Location: Upper Sayles
Time: 8:30 am
Present Bakhtawar Chaudhary, Joe Concannon, Danette DeMann, Ellen Farnham, Daniel Groll, Fadi Hakim, Sara Hooker, Fred Rogers, Duncan Sallstrom, Kristen Vellinger
Absent Chris Clark, Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Forrest McKnight
Secretary: Claire Milsted
New Member: We have a new member, Bakhtawar Chaudhary ’15. She introduced herself and we briefly explained what we have been up to recently.
Withdrawn resolutions: The Johnson and Johnson political contributions resolution and the Goldman Sachs offshore banking resolution have been withdrawn.
Meeting with trustees: We have a meeting with the trustees in two weeks. It will on Thursday, February 9th be from 12:15-12:45 PM in the Alumni guest house. The most controversial element in our discussion will be the proxy policy; therefore, Fred suggests that we mention the policy at the very beginning, but hold off on our full discussion of the policy until after we have addressed the resolutions.
The trustees will probably want to ask a lot of questions, particularly about the policy. It is important to give clear answers and not claim to know more than we actually do. It is particularly appropriate to admit not knowing everything about these companies in the fact that many of the resolutions involve requests for more information; the fact that we don’t have perfect information now is a point in favor of these resolutions.
In discussing the policy, it is important to stress that the policy steamlines the process a lot, but doesn’t give CRIC any real power to do things that the trustees don’t like—they have a say on what goes on the approved list.
We rehearsed our presentation for the board of trustees, with several different members each taking a small subsection of the presentation.
Meeting with Macalaster Students: This Saturday, we will be meeting with Macalaster’s student responsible investment group in Weitz 231.