As protests against Israel’s war on Gaza grow louder on college campuses across the United States, one central demand is taking center stage: divestment. Students and teachers taking part in the protests insist that their universities stop all funding and investments linked to Israel.
At the center of the protests is New York’s Columbia University, an Ivy League institution that has a decades-long history of student activism on campus.
And while no two protests are the same, the university also has a long history of leading U.S. educational institutions in ending controversial investments — often under pressure from their student, faculty and alumni communities.
What does it mean for Colombia to secede from Israel?
The underlying goal of any divestiture is to reallocate the university’s endowment funds to focus on investments viewed as more ethically sound, while using that money to encourage governments and other institutions to change their policies .
Columbia has a $13.6 billion endowment fund. Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of campus groups that is among the organizers of the current protests, has identified a number of investors with whom the university should cut ties. These include BlackRock, the asset management giant; Airbnb, which has offered accommodation in the occupied West Bank; Caterpillar, whose bulldozer Israel has used; and Google, which faced protests from employees over Project Nimbus, which provides artificial intelligence services to Israel.
These investments represent an almost negligible amount of Colombia’s endowment funds, but in February the university made clear that it had no intention of divesting from companies tied to Israel.
Still, the university has often been a leader among top U.S. schools in the past when it comes to disposing of controversial investments.
Abandonment of apartheid in South Africa
In 1985, students successfully pressured Columbia to divest from a number of large companies operating in apartheid South Africa.
After weeks of demonstrations, university authorities gave in and pulled out of companies like Coca-Cola, Chevron, Ford and American Express. The total value of shares sold by Columbia was about 4 percent of the university’s portfolio.
A number of universities followed suit, from the University of California at Berkeley to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
South Africa finally held its first democratic elections in 1994, when the African National Congress under the leadership of Nelson Mandela came to power, ending decades of white rule over a majority-black country.
When Colombia took a stand on Sudan
In 2006, Columbia University’s Sudan Divestment Task Force, a student-run organization, pressured the university to withdraw from Sudan due to human rights abuses in the western Darfur region.
Columbia University’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI), an advisory body founded in 2000 to advise university trustees on ethical and social issues, has committed to divest from 18 companies doing business in Sudan.
smoking prohibited
Since 2008, Columbia has also stopped investing in tobacco-related companies.
The university maintains a list of these companies – both American and global – in which Columbia is prohibited from investing.
The list includes US companies that produce tobacco or tobacco products. When it comes to foreign companies, the list also includes companies that are active in the distribution of tobacco and tobacco products.
Private prisons are taboo
In 2015, pressure from Columbia Prison Divest, a student-led group that advocates for the divestment of private prisons, led Columbia’s board of trustees to withdraw $10 million from Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and G4S.
CCA operates for-profit prisons throughout the United States, and G4S supplies technology and security personnel to these facilities worldwide.
As with apartheid-related divestments in South Africa, Columbia was the first U.S. university to withdraw from the prisons there.
Lee Bollinger, Columbia’s then-president, supported ACSRI’s demand that the university “divest any direct interest in companies that operate private prisons and make no follow-on investments in such companies.”
“I support this recommendation, which is the culmination of careful analysis and hard work by ACSRI and our students, faculty and alumni,” Bollinger said.
Hunger strikes lead to divestment from fossil fuels
In 2016, Sunrise Columbia, a coalition of climate activists at Columbia University, stepped up its campaign to get the institution to divest from fossil fuels. These protests eventually included week-long hunger strikes and sit-ins outside Bollinger’s office.
In 2017, Columbia pledged to divest from thermal coal, and in January 2020 the company announced a no-investment policy for oil and gas companies.
In a November 2020 statement, Colombia’s ACSRI said: “The urgency and importance of climate change requires that Colombia do everything in its power to support and accelerate the transition, including investing in companies with credible transition plans and actions “Economy from fossil fuels to the grid.” -No greenhouse gas emissions [greenhouse gas-emitting] energy sources.”