Brown faces an identity crisis.
On one hand, it proudly promotes itself as a socially aware institution committed to addressing injustice. All first-year students read an expanded edition of the 2006 Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice. Tour guides are expected to promote the Open Curriculum, the Brown Center for Students of Color, need-blind admissions and many other institutional commitments won by generations of student activism and civil disobedience. In the past, these commitments to justice have extended to our university’s finances. Former University President Ruth Simmons praised Brown’s 2006 decision to divest from Sudan, writing “this is a critically important and strong statement by the University community.”
On the other hand, the present administration remains silent on the subject of the ongoing apartheid regime and genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the Israeli state, hiding behind the shield of “institutional neutrality” to justify their inaction. Clothed in the staid rhetoric of responsibility and academic freedom, the doctrine of “institutional neutrality” masks an ugly truth; a Brown committed to, in the President Paxson’s words, not “tak[ing] sides on contested geopolitical issues” would never have divested from apartheid in South Africa or genocide in Sudan.
The current emergency in Gaza thus throws into sharp relief the systemic problem with the Paxson administration’s financial ethics. Every Brunonian of conscience should be distressed by the idea of a categorically “neutral” endowment. In the face of crimes against humanity enabled by U.S. government policy and private investment, it is worth remembering our school’s proud tradition of taking a stance. We must take up our own legacy and reject the self-serving logic underlying the present administration’s policy of “institutional neutrality.”
Historically, Brown has acknowledged its obligation to stand against instances of genocide and apartheid by using its endowment as a tool to take a public position against companies that profit from human rights violations. The 1987 Campus Committee on South Africa (the predecessor of Brown’s long-standing investment ethics committee) recommended Brown divest from companies operating in South Africa, writing that “communities which value democracy and human freedom are called upon to do what they can to support these values … the moral ideas underlying our university seem to us to require that we manage our financial resources in ways that are consistent with those moral standards.”
The Brown Corporation’s own committee concurred, writing that “whether apartheid should be opposed is not the issue; we all oppose it … so far, the Corporation has decided that as a matter of conscience it does not wish to be a shareholder in any company having employees in South Africa that does not observe the Sullivan principles.”
Similarly, Brown’s 2006 Slavery and Justice Report notes that given our institution’s past complicity with the slave trade, “the University has a special obligation to ensure that it does not profit from” any “forms of gross injustice” — including apartheid and genocide.
In the face of calls by hundreds of student protestors to publicly express our community’s disapproval of the Israeli state’s crimes against humanity, President Christina Paxson has offered yet another committee review. She argues the first divestment recommendation produced by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies in 2020 and supplemented by activists this January was not sufficient because it was still clearly aimed at “taking a position.” However, after a decade of an administration where no divestment recommendation, from coal to Palestine, has cleared the Paxson administration’s impossibly high bar for divestment, it’s no wonder that myself and many others view the committee report process as a stalling tactic to avoid the urgent action Gaza demands of us.
The practical consequences of institutional neutrality — silence in the face of genocide and apartheid — should be sufficiently damning. Equally important, the president and her supporters’ arguments in favor of the institutional neutrality standard regarding the Palestine question also fail to stand up to scrutiny.
As columnist Tas Rahman ’26 has previously written, the justification for institutional neutrality traces back to the Vietnam War-era Kalven Report. The central claim of its authors is that universities should serve “the limited … purposes of teaching and research” and that they cannot take a political stance lest it inhibit “freedom of dissent” by reducing a polyphonic community of scholars into a single position.
Yet even the Kalven Report placed limits on neutrality, as Rahman correctly noted. Divestment falls under the category of university activities described in the report where a school has no choice but to act in a “corporate capacity.” In other words, despite being a community consisting of many different scholars with diverse, contradictory opinions, not all these opinions can be simultaneously reflected in a university's investment philosophy. Therefore, institutional action should be taken “in the exceptional instance” that such investments are so “incompatible with paramount social values as to require careful assessment of the consequences.” Even if we grant the dubious proposition that divestment would somehow impact the academic freedom of students who support political Zionism, how can President Paxson then justify ignoring the impact on Palestinian students’ academic freedom every day the investment office remains allowed to invest in companies profiting from violence against these students’ communities? Unlike the content of speech or work by an individual student or faculty member, it is not structurally possible for the University to take a neutral position on the endowment’s management.
The University must have a fair, accountable and democratic mechanism for determining the appropriate stances to take in terms of its investment practices. Once supporters of institutional neutrality concede the endowment is fair game for taking political stances, they still claim it is a matter of “open debate” amongst our community about whether Israel’s crimes against humanity constitute an “exceptional” enough instance to warrant divestment intervention.
It is easy in hindsight to say that everyone supported divestment from South Africa. But in 1987, there were also prominent voices of dissent — angry letters from alums filled former University President Howard Swearer’s mailbox, now available in the John Hay Library archives. For South Africa, a supermajority undergraduate referendum, a faculty resolution and a campus committee report were considered sufficient to constitute consensus on campus. Similarly, the present divestment movement has won comparable referendums* and garnered hundreds of faculty, staff and alumni signatures.** Students have held rally after rally, risked arrest and conducted the nation’s largest hunger strike for Palestine, all for divestment. A recent BDH poll found just 14% of students disapprove of divestment while 67% approve, and every incoming member of the UCS cabinet has pledged to advocate for it. Until supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza can win supermajority referendums or convince the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management to rescind the 2020 ACCRIP report, the debate has been decided definitively in favor of divestment. The Corporation has a duty to respect the Brown community’s wishes to not profit from the Israeli state’s crimes against humanity.
By upholding a deeply conservative vision of “institutional neutrality” that effectively precludes any divestment action, President Paxson and the Brown Corporation purposefully discard an important means of using institutional power to address grave human rights violations, particularly those supported by our nation’s government and large corporations. President Paxson looks at the horrific violence unfolding in Palestine, violence that has not spared the Brown community, and says “we are powerless to do everything we’d like to do.” But Brown is only powerless because the Paxson administration has chosen to be.
Our university’s proud tradition of divestment shows how President Paxson’s “neutral” response to Gaza is not conduct becoming of a Brown leader. We are now faced with the responsibility to oppose our nation’s support of the Israeli state’s crimes against humanity. As a community dedicated to honest and rigorous thought for the common good, we cannot stand for the self-serving, intellectually bankrupt excuse of “institutional neutrality.”
Brown’s leadership once understood this. As Brown Trustee and Rhode Island’s first Jewish Governor Frank Licht wrote,
“Brown is a powerful institution. What it has to say is heard in the office of the President of the United States and in the halls of Congress. What we have to say is heard among all the colleges and universities of the United States and what we have to say is heard in South Africa … Unwillingness to yield, unwillingness to take a lead, willingness to follow those who are tentative and timid — these are not the ways to solve this brutal problem”
Students, faculty, staff and alumni must hold the president and the Corporation accountable to the standard set by Governor Licht, President Simmons and other Brown leaders who found the courage to use divestment to take a stand against apartheid and genocide.
*In fact, the 2019 UCS referendum on Israel divestment received more yes votes proportionate to the total student body (1,939 out of 9954) than South Africa did (~1000/7000).
**Over 250 faculty and staff signed a recent letter calling for the university administration to consider divestment. At over 1500 signatories, the alumni letter in support of divestment garnered almost twice the number of signatures compared to the “Letter in Support of Israel”, signed by 826 alumni and 161 current students.
Eli Grossman '24 can be reached at eli_grossman@brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com
