Brown University faces fresh pressure from student activists to divest Israeli firms
A group of Israel-bashing activists are plotting to pressure Brown University into divesting from firms they accuse of being “complicit in human rights abuses” against Palestinians.
Hard-left student campaigners want the university’s board of trustees, chaired by Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, to cut ties with companies they claim are “profiting from the genocide in Gaza.”
The students want Brown’s $6 billion endowment fund to exit any positions with as many as 10 companies such as Airbus, Volvo and Boeing and end the school’s alleged “complicity in the oppression of Palestinians.”
They are also demanding a comprehensive screening procedure for any future investments.
“The question of divestment has brought to the forefront strong and contrasting views, and the vote this fall will bring clarity to an issue of sustained interest to many members of our community,” said Brian Clark, a Brown University spokesperson. “We cannot speculate on the outcome.”
The Post has also reached out to Jane Dietze, Brown’s chief investment officer, who has presided over a 70% increase in the fund’s value since she took up her post in 2018.
The Brown Divest Coalition struck a deal with college bosses for a vote to be held this October in return for ending the months of pro-Hamas protests that engulfed the Rhode Island campus.
That agreement angered billionaire real estate mogul Barry Sternlicht who paused donations to his alma mater.
“If the vote fails, the students will blame the alumni and other pressure on the board,” Sternlicht told Bloomberg. “And if it succeeds, a great injustice will have been made.”
The Starwood Capital Group CEO, whose father fled Poland before the Holocaust, lambasted Brown president Christina Paxton for backing down, slamming the protesters as “ignorant.”
“It’s to set a chain reaction,” Arman Deendar, a spokesperson for the Brown divestment coalition, told Bloomberg. “Brown divesting, as a highly influential Ivy League private institution, would set a social precedent.”
Rhode Island’s 2016 anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) laws do not apply to private institutions such as Brown University.
Dietze revealed in an interview for the school’s website that only “4% of the endowment that is directly invested by Brown” with the rest being handled by third party managers such as hedge funds or private equity firms.
The anti-Israel protesters have argued that the Ivy League institution should copy its approach from the 1980s to the South African apartheid regime.
“Given today’s realities, it’s not possible to divest the way Brown did in South Africa,” she said.
“In the 1980s, endowments generally owned stocks directly, so if you wanted to sell your shares of, say, Coca-Cola to communicate a desire that Coca-Cola stop doing business in South Africa, that was a simple process.
“Endowments today overwhelmingly invest through external managers,” Dietze added.
The complexity of modern-day endowment investments mean that Brown cannot cash out of certain funds for a number of years.
The endowments are also a key source of financing for major colleges, helping to bankroll university programs or scholarships.
Protests have taken place since the October 7 massacre at other top colleges across America as pro-Palestinian activists try to pressure university leadership into cutting any ties with Israel.
UPenn president Liz Magill and Havard supremo Claudine Gay were forced to resign after a disastrous testimony to Congress in December after they declined to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews would breach school rules.
Columbia University President Minouche Shafik, a member of Britain’s unelected House of Lords, resigned nearly two weeks ago amid criticism of her handling of campus protests over Israel’s war in Gaza.
Shafik, who cited the toll the campus turmoil took on her family, has landed a job advising British Foreign Secretary David Lammy on international development.
