Students are known for having an abundance of ideals, but not much money or power. But student organizations around the country are finding ways to put thousands, sometimes millions of dollars behind sustainable companies.At Middlebury College, members of the school’s Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) club are working to guide the school’s $900 million dollar endowment towards more sustainable investments.They’ve joined a growing number of other schools in invoking the kind of ownership rights seldom embraced by the left: the right to influence the world through the tools of Wall Street, using their role as investors to spur change in powerful corporations.“Colleges have the opportunity to be leaders in socially responsible investing because we combine liberal ideals with a huge amount of money,” says Olivia Grugan, a Middlebury senior and president of the SRI club.Responsible investingAt Middlebury, a group of students started a Socially Responsible Investing (SRI) club and began working with the administration to set aside a part of the school’s $900 million endowment to be managed in a socially responsible way.Having ethically managed funds was a priority for the club, and they initially asked that the school allocate 1 percent of its endowment to a fully transparent fund. Middlebury’s administration was wary of sacrificing too much of the endowment’s money-making potential.“Our endowment supports some major commitments we’ve made,” says Patrick Norton, chief financial officer of the college. “We have a commitment to future generations of students and can never put our funding stream at risk.”But values and profits don’t have to be mutually exclusive, notes Dan Apfel, the executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, which regularly works with students to incorporate the principles of SRI into their schools’ endowments.Grugan argues that socially conscious investing is part of the school’s responsibility. “Middlebury has a mission statement that includes language like ‘environmental stewardship’ and ‘global community,’” she says, “and those values are something we want reflected in the entirety of our endowment.”In 2010, the school created a socially responsible fund of $4 million, to be matched with another $4 million raised through fundraising efforts.The current size of the fund is $2.5 million, but students and administrators are hopeful that it will grow in the next few years. Although the fund is not managed by students, they were able to provide input on the general direction of the investments.“When we got this fund, we had a couple of choices in what direction we could take it,” says Grugan. “We could try to make it the greenest fund ever, or we could aim to make it a model for how the entire ...

 Next week, NATO’s 28 members will meet in Chicago for their annual summit. Sixty-two years after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, binding the United States, Canada, and ten European states to consider an attack on one an attack on all, NATO is transforming itself into a twenty-first-century global security organization. The result will be a safer world.In 1949, the world was rapidly dividing into two principle political-military blocs, East and West, alongside a large “non-aligned movement.” NATO faced off against the Warsaw Pact, created by the Soviet Union and its allies in 1955. Within both blocs, smaller powers clustered around the superpower. No flexibility existed within either bloc for smaller groups of members to deploy alliance assets.Today, NATO is becoming, in the words of its secretary-general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, “a hub of a network of security partnerships and a center for consultation on global security issues.” It is a “globally connected institution,” with more than 40 individual country partners and growing ties to other international organizations. Follow Project Syndicate on Facebook or Twitter. For more from Anne-Marie Slaughter, click here.Indeed, the country partners include all of Europe’s non-NATO countries, such as Austria, Switzerland, Finland, and Sweden, and aspiring and possible NATO members such as Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine, Belarus, and even Russia. Virtually all of the Central Asian countries – from Turkmenistan to Kazakhstan, as well as Armenia, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan – are partners, as is the entire Maghreb, from Morocco to Egypt, as well as Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Finally, Pacific partners include Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Mongolia.On the organizational side, NATO describes itself as having developed “close working relations” with the United Nations, the European Union, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. It also collaborates regularly with the African Union, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the International Organization for Migration, the World Bank, the International Civil Aviation Organization, and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.If one draws links radiating outward from NATO to all of these different countries and organizations, the result is a security network that has multiple hubs and clusters – much like a map of the Internet or of planets and galaxies. This world is no longer unipolar, bipolar, or even multipolar, because the actors that matter are not single states but groups of states that are more or less ...