Students in Columbia College voted to support a resolution that ask Columbia to divest from companies that participate in anti-Palestinian oppression in Gaza and the West Bank. While the President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, opposes divestment, the referendum gives pro-Palestinian advocates at Columbia more evidence to present to the university’s Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing (ACSRI) if they eventually make their case for divestment. The vote is seen as another sign that students in the Ivy League are coming around to supporting the goals and aims of the broader Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS).
This moment comes two years after students at Barnard College voted to support a similar resolution presented in a referendum in similar margins to the results of Columbia College’s referendum - in the ballpark of 60%. Barnard has a separate Board of Trustees, and their process is more closely tied to their student government. It was the student government’s expectation that the level of support shown would warrant consideration from the Board of Trustees, but President Sian Beilock declared that the referendum question did not have a clear consensus or direct to Barnard’s mission. Unlike Columbia, there was no other committee to appeal to.
Last December, Brown’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices (ACCRIP) did have a vote approving divestment from “companies identified as facilitating human rights abuses in Palestine.” This followed a referendum that saw 69% of voters approving of a referendum similar to the referendums at Columbia and Barnard, though including a call to “establish a means of implementing financial transparency and student oversight of the University’s investments.” (I highlight this because neither Columbia and Barnard publicize where their endowments are invested in; both referendums used eight corporations as proxies for the sake of the discussion. A list of over 100 companies the United Nations finds involved in activities in the settlements can be found here.) President Christina Paxson also opposed divestment, though according to the Brown Daily Herald recognized that going through the ACCRIP was a valid method forward to evaluate divestment.
Bwog seems to indicate that President Lee Bollinger’s statement against divestment precludes the possibility of that presentation, which I’m not sure is accurate. It would track with the progression of the Barnard referendum, but as I said, Barnard has a separate governance structure than Columbia, which would be more akin to Brown, but to what extent is not clear. Nothing in the statement indicated that ASCRI wouldn’t meet with CUAD, only that the University President, like in Brown, is opposed to the referendum.
The larger debate over the BDS movement in the United States is generally seen as fraught. A week after Brown’s recommendation, the Trump administration passed an executive order interpreting Judaism as a race as well as a religion, according to The New York Times. The order is seen as a tool to enable more intensive investigations of higher education under Title VI over anti-Semitism, which BDS is seen as a harbinger of. The same New York Times article suggested that while Biden could, if elected, reverse the order with the flick of a pen, he might not want to politically. Members of Congress have also told the Department of Education to investigate Yale’s Council for Middle East Studies for connections to the BDS movement, as part of a pattern of targeting programs seen as too anti-Israel.
This…is a really intense debate. The State Department’s definition of anti-Semitism, based on the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, includes as an example of anti-Semitism “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” thereby denying Jewish people the right to self-determination. Critics, which include the original drafter, say that this definition is overbroad, and the application of this overbroad definition in academic spaces suppresses academic freedom. I don’t think this letter is the place to discuss how and if critiques of Israel slip into anti-Semitism, but whether BDS’ anti-Zionism slips into anti-Semitism defines how states and the federal government should respond, and is worth future articles if I can actually find the words for them. I can’t today.