Forty years ago, Williams students led an inspiring campaign to pressure the College to divest from South Africa. Although the College only partially divested, the students made the campus community participants in a global movement that was crucial in the downfall of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Today, two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jews for Justice, are leading the charge in calling for divestment from Israel’s apartheid regime, as determined by international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The students are teaching us all lessons in moral clarity, courage, and responsibility. They join student groups and activists on campuses around the nation calling for divestment and mobilizing against Israel’s onslaught against Gaza — what scholars and UN experts have called a genocide.
As faculty and staff at the College, we believe we must stand and unite with these brave students in their cause in calling for divestment from funds that benefit Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinian territories. As academics who study and teach about colonialism, militarism, apartheid, capitalism, and social movements, we believe it is imperative that the College recognize and end its complicity. It is in this spirit that we submitted a comment to the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR), arguing that divesting would be a material step toward delinking our institutional lives from militarism and state-sanctioned violence. As the South African case demonstrates, divestment works as a strategy. When prestigious and powerful institutions divest, the material and symbolic act makes a significant contribution to a global movement.
Some are asking: Why just Israel? Why only this genocide and war? Aren’t there other genocides to oppose? We completely agree. Rather than giving into the whataboutism that would have us ignore all oppression, we ask the College to divest from all funds invested in weapons manufacturing, either for use by the U.S. military or for sale to militaries around the world. As the world’s largest military power, the United States supports genocides worldwide from Palestine to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That the United States has been the primary sponsor of Israeli occupation since 1967 means that a response from us is long overdue. While the need to stop ongoing genocides is especially urgent, the College must not profit from war anywhere. Thus, we believe that the College must institute specific criteria to ensure ethical investments.
We reject the notion that ethically investing the endowment is too complex, or that financially supporting a genocide is just the cost of offering a Williams-caliber education. Investment portfolios of the College’s scale surely have ample options, and the Investment Committee (the highest level of oversight over the College’s assets), should explore these thoroughly and in good faith. We join students in calling on the College to make a genuine effort that goes beyond lip service by demanding that the ACSR be established as a standing committee because, as workers at the College, we believe this is a necessary step towards transparency and democratic decision-making.
Some others ask: Will divestment not undermine the College’s educational mission, which is to teach students how to think, rather than what to think? Should we not focus on providing students with the best possible education and on nurturing a shared academic community, rather than taking divisive stances on geopolitical conflicts and compromising institutional neutrality?
The idea that our institution is or should remain neutral is mistaken and disingenuous. Firstly, ethical and political values always shape decisions about the endowment. For example, the College has committed to make no new investments in oil and gas extraction and promised to phase out existing investments tied to fossil fuels. Such a commitment does not render students incapable of thinking through the issue of fossil fuels and climate change.
Furthermore, refusing to divest is also an active decision, and it too suggests to students how they should think and act. If institutional neutrality means keeping things as they are, and impartiality means that we cannot judge the past actions that shape our present lives, then we would be teaching students the opposite of critical thinking. How can we teach students to think critically, let alone motivate their desire to dismantle injustice and inequality, when the College won’t do its part to do the same? The College should act ethically, and can do so safe in the knowledge that such action will influence students without compromising their ability to think. Some students will disagree with divestment. Inviting them to think through and articulate their disagreement with the decision to divest will encourage thinking far more than the decision to preserve the status quo.
This institution is not neutral. We work and study on lands stolen from the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans; our founder was an enslaver; former students were missionaries and pro-imperialists. Claiming institutional impartiality teaches students the false and dangerous idea that the violence of dispossession, slavery, imperialism, and war-making, which make possible the College’s material existence, are in the past and can be forgotten. When the next generation looks back at this moment of crisis and disaster, what will they see? When we were confronted by courageous students to stop another colonial occupation, another genocide of an Indigenous people, what did we do? If we shrug our shoulders, citing an overly narrow conception of our pedagogical mission and a fictional neutrality, history will see our abdication of responsibility for exactly what it is.
For a full list of the authors of this statement and the current signatories, visit this link. As of publication, 29 signatories added their names in support. Not all signatories are authors.
Contact: Williams Workers Collective ([email protected])
