Speechless in a symposium

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Open Letter

Dear students, colleagues, and social organizations,

At the end of last year, the Dutch Koninklijke Vereniging voor de Staatshuishoudkunde published an interesting publication on corporate governance and societal interests. Edited by my esteemed colleagues Rutger Claassen and Dirk Schoenmaker, a selection of scientists examines the governance of corporations and their relationships with a wealth of environmental, social, and other stakeholders. In essence, the advice calls for more attention from board members and company directors to the social role and responsibility of their companies. In addition, various contributors advocate a broader role for stakeholders in organisational decision-making processes. I believe this to be a good thing, if only because in the past numerous (listed) companies paid lip service to their social role and function if they were not explicitly pressured to consider their role and responsibilities through external encouragement. Even today, many companies continue to shift social and environmental impacts onto society without the latter consenting – something economists refer to as ‘externalities’. Creating space for discussion – for example by setting up a social council, as one of the contributors recommends – contributes to awareness within companies and to a broader and better provision of information to the board. This is called engagement between companies and their social stakeholders. It goes without saying that a conversation is not the only meaningful form of influencing management. As Milieudefensie's lawsuit against Shell has shown, it sometimes makes sense to choose other forms of engagement that, at first sight, have more weight in terms of their consequences.

In a time of climate stress and worrying IPCC reports, it is comprehensible that civil society organizations draw attention to stopping the extraction, refining, sale and financing of fossil fuels. I therefore fully support a critical discussion with energy companies and financial institutions to encourage them to accelerate the energy transition and to phase out (the financing of) fossil fuel-oriented activities. To my surprise, however, the efforts of some NGOs go further, as it turned out on May 26. In an open letter to the Executive Board of Maastricht University, the dean of the School of Business and Economics and yours truly, End Fossil: Occupy! Maastricht (EFO) draws attention to the need to stop using fossil fuels and the investment in these resources. I warmly welcome the call – as well as comparable initiatives of sister organizations such as Extension Rebellion or Fossielvrij NL aimed at ending subsidization of the fossil fuel industry.

However, EFO goes one step further, and takes issue with the symposium that I organise as part of my course on Ethics, Organizations and Society. The aim of the course is to transfer knowledge about ethics and corporate responsibility to 170 third-year students and enable them to become proficient in their ethical judgment by means of various work methods. Theory and practice go hand in hand and that certainly applies to the symposium on 2 June. I invited four organizations: ING Bank, PGGM, Interface and Eosta. The purpose of the symposium is to give students the opportunity to engage with companies and challenge them about their social contributions and their social costs. That is not only the core of the subject of ethics, but of academic discourse in general.

It therefore came to me as a surprise that EFO sent an open letter to the Executive Board, the dean of the faculty and lastly also to me, requesting to revoke the invitation to ING Bank and PGGM to speak. The letter follows an earlier call by climate activists to Dutch universities to cut ties with financial institutions such as ING Bank, Rabobank, and Deutsche Bank. In that letter, according to EFO, environmental organizations call on Dutch universities: “financing fossil fuels has no place in a sustainable world and does not suit an institution that has knowledge development and knowledge implementation related to the major societal challenges as its primary goal.” Personally, I can understand the request to universities to look for alternative financial service providers that meet the identity, values, and policies of a university, while providing financial services of the same quality and under more or less comparable financial conditions. Universities have an option of outsourcing their financial affairs to other financial institutions, although possibilities for doing so should not be overestimated.

Assumptions

However, the question of excluding financial institutions from the critical debate is of a completely different nature. That's the wrong question for an academic institution. You can disagree with others, but an academic discourse requires a critical exchange of arguments. It is clear to me that both financial organizations must do more to encourage fossil fuel companies to change. The way to encourage them to do this by excluding them from an open discussion based on mutual respect is, in my opinion, the wrong way – certainly for a university. Obviously, several conditions must be met. Before going into detail, I will consider some explicit and implicit assumptions in EFO's letter to the university that I question.

In its letter EFO states that the invitation legitimizes the ethics of the financial institutions rather than criticizing the organisations, for instance for not urging PGGM to divest from fossil fuels. EFO writes about PGGM's participation: "We find it irresponsible to present a company that has a clear stance against divestment as ethical by including them in your symposium." This illustrates EFO’s first assumption regarding the nature of the symposium. By offering both financial organizations a stage, I have extended an opportunity to them to present themselves as 'green companies'. The letter states: “The move to have these companies at the symposium in an equal place to the likes of Eosta, risks placing them as actually 'green' companies, which they are not.” This assumption, however, is mistaken about the nature of a symposium. In the tradition of Ancient Greece – particularly in the context of a Socratic dialogue – a symposium lends itself pre-eminently to critically questioning an opinion or a practice. At the core of this form of education is the opportunity offered to third-year international students to apply the knowledge, experience and methods acquired in the previous weeks in a real-life context. In doing so, I cordially invited EFO to prepare a supplementary briefing for the students, which I would send to them in a timely manner. This enables them to draw from this information in their dialogue with panellists if desired or required.

The second assumption is that the organizer – and by extension Maastricht University – supports the ethics of the financial institutions by offering them a platform as “spokespersons on ethics in business”. Neither I nor the university makes any statement about the ethics of the participating organizations in the symposium. None of them is positioned as ‘ethical’ either. The fact that EFO implicitly questions my motives and independence as a university professor because I have worked as co-founder and co-director of ING Bank Sustainable Investment in the past, lacks substantiation.

I cordially invited EFO to prepare a supplementary briefing for the students, which I would send to them in a timely manner. This enables them to draw from this information in their dialogue with panellists if desired or required

The third assumption concerns the assumed effectiveness of EFO's request to no longer invite financial institutions that do adhere to the NGO’s principles, values, and policies. Maastricht University aims 'to offer students from all over the world the opportunity to develop into active, globally oriented citizens and critical thinkers'. Ending the conversation with possible opponents, as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin already knew, heralds the end of critical and independent science and an open society. It erodes the foundations of the exchange of evidence-based viewpoints.

Finally, the fourth assumption is that Maastricht University is no longer committed to sustainability if it offers ING and PGGM a podium. In Maastricht, the views of, among others, the IPCC and the International Energy Agency are prominently featured in education. In my view, it is actually pleads for Maastricht University as a critical and independent university that, in addition to this leading science, it also discusses insights that place the issues of our global economy in a broader context. This is also in the spirit of the concept of 'sustainable development' as already defined in 1987 by the World Commission on Environment and Development – better known as the Brundtland Commission – and of the Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015 by the General Assembly of the UN.

A meaningful symposium

If a symposium is to be meaningful, several conditions must be met[1]. In the first place, a symposium presupposes the willingness to engage in dialogue with others, to listen and to be open to criticism. To guarantee that the conversation can be open, secondly, it requires the safety and freedom of participants to express their views. Thirdly, parties must be able to pre-orient themselves in a timely manner and have relevant information at their disposal. In my experience, students are well-aware of (the downsides of) the activities of financial institutions such as ING Bank and PGGM and can present their views eloquently. A fourth and important condition is mutual respect for all parties in the symposium: the panellists, the students. and the organiser. You can disagree with each other, but that does not alter the fact that respect is the basis of a meaningful exchange of arguments.

In conclusion, the quality of education and research benefits from critical science. This science at Maastricht University obviously has an eye for today's climate challenges. Also, it does not shy away from engaging with opponents – regardless of whether they are companies or NGOs – and actively involves students. I began this open letter by referring to a recent report on corporate governance and engaging stakeholders on social and environmental interests. The report advocates greater involvement of civil society organizations in corporate decision-making. I wholeheartedly endorse this development and note with some surprise that an NGO such as EFO advocates excluding companies from the social dialogue. It is ironic that a civil society organisation that itself likes to be heard calls for the exclusion of its opponents. At the same time, there is some irony in a symposium on ethics aiming to promote an open discourse with companies, now becoming itself the subject of an ethical discourse. It leaves me and my guest somewhat speechless.

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