There is a serious problem at Colorado State University, the institution has been running at a loss in terms of direct cash flow since 2022, and we had a bond debt of 1.3 billion dollars in 2023. These are the lines used to justify department budget cuts and to argue against pay increases. Despite this they are consistently able to find millions of dollars to the salaries of consistently terminated administrative employees, like the 1.5 million paid to former President Joyce McConnell, or the more recent case of CSU paying $325,000 to our former provost Marion Underwood, both leaving under “similarly mysterious circumstances.” Both of these termination settlements underlie a greater problem with how much administrators at CSU are paid, with blanket 3% raises applying to both the top 10% and the bottom 90 of CSU workers, President Amy Parson’s wage increased from 600,000 to 666,238. The real problem is that the university puts unnecessary burdens on accessing the information which could be used to check their work, requiring payment for the data which should be public information under CORA.

Colorado State University has a number of tactics to ensure they are not financially transparent to students and staff. They utilize a series of separate nonprofits to this end; the CSUS foundation, the CSU foundation, CSU global, and more. The effect that these nonprofits have is that administration has a number of funding sources which are not easily accessible to the student body. Furthermore the CSU foundation keeps the investments it makes entirely unavailable to the public, meaning that the university could be investing in companies which run counter to the CSU land grant mission.

One mission that CSU continues to advertise is that of sustainability. Whether or not CSU's campus is sustainable, as it claims, Colorado State University's largest impact on the climate crisis will always be that of a financial institution. And yet, the university refuses to divulge how much money it has invested in fossil fuels. By using the CSU Foundation's list of its categories of investments and making our best guesses about proxy funds, CSU is likely to have around $23 million invested in fossil fuels. Of course, this number is not perfectly accurate, but it is either too large, in which case it is in CSU's best interest to correct it, or this number is too small, and CSU has an obligation to its students to reveal the true number.

This is not only an issue of CSU being disingenuous in its advertising to new students. As long as our college hides the amount of money it has invested in fossil fuels, it is making all of its students complicit in acts that will cause the worsening of the climate crisis and the loss of real human lives. Due to last winter's historically light snowfall, the Colorado River is running 20% lower than usual. In addition to the impact on the 40 million people who directly rely on the river, the reduced flow has also meant that power generation from the Glen Canyon Dam is now only at one-third of its normal level.

This is only a fraction of the impacts of the climate crisis. We are consistently hearing global stories, like the flooding in Nepal, which show the direct human cost of these types of investments.

Students have a right to not be complicit in global violence. By signing this petition, you show to Colorado State University that students, staff, and alumni believe that they deserve to know where their money is going and how it is expended for our campus.