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Brown University will not divest from 10 companies with ties to Israel’s military, the university announced Wednesday.
Student activists submitted a proposal in July requesting the university divest from the 10, most of which are aerospace or defense companies, on the grounds that they contribute to Israel’s “occupation of Gaza and the West Bank” and to violence against civilians in those territories.
Brown’s Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, which is responsible for researching and reviewing proposals for divestment from specific companies, submitted its report to the university on Oct. 1. The committee recommend against divestment by a vote of 8 to 2, with one abstention.
ACURM noted that Brown has no direct investments in those companies and that its indirect investment in them—about 0.009 percent of the total endowment—“is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm, as defined in ACURM’s charge,” the committee wrote. A divestment of that size, they continued, would constitute a “symbolic political statement”; ACURM’s charge disallows the recommendation of “any action that advances a position on social or political questions unrelated to the investment or expenditure of University financial resources under consideration.”
This is just the latest development in a long battle at Brown over divestment from companies that profit from contracts with Israel and its military. ACURM’s predecessor, the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices, voted to reject divestment in 2016.
When it came up for a vote again in 2020, after the student body voted for divestment in a 2019 referendum, the committee recommended divestment. But the Corporation of Brown University nevertheless declined to implement the recommendation, due in part to an incomplete report from ACCRIP that was impossible to implement as written “since it did not include clear standards for identifying which companies would be subject to divestment,” a university spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed last year. A former ACCRIP committee member, who spoke to Inside Higher Ed anonymously about the process, said the report reflected the committee’s sparse research, which consisted of just six one-hour meetings.
In the past, Brown has divested from companies doing business with apartheid South Africa, from tobacco companies and from companies supporting the Sudanese government during the humanitarian crisis in Darfur.
It is exceedingly rare for universities to agree to divest from companies over ties to Israel, but student activists have had a handful of successes. San Francisco State University decided to move toward divesting from weapons manufacturers. And Union Theological Seminary in New York has also said it will divest from companies that profit off the Israel-Hamas war as well as other conflicts—which its president told Inside Higher Ed is simply an extension of an existing policy to avoid investing in weapons manufacturers.