Following Hamas’ horrific attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, an Israeli military offensive has killed over 34,000 Palestinians and wounded over 77,000 more in the Gaza Strip. This violence has been funded through billions of dollars of military aid from the United States and further supported by the investment holdings of hundreds of American colleges and universities. In a historic wave of protests, students and faculty across the country — sometimes at the risk of suspension or in the face of militarized police retaliation — have argued that any amount of financial holdings that enables these killings is too large.
At the College, hundreds of students have organized since October, articulating and condemning the College’s complicity in response to the Israeli government’s bombardment of Gaza through its reportedly non-zero financial holdings in weapons manufacturers — even as the threat of doxxing makes it risky and potentially dangerous to do so. Last week, over two dozen faculty and staff publicly joined the movement, arguing that, as academics who study and teach about colonialism, militarism, apartheid, capitalism, and social movements, they believed it was time for the College to “recognize and end its complicity.”
We, the editorial board of the Record, join widespread calls, both across the country and on our campus: The College must divest any holdings from both weapons manufacturers and suppliers to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), as Israel continues to commit what United Nations (UN) experts — and scholars on our campus — have deemed a genocide.
Top UN aid officials have called conditions in Gaza “full-blown famine” as the Israeli military demonstrates flagrant and egregious disregard for international norms of war. Divestment would not unilaterally end the Israeli military’s genocide, and it may do little to alleviate the immediate suffering and killing in Gaza. Still, the effort from an elite institution like our own is symbolic. It is imperative that the College commits to an ethical approach in its financial holdings.
The recent past may be instructive on issues of divestment.
In 2021, when organizers called on the College to make a public commitment to phasing out its holdings in the fossil fuel industry, President Maud S. Mandel said that she was “skeptical” that such changes to the College’s endowment or a public statement would have any impact on the climate crisis. More importantly, she argued, the College “led the higher education sector” in 2015 when it launched a series of investments in renewable energy as the College’s investment strategies “sought to grapple with the climate crisis.”
Is the very existence of the College’s “impact investments” not an acknowledgment of its moral responsibility through its investment holdings?
It’s time for the College to uphold this moral responsibility through its endowment by standing against the funding of weapons used to engage in genocide in Gaza.
The College should establish specific investment criteria, with a particular focus on weapons manufacturing, that works to screen out companies that sell weapons or vehicles used by the IDF.
The College must publicly commit to broader environmental, social, governance (ESG) standards — beyond the ones instituted through fossil fuel investments — with respect to its investment strategy to ensure ethical considerations are long-term priorities, applying to a variety of global conflicts. Although the College may be legally or functionally precluded from sharing details of its investment strategy, publicly articulated ESG standards will build necessary trust and transparency between the institution and the community.
No matter the College’s determination on this specific call for divestment, it has been made clear that the endowment is of great importance to the campus community. As such, the College’s present lack of transparency surrounding its investments is unacceptable.
To the best of the College’s legal ability, it must publicly disclose the list of companies and funds with which it is invested as well as the size of each holding. Further — as has been argued by Students for Justice in Palestine and Jews for Justice, as well as dozens of faculty — the College must establish the Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility as a standing committee so information on the College’s investment strategies is made more accessible to students and faculty and inquiries on the ethics of the endowment can be easily raised.
We understand that divestment is both a complicated and difficult process and may come with financial risks and tradeoffs to the College. As a part of this transparency, the College must publicly identify what those risks might be to the best of its ability. We believe that the College faces a moral imperative to divest from the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, so we are willing to bear some cost to end our complicity in the deaths of civilians.
And if the College is unwilling to divest in the face of a moral imperative, it must publicly state as much — as Amherst’s president did last month. If hundreds of students and a coalition of faculty have repeatedly called on the College to change its investment practices, at the bare minimum, the campus community deserves a public response.
This editorial represents the opinion of the majority of the Record editorial board.
Several members of the Record’s editorial board chose to remove their names from the masthead this week in disagreement with the opinions expressed in this editorial, as per our editorial policy. The online masthead was altered to reflect this change on the day of publication and was reinstated on May 20, 2024. Names that remained on the masthead did not necessarily reflect total agreement with all opinions expressed.
