(CNN) — One of the main demands this past week by pro-Palestinian student groups at Columbia University has been that the school remove investment funds from what they describe as companies profiting from Israel’s military action in Gaza.
Columbia’s endowment is worth $13.6 billion and is managed by an investment firm owned by the university.
The request from Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student groups behind the movement, includes, among other measures, divesting funds from several weapons manufacturers and technology companies that do business with the Israeli government. The group has described those companies as benefiting “from apartheid, genocide and the Israeli military occupation of Palestine.” Israel denies accusations of genocide.
This is not the first time such demands have been made. Columbia has a history of student activism, from the now-famous 1968 student occupation of several campus buildings to raise awareness about the Vietnam War, to hunger strikes over issues such as the university’s expansion into Upper Manhattan.
And student protesters also have a history of pushing for Columbia to ditch different movements.
In 2000, the university established a Socially Responsible Investment Advisory Committee, made up of students, faculty and alumni, to provide input to managers of Columbia’s endowment investments. The group has a formal process for submitting divestment proposals.
Columbia University’s Apartheid Divest submitted a formal proposal to the committee in December to withdraw investments related to Israel, which has not yet been successful. Students at Columbia College, the university’s undergraduate school, voted in favor of the divestment proposal last week.
And students continue to push for the university to adopt the proposal.
“We are building on the legacy of decades of students who are called to freedom, liberation, equality and the end of apartheid systems around the world… for all oppressed peoples,” the student organizer of Columbia, Catherine Elias, earlier this week.
Leading a nationwide divestment movement in South Africa
Columbia currently lists five areas in which it refrains from investing: tobacco, private prison operations, thermal coal, Sudan and fossil fuels, all decisions that were made in the last decade. But the school’s history of divestment goes back even further.
In the 1980s, a group of Columbia students began calling on the school to cut financial ties with companies doing business in South Africa because of its apartheid policy of racial segregation.
Daniel Armstrong, who founded the Coalition for a Free South Africa as a Columbia student in the early 1980s and now owns a tutoring business in Los Angeles, said the effort began with fliers and guest speakers, but has grown over the years. following.
The students “started to see that this is not a crazy position,” Armstrong told CNN. “Then our student newspaper started supporting it, which I thought was a big step in terms of legitimizing the demand for divestment.”
In 1983, Columbia’s Student Senate approved the divestment measure with nearly unanimous support, but university administrators said no.
In April 1985, students led a three-week student demonstration against Columbia’s investments in South Africa, the New York Times reported at the time. Around 150 students participated in the demonstration, blocking access to the entrance to a campus building.
Pete Seeger, right, speaks to the crowd at Columbia University as hundreds of students continued to protest the school’s ties to South Africa, April 8, 1985. The protests were against the university’s investments in South Africa. (Credit: Frankie Ziths/AP)
Months after that protest, trustees voted to sell most of Columbia’s shares in American companies that did business in South Africa. That included a long list of investments in notable companies, including American Express, Chevron, Ford and Coca-Cola, among others, which together amounted to $39 million in stock and about 4% of Columbia’s total portfolio, the report reported. New York Times.
Columbia was the first Ivy League university to divest from South Africa, and several other universities followed suit, including the University of California, Berkeley, as well as Johns Hopkins University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. South Africa’s apartheid ended in the early 1990s.
‘Symbols have power’
Since then, student activists have managed to pressure Columbia to divest from several other areas.
In 2015, Columbia became the first American university to divest from private prison companies after a campaign by student activists that lasted more than a year and raised concerns about human rights abuses. The university sold its shares in G4S, the world’s largest private security company, and Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private corrections company in the United States.
In 2019, a group of Columbia students affiliated with the climate activism organization Extinction Rebellion staged a week-long hunger strike at the library to encourage the university to go beyond a previous commitment to divest from thermal coal and defund of all fossil fuels.
Students and activists occupied Columbia University’s Low Memorial Library in October 2019 in New York, urging staff and alumni to take concrete steps to address the looming climate crisis. (Credit: Karla Ann Coté/NurPhoto/Getty Images)
Despite some negative reactions from university leaders in the following months, the group submitted a formal divestment proposal to the socially responsible investment committee.
“People criticized (these movements) for using the divestment target because it’s a symbolic target and if the university divests, someone else will just buy those same shares,” said Savannah Pearson, who participated in the 2019 hunger strike as a student. university. In colombia. But, she said, “symbols have a lot of power…and can inspire other schools to do the same.”
The fossil fuel divestment proposal was approved by the Columbia Board of Trustees in early 2021. The policy includes, among other things, a commitment not to invest in “companies whose primary business is the exploration and production of fossil fuels.” Columbia’s announcement was followed by student advocacy and, eventually, similar commitments at other Ivy League universities.
“A small group of students can transform an institution like Columbia University, but they cannot do it without the support and acceptance of the broader community,” said Michael Cusack, who as a graduate student at Teachers College in Columbia in 2019 helped author of the group’s proposal.
