Because the roar of protests in opposition to Israel’s battle on Gaza grows louder on campuses throughout the USA, a key demand has taken centre stage: divestment. College students and lecturers who’re part of the protests are insisting that their universities cease all funding and investments tied to Israel.
On the coronary heart of the protests is New York’s Columbia College, an Ivy League establishment steeped within the historical past of campus scholar motion stretching again many years.
And whereas no two protests are the identical, the college additionally has an extended custom of main US academic establishments in ending controversial investments – usually underneath stress from its scholar, school and alumni communities.
What does it imply for Columbia to divest from Israel?
The underlying aim for any divestment is to redistribute the college’s endowment funds to give attention to investments which can be seen as extra ethically sound whereas additionally utilizing that cash to encourage governments and different establishments to alter their insurance policies.
Columbia has an endowment fund of $13.6bn. Columbia College Apartheid Divest, a coalition of campus teams that is without doubt one of the organisers behind the present protests, has recognized a sequence of buyers that it desires the college to sever ties with. They embrace BlackRock, the asset administration large; Airbnb, which has supplied leases within the occupied West Financial institution; Caterpillar, whose bulldozers Israel has used; and Google, which has confronted protests from staffers over Venture Nimbus, which supplies synthetic intelligence companies to Israel.
These investments represent an virtually negligible quantity of Columbia’s endowment funds, however in February, the college made it clear that it had no intentions of divesting from companies tied to Israel.
But the college has usually up to now led the best way amongst high US colleges on divestments from controversial investments.
Divesting from apartheid South Africa
In 1985, college students efficiently pressured Columbia to divest itself from a slew of main firms that operated in apartheid South Africa.
After weeks of demonstrations, college authorities buckled and pulled out of firms like Coca-Cola, Chevron, Ford and American Specific. The whole inventory worth that Columbia dumped amounted to about 4 p.c of the college’s portfolio.
A sequence of universities adopted swimsuit from the College of California at Berkeley to the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In 1994, South Africa lastly held its first democratic elections when the African Nationwide Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, got here to energy, marking the tip of many years of white rule over a Black majority nation.
When Columbia took a stand on Sudan
In 2006, the Columbia College Sudan Divestment Process Pressure, a student-run organisation, pressured the college to divest from Sudan as human rights violations had been dedicated in its western area of Darfur.
The Advisory Committee on Socially Accountable Investing (ACSRI) at Columbia College, an advisory committee established in 2000 to advise college trustees on moral and social points, pledged to divest from 18 companies that carried out enterprise in Sudan.
No smoking
Since 2008, Columbia has additionally ended investments in firms linked to tobacco.
The college maintains a listing of those firms – each American and international companies – that Columbia is barred from investing in.
US firms that manufacture tobacco or tobacco merchandise are on the listing. As for international companies, the listing extends to firms concerned within the distribution of tobacco and tobacco merchandise.
Personal prisons off limits
In 2015, stress from Columbia Jail Divest, a student-led group advocating for personal jail divestment, pushed Columbia’s Board of Trustees to tug out $10m from Corrections Company of America (CCA) and G4S.
CCA operates for-profit prisons all through the US, and G4S provides know-how and safety personnel to those amenities globally.
As with divestments regarding apartheid South Africa, Columbia was the primary US college to divest from prisons there.
Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s president on the time, backed the decision from the ACSRI that the college “divest any direct inventory possession pursuits in firms engaged within the operation of personal prisons and chorus from making subsequent investments in such firms”.
“I help this advice, which represents the fruits of considerate evaluation and laborious work by ACSRI and by our college students, school and alumni,” Bollinger mentioned.
Starvation strikes result in fossil gas divestments
In 2016, Dawn Columbia, a coalition of local weather activists at Columbia College, amped up its marketing campaign to get the establishment to divest from fossil fuels. These protests would finally contain weeklong starvation strikes and sit-ins exterior Bollinger’s workplace.
In 2017, Columbia pledged to divest from thermal coal, and in January 2020, it introduced a no-investment coverage for oil and fuel firms.
In a November 2020 assertion, Columbia’s ACSRI mentioned: “The urgency and significance of local weather change require Columbia to do every thing it may possibly to help and speed up the transition, together with investments in firms with credible plans and actions to transition the financial system from fossil fuels to net-zero GHG-emitting [greenhouse gas-emitting] sources of power.”