Two weeks ago, Brown University students who had set up an encampment on campus to protest the war in Gaza vowed they would not leave until school leaders met their demands, which included divesting the endowment from any company tied to Israel’s military.
Instead of sending in the police, as other universities had, Brown’s leaders negotiated a key concession with the student activists: They would put the question of divestment to a vote by the governing board in October. In exchange, students cleared the encampment.
“We finally got past this obstacle,” said Isabella Garo, a student negotiator. Now, she said activists will lobby the governing board to vote for divestment. “We have to make sure we make it count,” she said.
Brown’s concession on divestment might have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago, when the activist campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel was a fringe movement dogged by allegations of antisemitism.
But the ground is now shifting.
After a nationwide student protest movement with echoes of the antiwar movement of the 1960s, and following more than half a year of war in the Gaza Strip, at least a handful of institutional leaders, from university presidents to President Biden, are taking steps — albeit small and tentative ones — toward censuring Israel over its conduct of the war and its treatment of Palestinians.
Student protesters are outraged by the staggering civilian toll in Gaza and view investments in Israel and companies that supply it with war materials as a form of complicity in the war, which was triggered by Hamas’s killing and kidnapping spree in Israel last Oct. 7. Their concerns have grown in recent days as Israel invaded Rafah, where more than 1 million people had sought refuge from the bombardment in the northern part of the Gaza Strip. Biden paused a shipment of bombs to Israel as he urged the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, not to invade — a form of pressure the United States has rarely brought to bear on Israel in recent decades.
At least seven US colleges and universities have partially acquiesced to students’ divestment demands by agreeing to disclose more details about their investments, formulate investment guidelines that could blacklist some companies doing business in Israel, or, like Brown, hold a formal vote on whether some type of divestment should become official policy.
Sacramento State, part of the California State University system, announced last week it would divest from any companies that “profit from genocide, ethnic cleansing, and activities that violate fundamental human rights.” Those terms mirror the language of student protesters who describe Israel’s war in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have died, according to Palestinian authorities, as genocide.
The leaders of Evergreen State College in Washington agreed to create a task force that “will develop a definition for socially responsible investing” and “address divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories,” a reference to Gaza and the West Bank, a majority-Palestinian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967.
Some schools, including the University of Chicago, shield themselves from activist demands by citing their policies of institutional neutrality, which hold that they should not take positions on political issues or international affairs.
A committee at Harvard is studying whether the university should adopt a neutrality policy. But some faculty say the school should stay clear of divestment from Israel for that reason: It would signal that the university has taken a position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“For a neutral institution, it’s important that the investments and divestment policies also be neutral,” said Harvard economist Eric Maskin. “You make these decisions according to financial returns, not according to politics.”
University leaders have a history of resisting calls for divestment, pointing to technical complications of weeding out specific assets from index funds, and institutional obligations to ensure the long-term financial stability of the endowment. It took years of high-profile student advocacy and civil disobedience before colleges broke financial ties to South Africa over racial apartheid in the 1980s. More recently, student demonstrations and faculty pushback have prompted some universities to divest from fossil fuels. And, some institutions moved quickly to divest from Russia in 2022 after its invasion of Ukraine.
The United States and Israel have been long-standing allies. Many American Jews and non-Jews alike regard Israel, which formed after the Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust, as a necessary bulwark, a source of protection for a people with a long history of persecution.
The idea of divestment from Israel is still unfathomable for most schools, despite protests that have roiled many campuses since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack that killed about 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, while another 250 were kidnapped, and Israel launched its retaliatory war in Gaza.
Northwestern University, for example, made some concessions to campus protesters, including agreeing to disclose more information about its investments. But in an op-ed last Thursday, president Michael Schill said in response to protesters’ demands for “divestment from Israel and the end of an academic program that focused on Israeli innovation,” his answer was “a flat no.”
The current demands are related to the long-running Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement that urges universities, companies, governments, and other institutions to sever ties with Israel and treat the country as a pariah state. Many see the movement as antisemitic because it targets the only Jewish state while ignoring human rights abuses elsewhere.
When the Crimson editorial board endorsed the BDS movement in 2022, it provoked a backlash from alumni and criticism from then-Harvard president Lawrence Bacow.
Today, schools are under tremendous political pressure, especially from the right and from high-profile, vocal alumni and donors, to arrest and punish protesters instead of negotiating with them. Brown and Northwestern drew backlash from donors and conservative politicians for negotiating with student protesters. Billionaire Barry Sternlicht suspended donations to Brown, the New York Times reported. Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, a Republican from North Carolina, has called the presidents of Northwestern, Rutgers University, and UCLA to testify before the same committee that interrogated then-Harvard president Claudine Gay in December, contributing to her resignation.
“Over the last several days, the presidents of Northwestern and Rutgers have made shocking concessions to the unlawful antisemitic encampments on their campuses,” Foxx said in a statement. “They have surrendered to antisemitic radicals in despicable displays of cowardice.”
University leaders, though, are also under unrelenting pressure from students and faculty. At Harvard, a primary target for politicians and donors concerned about antisemitism on campuses since Oct. 7, more than 350 faculty members last week signed a letter urging school leaders to meet with student protesters, which interim president Alan Garber agreed to do Wednesday evening. Harvard said the meeting was not a negotiation. The protesters rejected Garber’s proposal to end the encampment.
“My sense about the universities’ unwillingness to even listen or talk about [divestment] has more to do with the optics and fears of further retaliation in various forms by donors, right-wing critics, Congress,” said Steve Levitsky, a government professor at Harvard.
Other professors, in a letter signed by around 150 faculty members, urged Garber to remove the encampment and not make concessions to the protesters.
Garber told student protesters Wednesday the university will not use its endowment “as a political tool,” a spokesperson said.
It’s not clear that divestment would have much impact on Israel. US university endowments collectively hold $839 billion in assets, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, but their portfolios are opaque and spread across a vast variety of investment areas. Divestment would probably carry a more symbolic weight, one that some say has the potential to shift public opinion on Israel, which has already lost standing in the eyes of many Americans, particularly younger ones, since the conflict began.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, said student protesters did help raise public awareness about apartheid in South Africa, bolstering US-imposed sanctions on the country, which some say contributed to the end of apartheid.
University divestment itself, however, he said, “has zero economic impact. It’s a moral tool. It’s a way of highlighting an issue.”
Rabbi David Wolpe, who quit a Harvard advisory board on antisemitism last year after Gay’s Dec. 5 congressional testimony, said he is concerned about the slight shift among some universities in considering the request for Israeli divestment, though he does not think divesting would “materially impact Israel’s strength and future.”
“I don’t think the students ought to be the people who dictate the policies of the university,” Wolpe said. “Most students involved in these protests are abysmally ignorant about the truth in the Middle East.”
Garo, the Brown student who was arrested at a sit-in earlier in the academic year that called for divestment from “Israeli military occupation,” said students are aware that divestment campaigns typically have little financial impact.
But she believes the logic behind them is nevertheless strong.
“It create[s] a stigma in maintaining political and social connections to human rights abusers,” Garo said. “Divestment is a narrow thing to focus on, and get people talking about [Gaza].”