The NYTimes has an article on protestor's demands that university endowments: Santul Nerkar, Rob Copeland and Maureen Farrell, Calls to Divest From Israel Put Students and Donors on Collision Course (May 3, 2024). Three universities have struck deals:
Brown University, the liberal Ivy League institution, agreed this week only to hold a board vote this fall on whether its $6.6 billion endowment should divest from any Israeli-connected holdings. In exchange, the pro-Palestinian encampment on the campus's main lawn was dismantled.
Northwestern University and the University of Minnesota have also struck deals with student protesters to clear camps in exchange for a commitment to discuss the schools’ investment policies around Israel. The moves could add pressure on administrators at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of North Carolina, among others, where protesters have made divestment from Israel a central rallying cry.
After discussing the history of and current state of such demands the article notes:
But there are also practical challenges with any effort to divest. One, simply, is identifying what to divest and how to define the terms of such a policy.
Some academics question whether divestment works, with research finding that it has little to no impact on the bottom lines or behavior of targeted firms. Others point to the logistical complexity of divesting: As a private institution, Brown isn’t required to disclose all of its endowment’s investments, and in fact says almost nothing about them. Some 96 percent of its coffers are invested via outside asset managers.
The Brown Divest Coalition said it wanted to the university to sell off “stocks, funds, endowment and other monetary instruments from companies facilitating and profiting from Israeli human rights abuses.” It outlined criteria for divesting from certain companies, drawing upon lists compiled by three organizations, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The students acknowledge that they don’t even know if Brown invests in any of those companies. That’s because what Brown does with its money — and how the institution or any other school would get rid of them — is hardly straightforward.
Timothy Burke, who teaches history at Swarthmore College, discusses this difficulty in his Substack column, Eight by Seven (May 2, 2024):
Divestment made marginal sense at best as a pressure strategy way back in the anti-apartheid movement, but ever since then has been less and less coherent as a tactic. The primary reason is that the nature of investment itself has changed so dramatically. Universities don’t own stock of particular companies for a long time now: most of their endowments involve frequent trading and in a much wider range of asset classes than stocks. Their investments are also frequently firewalled off from direct scrutiny by administrators, who are not kidding when they say they don’t even know what the endowment actually owns on a given day. Moreover, publicly traded companies largely could care less whether some group of potential buyers are not buying their traded stock, and mostly you don’t have shareholders who bring pressure on companies if the stock value is falling. Even when you do, boards and CEOs might ignore that pressure. Excluding companies from a list of assets an endowment can own doesn’t hurt them in any real way, and they are the real targets of a divestment campaign.
Later in his piece Burke makes a more interesting and more important argument:
These protests should have stopped being about colleges and universities except now they have to be about them.
What do I mean by that?
All the way back to the anti-apartheid movement, the weakness of campus activism has often been that it gets drawn obsessively into demanding that the institutions act as allies within larger struggles against distant or well-protected adversaries. This structure of protest has turned colleges and universities into proxies for those targets and eventually replacements for them, because protesters accurately perceive that they have some hope of minor concessions or that they will at least be able to compel the authorities on their campuses to listen to their demands, with whatever legitimacy that provides. Effectively, protesters come to hallucinate that their university administrations ARE the bad guys they want to attack, and equally completely miss out on understanding what is wrong with those administrations.
The obsession with making the university knuckle under to a particular demand trapped campus activists in a cul-de-sac of their own making, where superior options for change were scorned because protesters wanted to hang a particular kind of trophy head on the wall. My colleagues here know that was my position on fossil fuel divestment for years, and I feel fairly vindicated on that point. I warned students that they were going to get stuck chasing an action that would have zero impact even if their demands were met, that was premised on a really poor reading of how to bring meaningful political pressure on the U.S. government to end subsidies for fossil fuel production. In the meantime, lots of possible actions that would directly commit universities and colleges to the goals of climate activism were scorned as distractions from the divestment effort.
What the Gaza protests have revealed, however, is first that there’s been a change in the internal architecture of power on campuses and that this change is now allowing external actors to directly intervene in university and college affairs in new and largely unaccountable ways. Moreover, I think those changes are aligned with the larger remapping of U.S. politics and social life to new forms of oligarchy. Now the issue really is the administrations and I think for the first time in a while, student activists understand why that is.
Burke goes on to argue:
So what I suggest is that right now and immediately at the start of next fall, student activists should call the bluff that many university administrators have made in their passive-voice statements in the past week. If universities claim to support reasoned disagreements and debates, if they really do believe in learning together, if they embrace diversity of thought and experience, then turn the encampments into open air teach-ins, 24/7.
Make them expressly about conversation, debate and education, and not just about Gaza. About all the things that matter that aren’t highly prioritized in most university curricula. Let a thousand flowers bloom! The encampments should be alive with people talking about the flaws of nationalism generally, or about the reasons they support nations as a political form. About socialism, capitalism, anarchy, authoritarianism, about what has been and what might be. About political change and how it happens—or fails to happen. About the way the world got to be as it is. About why the curriculum is organized the way it is and what it could be. About pedagogies. About labor markets past and future. About oligarchy and hierarchy. About bodies and rights. About power and helplessness. About violence and peace. And none of it with fixed, hardened ideological positions. Explore. I think this generation is ready to make its own theories, conduct its own observations from what they’re living and what they hope to live.
Turn the encampments into makerspaces. Publish writing, formalize theory. Create art, stage performances. Experiment.
Reverse-engineer end-state political positions that people scream at each other, work back to first principles. What do we mean by freedom? What is unfree in our world? What do we know and how do we know it? How do we live and what do we want to live? Who are we here, who is not present with us, what is local to us, what is far away?
Make the encampments into what universities claim they want. Call their bluff.
Sounds good to me.
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