Brown Rejects Protesters’ Push to Divest Over Israel Ties

Brown University announced on Wednesday that its governing board had voted to reject a student proposal to divest from companies involved in Israeli military and security activities.

The vote, on Tuesday, was the first of its kind in the Ivy League since the start of the Israel-Hamas war one year ago, which has ignited an international protest movement.

Since the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the ensuing bombardment of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, pro-Palestinian college students across the country have demanded their schools take action — mainly by divesting college endowments from holdings related to Israel. These efforts have rarely been successful.

Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University, and Brian Moynihan, chancellor of the governing board known as the Brown Corporation, said the board had voted down the divestment proposal because the endowment held no direct investments in the 10 companies that protesters had named as facilitating “Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.”

Given the university’s minimal and indirect financial exposure to those companies, “it could not be directly responsible for social harm,” Dr. Paxson and Mr. Moynihan wrote in a letter to the Brown community.

In addition, they wrote, “Brown’s mission is to discover, communicate and preserve knowledge. It is not to adjudicate or resolve global conflicts.”

Rafi Ash, a junior and a member of Brown Divest and Brown University Jews for Ceasefire Now, called the vote “a clear moral failure of the university.” He said the board had “voted to remain complicit in this genocide.”

Brown is one of just a few schools to take divestment to a vote, the result of negotiations last spring between protesters and Dr. Paxson. Ahead of the vote, Republican attorneys general from 24 states warned Brown of potential financial penalties if it chose to divest, citing state laws that penalize anti-Israel activism.

But the decision to engage with protesters helped Dr. Paxson to avoid some of the conflicts that occurred last spring at other elite universities like Columbia and U.C.L.A., where police officers broke up encampments and made dozens of arrests.

Many colleges have refused to consider the issue at all, seeking to remain neutral in a difficult political environment where they also face strong pressure from students, donors, politicians, alumni and others supportive of Israel.

Dr. Paxson had previously opposed a divestment vote. In the charged environment of the current war — including the shooting of a Palestinian Brown University student in Vermont last year — she changed course. In exchange, protesters dismantled an encampment they had erected in April on the college’s Main Green, the heart of its Providence, R.I., campus.

In September, Joseph Edelman, a hedge fund manager, resigned from the board to protest the vote.

“I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered, much less that it will be held, especially in the wake of the deadliest assault on the Jewish people since the Holocaust,” he wrote in an opinion piece explaining his decision.

The divestment proposal the board considered was crafted by a coalition of student groups known as Brown Divest, which includes the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as Brown University Jews for Ceasefire Now.

The proposal, if passed, would not have led to a blanket financial, cultural or academic boycott of Israel. Rather, it would have required the university to divest its endowment from 10 companies, including Volvo, Boeing, Motorola, Airbus and General Electric.

In a report, Brown Divest detailed how some of those companies manufactured vehicles used by Israel to transport Palestinian prisoners, weapons used by the Israeli military, and surveillance technology used by Israel in the occupied West Bank.

There are a few institutions that have agreed to the protesters’ demands. San Francisco State University has divested from several arms manufacturers as part of a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters. The divestment policy cited human rights abuses broadly, and did not name Israel or any other country.

In May, Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., agreed to explore divestment.

Brown Divest had pointed to successful divestment pushes in the past. The university withdrew its endowment from companies involved with tobacco in 2003 and the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan in 2006.

Brown students who opposed divestment had issued a report arguing that the proposal to divest was “functionally antisemitic” in singling out Israel, and pointing out that pro-divestment student groups had celebrated terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

Last week, Brown Students for Justice in Palestine wrote on social media that the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed more than 1,200 people in Israel, most of them civilians, was “a historic act of resistance against decades of occupation, apartheid and settler colonial violence.” The group said it stood in support of “resistance against occupation by any means necessary.”

Brooke Verschleiser, a senior and the president of Brown Students for Israel, said she saw the divestment effort as relying more on “emotional justifications” than on a nuanced consideration of Middle Eastern politics and the university’s financial power.

“Divestment is dangerous as it undermines and ignores these complexities by mislabeling Israel’s efforts to defend itself and holding Israel to a double standard,” she said.

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