I'd like to offer a brief response to the socially responsible investment story in Tuesday's Alligator, for which I was interviewed.
When it comes to what Carlos Alfonso called everybody's "different idea of what socially responsible investing is," I'd like to make myself very clear: it doesn't matter what SDS, me or anyone else thinks SRI is, because UF has already clearly stated where it stands on several important issues.
We're deeply committed to environmentalism, non-discrimination and "operating to promote the public good." At its most basic level, then, SRI is an attempt to ensure that the companies we invest in share those values.
We recognize the Board of Trustees' concerns over the practicality and desirably of transparency, and fully accommodated them into our SRI Committee proposal. Basically, the Committee gets real-time transparency, and the public gets retroactive transparency over the previous year's investments. Problem solved.
The part about this process taking 10 or 20 years seemed a little confusing in the article, but I was only trying to get across that we understand the need for a robust endowment portfolio, and that we desire SRI to be a long term goal instead of a rash, dramatic restructuring of UF's portfolio.
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