By 
The 2024 edition of March Madness will be long remembered for 1) the dazzling play of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, 2) South Carolina completing an undefeated season by knocking off Clark and her Iowa teammates to win the women’s National Championship, and 3) UConn running roughshod through the men’s tournament to win its sixth national title, all since 1999.
As far as off-the-court stories were concerned, it was the phenomenal, unprecedented TV ratings for the women’s tournament, driven mainly by Clark and buttressed by a slew of dazzling players from across the country, that led the way. The successful unionization of the Dartmouth men’s squad, a first for any collegiate sports team, received a smidge of mainstream media attention while generating significant agita on the part of the Grand Poobahs of college athletics.
Yet it was another story that caught GSB’s eye: The Green-Sports-Washing undertaken by TIAA — the company that invests the retirement funds (IRAs and pensions) for teachers across the United States, from grade school through universities — through its sponsorship of the Big Ten men’s and women’s basketball tournaments in Minneapolis in early March.
At first glance, Caroline Levine is a most unlikely Anti-Green-Sports-Washing detective and fighter. She is not as involved in the business of college sports and she is not a community organizer. At least not until now.
But dig a little deeper and you’ll see why it makes perfect sense that Levine, a professor of the Humanities, with a focus on the environment, sustainability, and English at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, is helping to take on the Goliath that is TIAA and its sponsorship of the 2024 Big Ten men’s and women’s tournaments.
She is a big-time college basketball fan (“I was a huge Syracuse fan growing up and I love Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese”) and she is even more passionate about climate action.
Caroline Levine (Photo credit: Cornell University)
Levine is devoting a good chunk of that passion nowadays to TIAA Divest, the four+ year old group has the mission to inform its hundreds of thousands of teacher clients that TIAA — with $1.2 trillion under management — has $78 billion (or 6.5 percent) of their money invested in fossil fuels and would generate better returns by investing in renewables and other clean tech companies.
“We want to talk with TIAA leadership about the benefits to teachers, who are their client-investors, of switching their investments out of fossil fuels and into renewables,” Levine asserted in a phone interview. “In 2020, we reached out to Amy O’Brien, the Director of Sustainability at Nuveen, the company owned by TIAA that actually does the investing for the various funds, to ask what their plan was to reduce their investments in fossil fuels. She said, ‘we’ll get back to you’. We’re still waiting to hear from her.”
Then in November 2022, the group lodged a formal complaint with the UN-backed network of investors called the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), a referee of sorts.
“The PRI did not follow its own protocols and refused to take up the complaint,” she shared. “The TIAA Board of Trustees also basically dismissed us, using the old ‘whataboutism, let’s do nothing’ playbook, saying ‘we’d have to divest from almonds if we divest from fossil fuels’.”
Frustrated, Levine and TIAA Divest, which counts Bill McKibben, the founder of the climate action nonprofit 350.org, and Dr. Michael Mann, the respected climate scientist and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, among its supporters, were looking for other ways to get O’Brien’s and the Board’s attention. Then they learned that Nuveen/TIAA had signed on as a sponsor of the 2024 Big Ten women’s and men’s basketball tournaments last September.
For those GSB readers who are not familiar with college sports, the Big Ten is one of the two biggest and most powerful conferences/leagues in the country (the Southeastern Conference or SEC being the other). It’s newly expanded roster of 18 schools now stretches from Rutgers (New Jersey) and Maryland on the east coast, to its Midwest core that includes Penn State, Ohio State, and Michigan, to its new west coast members UCLA, USA, Oregon and Washington (did anyone think of the increased carbon emissions that go along with the coast-to-coast travel?). The Big Ten and 31 other conferences/leagues host conference tournaments whose winners get automatic bids to ‘The Big Dance’, the national NCAA Tournament for both men and women. So, the Big Ten Tournaments are BIG DEALS. Why would TIAA, a retirement fund, become a sponsor?
When it comes to college sports, the Big Ten is ‘Apple Pie and Americana’. Its postseason basketball tournaments are terrific vehicles through which TIAA can burnish its wholesome image as a retirement fund management companies that helps teachers and ultimately college students — the future of the country.
Except, according to Levine and TIAA Divest, the TIAA branding is a mirage, a greenwash.
“The sponsorship and the ads that go with it hide the fact that TIAA is destroying the promise of the future it claims to nurture by its $78 billion in fossil fuel investments,” she proclaimed. “It also glosses over the fact that TIAA is the largest owner of private farmland and timber land in the world. That means it is denuding local environments through blatant land grabs from small farms, many Black-owned, and transforming them into big ‘monocropping’ agribusinesses which are awful for the environment. One in particular got our attention: an agricultural chemical company owned by TIAA sprayed the tiny, majority Black town of Elaine, Arkansas with toxic chemicals, putting animals and people at risk.”
TIAA Divest felt it needed to publicly challenge TIAA and Nuveen management and that a series of grassroots actions during the Big Ten Tournaments was the ideal tactic to do just that. The group:
- Got a series of op-eds published in newspapers in several Big Ten markets, including The Des Moines Register, not far from the University of Iowa, The News-Gazette in Champaign, IL, the home of the University of Illinois, as well as The Daily Targum, the Rutgers student newspaper.
- Made a significant push on social media, with Bill McKibben getting significant traction by reposting the op-eds.
- Deployed TIAA Divest organizer Abigayle Reese and a handful of her colleagues handed out flyers and other literature outside US Bank Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings, during the the Big Ten Tournaments.
Abigayle Reese of TIAA Divest holds a card that lays out TIAA’s fossil fuel investments and its environmentally-harmful monocropping behaviors. She and other volunteers handed out the cards to fans as they entered in to the Big Ten Men’s basketball tournament in Minneapolis in March (Photo credit: TIAA Divest)
TIAA Divest funded mobile signage decrying TIAA’s fossil fuel investments near US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis during the Big Ten men’s basketball tournament in March (Photo credit: TIAA Divest)
“These actions and others helped us rank in the top 10 on Google news searches of TIAA,” offered Levine. “Other local news outlets picked up the story as well. Our belief is that the Big Ten Tournament was a big success – for TIAA Divest. And it needs to be a springboard to future efforts to get TIAA and Nuveen management to listen to us.”
To do so, the TIAA Divest crew will work to go above O’Brien by targeting the TIAA Board of Trustees and its Board of Governors. It will also build on the grassroots efforts it pioneered at the Big Ten Tournament by teaming up with the Campus Climate Network to build grassroots student pressure on TIAA to divest its fossil fuel investments.
GSB reached out to TIAA for comment but has not heard back.
“TIAA Divest will keep calling out the company’s greenwashing until our money is out of fossil fuels,” Levine promised. “See you at the next sports events they use a feel-good sponsorship to cover up their environment- and climate-destroying practices.”
Photo at Top: Signage heralding TIAA’s sponsorship of the 2024 Big Ten Basketball Tournament
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