Student activists have been demanding that higher education institutions divest their endowments from fossil fuel companies for over a decade. Now, as more institutions move toward sustainable investment, a group of faculty is calling on its pension fund to go green.

About 300 clients of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association of America–College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA), which hundreds of higher education institutions use to invest faculty members’ pensions, are calling on the fund to divest from companies they say contribute to climate change. They are also demanding that TIAA “establish a moratorium on new fossil fuel investments,” “divest its existing fossil fuel investments by 2025” and “stop land grabs leading to deforestation,” according to a press release emailed to Inside Higher Ed.

The group, which consists of faculty members whose pension money is managed by the fund, also filed a formal complaint with the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment Initiative, asking it to remove TIAA from its list of ethically invested portfolios.

TIAA, which was founded in 1918 to manage the retirement funds of teachers, has grown into one of the largest money managers for employees of educational, cultural and medical organizations, many of them nonprofits.

“Unlike a lot of general banks and retirement funds, TIAA does have a nonprofit bent, a bit of a history of public service,” said Caroline Levine, a literature professor at Cornell University and a TIAA fund participant who signed the complaint to the UNPRI. “What does it mean for me to have had a whole career dedicated to building conditions for students to live happy and flourishing lives and then retire in a way that undermines and makes a mockery of that work?”

In an email to Inside Higher Ed, a spokesperson for TIAA, who preferred not to reveal their gender, rejected the participants’ characterization of its investments and maintained that the fund was in line with UNPRI recommendations.

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