Brown Rejects Protesters’ Push to Divest Over Israel Ties
The New York Times
The university made a deal with pro-Palestinian students last spring to consider their demands if they ended a protest encampment. But the university board voted against divestment.
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.”
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