Brown University’s board rebuffs proposal for divestment

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Brown University’s governing body voted this week to reject a petition from students requesting that the college divest from companies that facilitate “the Israeli occupation of Palestinian Territory.”
The decision caps off months of anticipation after the Ivy League school’s administrators distinguished their handling of student protests in the spring by agreeing to put the issue to a vote.
In a letter explaining the move, the Corporation of Brown University cited a report from the independent Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, which concluded that the Rhode Island university “has no direct investments in any of the companies targeted for divestment.”
Additionally, the advisory committee found that “any indirect exposure for Brown in these companies is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm.”
Last spring, dozens of students who camped out on Brown’s campus green for a week agreed to clear their encampment in exchange for the vote on divestment.
They asked the university to divest from 10 specific companies, including prominent defense contractors: Airbus, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola Solutions, Northrop Grumman, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon and United Technologies), Textron, Safariland and Volvo Group (AB Volvo).
Before making its decision this month, Brown University’s corporation “discussed the broader issue of whether taking a stance on a geopolitical issue through divestment is consistent with Brown’s mission of education and scholarship,” according to an open letter to the campus community from the corporation’s chancellor, Brian T. Moynihan, and the university’s president, Christina H. Paxson.
Ultimately, administrators decided Brown’s mission is not “to adjudicate or resolve global conflict.”
Divestment would hurt the university because “it would signal to our students and scholars that there are ‘approved’ points of view to which members of the community are expected to conform,” Moynihan and Paxson’s letter states.
In the past, Brown took steps to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa, with tobacco manufacturers and with companies facilitating genocide in Darfur, the advisory committee’s report notes.
“It is indisputable that grave harm is occurring in the Palestinian territories and Israel as a result of this conflict,” the report says. “However, by a vote of 8-to-2, with one member in abstention, the Committee finds that the investment of Brown University resources in the ten companies does not directly contribute to this harm, and the Committee therefore does not recommend divestment.”
Approximately 1% of Brown’s endowment may be indirectly invested in the 10 companies through external investment managers, the board found. That amounts to “nine-thousandths of one percent” of those companies’ value, according to the report.