 What a pleasure to be here, and Makala, I'm as usual feeling a little nervous to be speaking in front of my community, and as I've been sitting here, this sort of creeping feeling of sort of low net worth has kind of been, you know, falling over me. I will do my best, though, just to go where I can. I'm very glad. I think the first thing to be said is if you want to know what students have to think about this, it's probably a good idea to ask them and have them on panels like this. I'm glad that Charlie was added at the, I'm glad that Charlie, you know what, I'd be so grateful if people don't applaud because I'm nervous to begin with, and also I've got a lot to say. I'm not going to go quite as long as Mark, but I might go just a minute over what I was supposed to say. I'm very glad that Charlie was added at the last minute, and I'm very glad that he brought us that news about what students here think, because if you listen to the numbers, it's an absolute landslide. Eric Davis or Matt Dickerson could correct me, but I don't think any American presidential election's ever been decided by as large a margin as 60 to 15, and I'm pretty sure that that same set of numbers holds that the other colleges that are joining us on live stream tonight because they're investor colleges, a real shout out to people at Barnard and Dickinson and Trinity and Smith and Tulsa, and also to the 205 other campuses around the country where their active divestment movements underway now. The request we make tonight is a sober and conservative one that's already been agreed to by two colleges and by the government of the city of Seattle that we pledge in the course of the spring semester not to invest new money in the 200 biggest fossil fuel companies and that we spend the next five years winding down those positions. Because of Middlebury's long standing commitment to international relations, students here have asked for divestment on the same terms from arms manufacturers. We've been asked to stay away from moral arguments tonight, but let me just say that moral considerations are at the base of this fight, and they have been from the very beginning, and one is reminded with David's excellent introduction that this is a thread that runs through this whole conversation. It's a good thing to quote Thomas Jefferson, and it's a really good thing to remember that he was a morally compromised individual in all kind of ways, and that there were colleges that invested in slavery at that time because it was perfectly legal and have spent the last few decades apologizing for that work. One understands that slavery and climate change are not the same thing, but one also might guess that a hundred years from now people will look back on our time with some of the same disbelief that people were not taking action against what was a clear and present danger. In this case, it makes no moral or practical sense to pay for the education of Middlebury students by investing in companies whose business plan guarantees they will not have a planet to enact that education on. I was very grateful to Patrick for talking about the intergenerational equity that an endowment represents. Part of that intergenerational equity is making sure that a hundred years from now in Middlebury, we not only have money here, we have a Vermont here that works for people to come to, that we have some way to deal with it. And if it is wrong to wreck the climate, it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. At this point, by the way, Mr. Earl's comments notwithstanding, gas will do just as efficient a job or almost as that of coal. The latest NOAA evidence released last week shows horrifying rates of methane leakage from fracking fields that make it, if anything, worse than coal if those numbers hold up. The latest international energy agency study shows that a world that converted entirely to gas entirely would still see its temperature rise six degrees Fahrenheit. As to arms, we reach tipping points there, too. In fact, tipping points was precisely the term used by the California State Teachers Retirement Fund when the day after the Newtown Massacre, they divested their holdings. Maybe for us, it's the news today that yet another gunman has shot up a school, college, this time in Texas. Maybe it's the reflection given the demographics of Middlebury that one or two of those Connecticut kindergartners could easily have grown up to be member of our class of 2028, okay? No more, I won't go on in this vein though I could. Let me make my second point. Divestment should, I agree, be a rarely used option. In most cases, the kind of shareholder pressure on companies that Mr. Earl recommends can win real change. If Apple pays low wages to Chinese workers, it does not mean that we have to get rid of Apple. It doesn't mean that we hate iPhones. It means that we pass a shareholder resolution asking them to pay fair wages. But these industries are different. There's not a fixable flaw in the fossil fuel industry's business plan. The flaw is the business plan, which involves burning five times more carbon than even the most conservative government on earth says is safe. Those were my figures last summer borrowed from financial analysts in the UK. But in the course of the fall, there are figures that have been validated by the World Bank and the International Energy Agency. The carbon bubble that we're now experiencing will be by far the greatest bubble that we have ever faced unless we are able to remove the social license of those industries and prevent them from burning that carbon. Third, morality must be joined by effectiveness. Our hope is not, and I want to make this clear, that we can bankrupt companies like Exxon. We can't. We're completely unconcerned with the day-to-day movement of stock prices. We do think history shows that the attention generated by divestment can change the course of events. No guarantees, of course. Mr. Earl's correct that there's no silver bullet and that maybe two of the three divestment things didn't entirely work out. Given the fix that we're in with climate change, I'd take one in three odds as pretty good, frankly. Still, the one in three chance, he cites the South Africa one where things did work out is tremendously important. And as John Elder demonstrated last Sunday in Mead Chapel and in the beautiful essay that he has handed out to you tonight, divestment played a very key role in that fight. In fact, those of you who are in Mead Chapel heard Desmond Tutu remind us what a key role divestment had played in the liberation of South Africa and ask us to repeat this exercise in part because of the tremendous unearned suffering that people in Africa are now undergoing from climate change. But would it work in this case? Would it still work? Here's the testimony last week of former Utah Governor John Huntsman, a Republican from the reddest state in the Union, a newspaper story. Huntsman applauded the growing student-led movement for divestment. I think it's a good thing and I can tell you from serving on some big corporate boards that when things like that happen, it's taken seriously. You can move the need from a policy standpoint by taking action, leave it up to kids on campuses to do what they think is right, and in many cases you'll find you're ahead of the curve in terms of policy quote unquote. Remember also that effectiveness needs to be measured against what we're doing at the moment. So Mr. Earl gives us, for instance, a set of policies that people have been following for a long time. Let's try to use less carbon in our lives, drive better cars, make personal commitments. Those are all important things to do. My car gets even more than 50 miles to the gallon. And the Arctic melted last summer. We have to up our game and do a lot more than what we have done in the past. The old generation has failed us, so it is time now to do the next. Fourth, nothing comes for free and we're well aware of and grateful for the college's endowment. If, as Mr. Christmas says, we put a few stocks off limit to our endowment managers that add some risk. It says if you had a herd of wildebeest with 20 watering holes to choose from and one dried up. The question is how much risk will be added? He gave you one forward looking method. In fact, there's actually only been one study that I know of that looks at this field in particular. It was released in December by the Apurio Group. It quantified the risk for excluding the entire fossil fuels, metal and mining, electric utility, and independent power producers sector, a much larger sector than we've asked for. It found that it would increase absolute portfolio risk by 0.0133% with a theoretical return penalty of 0.0044% or less than one half of basis point. So, not nothing, but pretty close to nothing, a small risk. Even, well, five. Endowment return is not the only financial indicator to worry about. Colleges depend on a steady flow of donations and hence of goodwill. Here we have some evidence to offer. The president of Unity College in Maine, the first college in the country to divest, reported last week that donations to the college had increased substantially in the wake of their divestment announcement and that there had been a significant uptick in inquiries and applications, the basis of the 67% of our finances that Patrick described. In fact, we've already heard from a number of excellent high schools around the country where students are organizing to ask their potential college choices whether or not they have divested going forward. So this is an important thing to think about as we continue to try to attract the best students that we possibly can. Six, consistency, logical consistency, intellectual consistency, which is of course a part of our thinking here, demands that we take such a move. President Liebowitz correctly asked for decorum and civility at this forum and in all our campus life and that's what we should definitely aim for and it doesn't correspond with, say, manufacturing assault rifles that as we've seen can turn classrooms into horror shows. We've been leaders from the start in sustainability. One of the earliest signers on the President's pledge of carbon neutrality, which makes me incredibly proud and I have sung the praises of this campus from one end of this country to the other over and over and over again. It makes no sense to green the campus without also greening the portfolio. It would be like saying we're going to build energy efficient buildings north of Route 125 and build the old fashioned kind south of Route 125. Consistency is an important part of what it means to have any kind of witness. Seven and finally, let me say that though I am no investment pro, okay, I know people who are and I want to bring one person's testimony in particular to bear here. This is a statement that arrived to Saftor Noon from Tom Steyer, who was able to join us on campus over the weekend. Tom is a more successful investor than anybody else here. How do I know this? Because this is one thing we actually can measure quite easily. He made more money than anybody else, okay? In fact, his personal fortune is half again as large as the Middlebury Endowment. And he earned it as the founder of a hedge fund to which others have entrusted $20 billion of their money. Anyone can talk about hitting home runs, but when you really want to get the story, go ask Ted Williams, okay? He's also extraordinarily generous, one of the first American billionaires to pledge to give away half his wealth, and he's given much of it to institutions like Stanford where he sits on the board. Before my friends in the development office get too mad at me, let me just say I did my level best to set up meetings between him and our senior administrators while he was here, but people had tight schedules. Yes, Ron, and it did not work. He did however, he did however meet with the grooming staff at Breadloaf, and he had such a good time there that I hope he will be back, okay, in the future. Anyway, his eloquent letter, which John Isham will distribute copies of when I'm done talking, makes three points, three points. The first is, this can be done, even though we have co-mingled funds, even though we have many managers, as he put it, five years is plenty of time to wind down positions. I can tell you from my experience building one of the country's larger hedge funds that this is entirely possible and well within the skills of your expert advisors who I know and respect. The second thing he said, it is a good investment strategy. The research he points out makes clear that any return penalty would be small, but as he adds, in any event, good investors rarely look backwards. As others come to realize, as Middlebury's science departments long ago did, that climate change is a profound risk, fossil fuel stocks have come under increasing pressure. Knowing this in advance gives you an edge relative to those investors. The same kind of edge, it must be said, that was supplied by our environmental studies department when it urged this transition from oil to biomass in our burners. At the time, oil was $40 a barrel and we made the case that it made some sense, but we predicted that the price of oil would go up to $80 or $100 a barrel, which it has. And Patrick, yes, this has saved us considerable sums of money over time. The point is we have skill here and it makes sense to use it. For Tom Steyer, and this is important and significant and new, and this is no idle talk, he said today, I have directed my financial team to divest my holdings of fossil fuel investments so that I will have a fossil fuel free portfolio myself, in part because I am convinced that it will outperform the market. The third question, third statement from Tom, it does matter what we do. The kind of proxy voting that Mr. Earl recommends, Steyer says, will have, as he describes it, de minimis value. Divestment is the way to make yourselves heard, to make a statement about values far beyond the money involved. In particular, he says, it's a move that Middlebury needs to make. This is a college known worldwide for its leadership on environmental issues from the country's first ES department to the birth of 350.org. A strong, as he says, a strong and well-defined mission is an incredibly valuable thing for a college or any institution as my wife, CEO of a Community Development Bank, often says, your mission is your advantage. I agree with Tom and I am grateful for his boldness. For Middlebury, divestment is not a problem to be, Middlebury divestment is not a problem. It is an opportunity, one that we should seize now. I am very confident that we will. You will find in your packets there as you came in, a letter drafted by students with great responsibility, not demanding immediate anything, but asking to meet with the Board of Trustees at its February meeting and asking for action to be taken as soon as possible in the semester to come. This is slower than other colleges, slower than the city of Seattle, slower than the California State Retirement Fund, but it is still at some kind of pace that might help us deal with the speed with which these problems are encroaching upon us. I am confident, I think I'm confident that we will do it. It's hard to imagine how we could live with ourselves otherwise, thank you. Thank you.