socially responsible investment and, in a historic move this September, Harvard committed to divestment.

Two years after the jaw-dropping Yale-Harvard climate change and fossil fuel divestment protest on the field of the Yale Bowl at The Game — Yale’s tradition-steeped annual football contest with its archrival — the far-reaching direct action remains the highlight of some college activists’ lives.

On Aug. 28, President Peter Salovey gave his opening assembly address to Yale College’s class of 2025. I sat with my fellow first years in folding chairs on the Cross Campus lawn, ready to receive the wisdom and direction to commence my studies at this place which for so long had been my biggest dream.

Hundreds of students gathered in Beinecke Plaza on Friday at a rally organized by the Endowment Justice Coalition. There, they called on Yale to disclose and divest its holdings in the fossil fuel industry and increase its investment in the city of New Haven.

On November 5, over 150 Yale undergraduates wearing red gathered at Beinecke Plaza to call for endowment justice. The endowment, one of the largest of its kind, reported a 40.2% increase to $42.3 billion in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Following the formal announcement from Harvard and Dartmouth, the majority of Ivy League institutions have now divested from the fossil fuel industry.

This week, Bill McKibben, an environmental studies professor at Middlebury College and a founder of the international climate action network 350.org, contributed a piece to the New York Times on the subject of fossil fuel divestment.

I remember the night in the autumn of 2012 when the first institution in the U.S. publicly committed to divest from fossil fuel. I was with a group of other climate activists in a big theater in Portland, Maine, halfway through a monthlong road show with rallies in cities across the country, and the president of tiny Unity College in the state’s rural interior announced to the crowd that his trustees had just voted to rid their endowment of coal, gas and oil stocks. We cheered like crazy.

In 2019, the Yale-Harvard football game came to a halt as students desperately protested the two universities’ roles in distressed Puerto Rican debt and climate annihilation.

Yale’s latest capital campaign, which launched on Oct. 2 and aims to raise $7 billion, has generated discussion among students and faculty about Yale’s rising emphasis on the sciences, as well as how Yale’s $31.2 billion endowment can be most effectively and ethically allocated.

In 2015, Puerto Rico declared its debt unpayable at $72 billion. Due to its status as an "unincorporated territory" (read: a colony), Puerto Rico cannot declare Chapter 9 Bankruptcy.