Tobacco, prisons or coal: Columbia University’s investment red lines do not include Israel

When on the morning of Wednesday, April 17, a group of students from Columbia University (New York) set up a web of tents in one of the central gardens of the campus, they did so willing to stay until the university parted with the money they has invested in “companies and institutions that benefit from the apartheid, the Israeli genocide and occupation in Palestine,” according to the organizers. The slogan chanted in the protests that immediately broke out on campus—and that caught fire in universities across the country after the police evicted the camp a day later—was basically one word: divest, divest; In practice, getting rid of part of a portfolio of 13.6 billion dollars (more than 12.6 billion euros) that is managed by an investment fund of the university itself.

The moment could not have been more opportune. After almost seven months of war in the Gaza Strip, and in the midst of a Republican offensive against companies that invest with sustainable criteria (ESG), considering them an exercise in progressive activism, the students involved in kufiyas (the Palestinian scarf) brought out the colors of the elitist Ivy League university (the organization that brings together the eight most prestigious and most expensive universities in the United States), where tuition costs around $70,000, pointing the finger at opaque interests. Always one step further than their peers on other campuses, they also demanded the total withdrawal of investments linked to Israel, not only from companies related to the defense sector.

It might seem that the pro-Palestinian students’ initiative stems from the global campaign called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, but it would be more correct to say the opposite. Similar initiatives, arising from other moments of unrest on campus, support a tradition that dates back to 1985, when a massive mobilization against the South Africa of the apartheid forced Columbia’s board of directors to withdraw its investments from companies linked to the racist Pretoria regime, such as Coca-Cola, Chevron, Ford and American Express. The total value of the shares he disposed of then amounted to approximately 4% of the portfolio. Berkeley and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, followed suit.

Since then, Columbia has drawn five very clear red lines, five areas in which it refrains from investing: tobacco, private prisons – which are the majority in the US -, thermal coal, Sudan and fossil fuels, in decisions adopted one after another throughout the last decade. The New York university has set the standard for other American educational institutions in ending controversial investments, almost always due to the combined pressure of its students, professors and alumni. But this time the case is very different: many large donors, those who pay for the expensive maintenance of faculties and centers, are Jews, and not a few have threatened to withdraw their contributions if the pro-Palestinian protests are not put to an end, as they have been doing since that the debate on anti-Semitism on campuses put the rectorates on the ropes.

“We build on the legacy of decades of students who have called for freedom, liberation, equality and the end of systems of apartheid all over the world… for all oppressed peoples,” Catherine Elias, organizer of the protests, explained to CNN this week. Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), a coalition of student groups also driving the protests, has also identified a number of investors with whom it wants the university to sever ties. Among them are BlackRock, the asset management giant; Airbnb, which has offered rentals in the occupied West Bank; Caterpillar, whose excavators Israel has used to demolish Palestinian homes, and Google, for Project Nimbus, which provides artificial intelligence services to Israel. In February, two months before the protests, the university made it clear that it had no intention of canceling those ties.

Finances in the key of activism

Except with respect to Israel, the investment of the endowment (university financial endowment) of Columbia can also be read in terms of activism. In 2006, the university’s student-led Sudan Divestment Task Force lobbied the rectorate over human rights violations in Darfur. The advisory committee on socially responsible investments, which had been created in 2000, then approved divesting from 18 companies doing business in the African country. Since 2008, it has also cut its investments in the tobacco industry, in the United States and abroad.

A step further in socially respectable investment was the withdrawal of 10 million dollars, in 2015, from CCA and G4S, two companies that, respectively, manage private prisons in the United States and provide technology and security to these types of centers throughout the world. Pressure from Columbia Prison Divest, another student-led group, convinced the board of trustees of the university, which was the first in the United States to divest from a sector enthusiastically defended by Donald Trump. “I support this recommendation, which represents the culmination of careful analysis and hard work by the advisory committee [de inversiones responsables] and our students, teachers and alumni“, welcomed the measure by Leo Bollinger, who was rector at the time.

In 2016, climate activists at the university went on week-long hunger strikes in addition to incessant sit-ins outside the chancellor’s office. A year later, Columbia committed to divest from thermal coal and, in January 2020, announced a new policy of no investment in oil and gas companies. “The urgency and importance of climate change requires Columbia to do everything we can to support and accelerate the transition, including investments in companies with credible plans and actions to transition the economy from fossil fuels to zero-emission energy sources.” net,” the responsible investment committee announced in November 2020.

For some experts, institutional divestment is much less powerful than corporate divestment, when companies stop doing business in or with a country, as happened with South Africa in the 1990s. apartheid. Even if the rectorates acceded to the student demands—Columbia, as dependent as the rest of the Ivy League universities on its donors, has instead offered as a gesture of goodwill to finance health and education projects in Gaza—the The impact of the measure would not have an immediate effect, but rather a symbolic one. The repression of campuses from coast to coast in the United States does not help to appease their demands either.

Columbia, like most private centers, keeps most of its financial information secret, the portal reported this week Axios. Its trustees publish annual financial reports, which include investment performance and asset class allocation, but do not detail specific investments, such as stocks and private equity funds, much less their geographies. In short, divestment appears to be for the moment more of a rhetorical demand by those seeking an end to the war than a pragmatic strategy to help achieve it. The long history of student activism, from Vietnam to Gaza, seems to have struck a chord in everything related to Israel, with the approval of politicians of both stripes.

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