Around noon on Wednesday Oct. 9, students at the University received an email from Chancellor Brian Moynihan ’81 P’14 P’19 and President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 detailing the culmination of the University’s battle against the student divestment movement. As is so often the case with Brown’s unaccountable bureaucracy, what many on campus anticipated as a climactic announcement following the Corporation’s annual meeting was instead abruptly communicated via email. To the surprise and shock of many, the Corporation secretly convened a week early — which has no recorded precedent at Brown — and a majority voted to endorse a University report which recommended against divestment. This vote not only disregards the previously well-established social harm occurring in Palestine but sets a new precedent where divestment from any entity becomes impossible. Contrary to its intended outcome, the Corporation’s decision demonstrates the need for student and community advocacy which will persist so long as the University remains complicit in the unfolding atrocities.
To contextualize the controversy over the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management’s report, it is important to first understand the history of divestment advocacy at Brown. Since the culmination of student organizing against racist admissions policies during the 1968 walkout, student activism at Brown has centered around campaigns that organized against the unwillingness of the administration to meaningfully correct the University’s moral failures — everything from its refusal to hire more Black faculty (1992) to its insistence on profiting from investment in coal companies (2013). At a university that was endowed with the profits of the slave trade and enriched by investments in injustice, it is no wonder why student movements have been forced to use divestment as a central plank in the fight to correct this insistence on profiting from exploitation and death. In 1985, Brown University students from diverse backgrounds protested the University's investment in companies operating under South Africa's apartheid regime. Their large-scale demonstrations led the Brown Corporation to vote for full divestment within a year if companies didn't comply with the Sullivan Principles. While Brown partially divested, students resumed protests, including hunger strikes and shantytown encampments, until the University fully divested in 1987.
Though it took years of unyielding student pressure, the University divested from the South African apartheid, even though its total investment in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa was miniscule. Now, faced with apartheid, genocide and occupation facilitated by its investments — the restrictions Paxson placed on ACURM, the committee which recommended against divestment, have prevented Brown from meeting its obligation to reject profit from gross injustice.
ACURM was set up to fail. In 2020, the University was on track to divest within its direct and indirect holdings — with ACURM’s predecessor recommending “Divestment from Companies that Facilitate the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territory.” The companies identified in this report were nearly identical to those listed in the Brown Divest Coalition's 2024 Critical Edition Report, and the 2020 divestment decision came three full years before the beginning of the genocide in Gaza — meaning that less aggregate social harm compelled the University to recommend divestment in 2020 than today.
Despite the gravity of the injustice at hand, Paxson rejected the 2020 proposal and dissolved the body, ending a 42-year-old community advisory forum for divestment proposals. She replaced it with ACURM, an advisory board endowed with much narrower criteria, only recommending divestment “when such actions will likely have a positive impact toward correcting the specified social harm.” This new charge is a deceptive instrument designed to absolve the University of the responsibility of divesting. This standard’s ridiculousness becomes most clear when applied to previous divestment decisions: For example, if the University Sudan divestment action did not immediately compel Janjaweed officers to stop killing Darfur’s children, by ACURM’s charge, the University would not have been required to divest.
Divestment carried out within one institution like Brown does not immediately influence actors on the ground. Instead, it sets a precedent for other institutions to follow. Most importantly, it communicates that the University will refuse any financial ties to social harms — including apartheid, genocide and occupation.
As one of the students who presented the divestment proposal to ACURM, my peers and I drew on Brown’s previous divestment actions, particularly from Sudan, which was a clear example of the proliferative effect of ‘symbolic’ divestment. Brown was the sixth university in the nation to take such action, and 61 universities followed. Two years later, Congress passed the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act. But ACURM failed to acknowledge the precedent of divestment’s impact, as outlined in Section 4 of its report. Instead, ACURM chose to ask if Brown’s divestment was so immediately significant as to singlehandedly curtail the genocide in Gaza: asking the wrong question, to which the committee answered no.
This narrow definition of social harm begs the question of whether previous divestments—such as from South Africa, Sudan, and tobacco—would have met ACURM's criteria for social harm. Had the committee existed at the time, the answer would likely have been a resounding no.
Another reason for ACURM to reject divestment was the extent to which Brown’s endowment was indirectly invested in the social harm occurring in occupied Palestine. According to the committee, Brown’s exposure to the 10 companies identified in the divestment proposal is equivalent to less than 1% of the University's endowment, or up to approximately $66 million.. Similarly, Brown’s investment in companies complicit in the injustices that occurred in Sudan and South Africa were also minuscule, yet their mere existence compelled divestiture as it was contrary to the values of Brown. Should the human suffering of Palestinians be any different? Is the existence of Palestinians like myself and our experience of occupation and apartheid too much of a liability that the University must continue to remain invested in the very companies that aid and abet such conditions?
The social harm that ACURM and the Corporation deemed insignificant has only expanded and worsened. As of this writing, over 1 million Lebanese have been displaced by Israeli airstrikes, while Palestinians in northern Gaza remain besieged in their homes, with dozens reportedly killed while attempting to flee—a situation many analysts have described as part of a deliberate effort to depopulate the area of civilians.
Still, the Corporation’s decision to not divest is by no means a defeat. If anything, it shows that the plight of the Palestinian people, my people, is not to be ignored. Last fall, this administration alongside other universities was quick to release a statement condemning the Oct. 7th attacks while paying lip service to the devastation that Israel brought upon our communities. The denial of Palestinians is nothing new. I have faced numerous uncomfortable discussions on campus with people denying the existence of Palestinians or making racist remarks about how we were all “taught to hate.” At the same time, this past year has given me and other Palestinian students on campus hope. Our pleas did not fall on deaf ears and undergraduate, graduate, and faculty have shown up to support us. Through nearly a year of struggle,Our grievances with Brown University — its shallowness and suppression of Palestinian liberation — are ongoing, but so too is our resistance. Undergraduates, graduates, and faculty are all privileged to be a part of Brown. We have not abandoned our mission to serve our community and pursue justice regardless of what actions the administration and Corporation take to curtail it.
Aboud Ashhab ’25 can be reached at aboud_ashhab@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
