Back in 2015, during the Toronto350.org / UofT350.org fossil fuel divestment campaign, I set up UofTFacultyDivest.com as a copy of what the Harvard campaign had up at harvardfacultydivest.com/.
The purposes of the site were to collect the attestations we needed for the formal university divestment policy, to have a repository of campaign-related documents, and to provide information about the campaign to anyone looking for it online.
The site was built with free WordPress software and plugins which have ceased to be compatible with modern web hosting, so I will re-list the important content here for the benefit of anyone seeking to learn about the campus fossil fuel divestment movement in the future:
- The earliest public draft of the brief: September 2013 brief
- Final brief presented by Toronto350.org to the Office of the President
- Cover for the bound paper copies of the brief made for the members of the president’s ad hoc committee at the Toronto Reference Library’s Asquith Press (available in the Robarts catalog and the U of T Archives)
- Presentations to the ad hoc committee
- December 2015 recommendation from the president’s ad hoc committee to divest
- Toronto350.org / UofT350.org Community Response to the committee’s recommendations
- Campus-wide endorsements for the campaign
- University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA) endorsement
Of course, U of T announced in 2021 that they would divest. Since then, the Climate Justice U of T group which developed out of the Leap Manifesto group which organized the second fossil fuel divestment campaign at U of T (after Toronto350 / UofT350) has succeeded in pressuring the federated colleges of St. Michael’s, Trinity, and Victoria University to divest as well.
