The Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies and its successor committee, the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, have historically represented Brown’s commitment to take responsibility for the moral implications of its investment policies. Unfortunately, President Christina Paxson’s administration has systematically undermined the independence and power of the Committee because its original purpose is directly at odds with her conservative policy of “institutional neutrality.” In a final twist of the knife, Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey now calls upon us to respect the judgment of a committee the administration has never respected until it finally rendered their desired verdict: no divestment from Israel and potentially from anywhere, ever.
Carey claims that students no longer trust ACURM because they are “misinformed about the history of ACCRIP’s transition in 2020.” While he writes like a mature adult chiding ignorant students, he omits the long history of struggle between administrators and activists over the independence and power of the committee. As a UCS student representative on the faculty-led working group who helped review the final ACURM charter, I write today to set the record straight.
Carey argues the publicly stated purpose of the ACCRIP-to-ACURM transition was to expand the committee’s responsibility so that its charge included issues such as the naming of buildings and the acceptance of gifts. However, the fine print revealed another possible motive: reducing the committee’s independence. The administration’s original draft motion proposed reduced student and faculty representation so that half of the committee was appointed via processes over which President Paxson had direct control. Carey knows this — he wrote the proposed changes.
Indeed, the working group I served on only formed after a public outcry by divestment activists, a fact Carey conveniently leaves out of his account. Student protest led the changes to be postponed until after the Brown Divest Coalition proposal was evaluated (and eventually endorsed) by ACCRIP, and my working group restored the original representation rules to ensure a student/faculty majority in the new ACURM charter.
However, the administration appears to have found other ways to get the ACURM process to produce the outcome they wanted, this time by gutting the committee’s power to recommend any divestment at all.
The present ACURM committee clearly worked under the impression that their charge puts a new and unreasonably high standard on divestment determinations through its definition of social harm, which reads:
“the harmful impact that the investment or expenditure of University financial resources may have on the University community, consumers, employees, or other persons, or on the human or natural environment.”
Chair James Kellner claimed this definition requires a “causal link” to be demonstrated between the University’s present direct investments and social harm. Given that the Brown endowment is largely invested via third party managers, proving such a link on a company-specific level is nearly impossible. The Committee thus criticized the charge as “overly narrow,” noting
“This is not “harm” as ordinarily understood [...] it is difficult to envision even egregious examples of ordinarily understood harm meeting the definition of “social harm” as required for potential divestment action” (13).
Disturbingly, ACURM describes having made the significant moral decision to limit Brown’s divestment responsibility to just its present direct investments as a matter of procedure, not one of explicit deliberation. They lay the blame for their new limitation on the ACCRIP-ACURM transition process that produced the charge, the very transition that Carey now feels compelled to publicly rehabilitate.
There is something fishy here. A “causal link” test is not the only possible interpretation of the charge’s definition of social harm, nor was it the intent of the faculty-led working group to impose such a drastic limitation. Had that been the case, I would have objected for three main reasons.
First, the working group’s stated goal was to expand, not limit the charge. As ACURM itself noted, imposing a “causal link” test would have represented a profound change from the previous ACCRIP precedent, in which Brown freely took pro-divestment stances despite owning de minimus positions in the offending companies (Sudan – 0/6 companies, Tobacco – 0.2%).
Second, such a strict interpretation of social harm misunderstands the point of divestment. Under such a rule, Brown would only be able to make divestment decisions after investing in companies that contribute to social harm rather than rejecting that investment in the first place. Divestment policies are just as much about what the University chooses not to consider for future investment as they are about what the University presently owns. Hence, the charge defines social harm in terms of the possible negative impact Brown’s investment strategy might or “may have” as opposed to solely the impact present investments “currently have on” or “cause to” various stakeholders.
Finally, given the opaque and ever-changing nature of the Brown endowment, community members are unable to gather or verify the evidence required to craft a proposal that would ever pass such a test. ACURM deliberations should be about setting investment norms for the investment office and their managers, not evaluating present endowment holdings.
Any divestment consideration is a decision on the parameters of Brown’s moral responsibility to the world, not simply a determination of social harm and a calculation of financial impact. The threshold for the University’s divestment actions should be a matter of open debate for our community. President Paxson favors a narrow definition of our community’s responsibility to respond to social harm and how it relates to Brown’s investment practices. Past Brown leaders in her place – such as President Simmons — took a different approach. The clear super-majority of the Brown community believes a genocide bankrolled by the American government and some of its largest corporations puts an onus on all of us to make it clear we do not stand for such horrific, illegal crimes against humanity. They believe there can be no “business-as-usual” attitude when your nation is funding a genocide.
So, the decision to adhere to a narrow interpretation of social harm under the bounds of “institutional neutrality” was not one made by our working group or by any other community-based deliberative process. It occurred mysteriously by fiat with the latest ACURM divestment decision.
We may never know why Kellner and the Committee came to believe they needed to use this strict “causal link” test. But we do know that Paxson refused to respect shared governance on this issue in 2020 when she did not forward ACCRIP’s pro-divestment recommendation to the Corporation for a vote, only respecting the process when it suited her aims. We do know she took the student divest proposal – which has comprehensive recommendations for engaging with Brown’s complex indirect investments – and narrowed it against the students’ wishes to the question of direct divestment from just ten companies. Following the example of Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), these companies were named as targeted examples we should ensure Brown or its managers never invests in; students never claimed Brown had significant present investments in these companies. But Paxson set the students up to look like they were just being silly and asking Brown to sell stocks it doesn’t have.
Carey’s op-ed is just the latest example of how the Paxson administration uses every measure available, from Providence police to performative committees to gaslighting op-eds, in order to force community members to accept a morally reprehensible vision of a “neutral” Brown.
Mr. Carey, students are not “misinformed.” On the contrary, they know you and President Paxson all too well.
Eli Grossman ’24 can be reached at eli_grossman@alumni.brown.edu. Please send responses to this op-ed to letters@browndailyherald.com and other opinions to opinions@browndailyherald.com
