At the beginning of class last Friday, our class came to a consensus that we wanted our collective midterm activism project to be focused on encouraging Duke to divest from oil companies. While the idea sounds nice to environmentalists like us, one main message has been echoed in just about everything we have read/discussed so far: money rules the world. That being said, in order to present a practical and efficient argument to the Duke Endowment fund managers we must couple environmental justification with a recommendation for how they should reallocate their endowment funds. In other words, we must explain to them the concern everyone should have for the environment and present to them other, socially good securities they can invest in while making comparable returns to what they made previously while investing in oil companies. According to http://www.pionline.com/article/20171009/ONLINE/171009830/duke-endowment-returns-127, Duke’s endowment fund returned 12.7% in the past fiscal year. Via the latest SEC filings, DUMAC (the group that runs Duke’s endowment fund) invests 45.77% of its market share in PDC energy (Oil and gas company), and another 5% in Carrizo Oil and Gas.http://www.secinfo.com/d1gb4d.jd.d.htm For the non-Econ majors out there, that’s not good for us environmentalists. This report shows that a large bulk of Duke’s endowment fund is invested in the oil and gas industry and that it does not look like they are making strides towards “Divesting from oil.” To compare, Harvard’s most recents return in their endowment fund was 8.5%, with their largest investment being in Aduro Biotech (27%), a company focusing on engineering immunotherapy for cancer. There are better answers out there, Duke. It’s time to become an activist.