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The student antisemites and cretins (they overlap quite nicely) on American campuses have been calling, chanting, screaming for their universities to engage in a policy of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctioning — known as BDS — of companies doing business with Israel. They huff and they puff, but they haven’t been able to blow that particular house down. Almost all universities that have taken up the matter have rejected demands for BDS, on economic as well as on moral grounds. After all, the endowment fund managers have a fiduciary duty to reduce risk and maximize return. More on this rejection of BDS can be found here: “US Colleges Reject Divestment Proposals Targeting Israel,” by Dion J. Pierre, Algemeiner, September 13, 2024:
American universities are largely rejecting demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering further blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement, which students and faculty pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations to coerce officials into enacting the policy.
“We have a fiduciary responsibility to preserve and grow the endowment, which directly supports the mission of the university,” Chapman University trustee Jim Burra said in a statement issued on Wednesday. “It is important that we make financial decisions based on risk and return.”
Late last month, the University of Minnesota provided similar reasons for not divesting from Israel, citing “fiduciary duty” and the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes the campus community. However, the university adopted a new policy for its investments, a so-called “position of neutrality” which insulates official business from the daily caprices of political opinion.
“For the past several months, we have sought expert analysis and a variety of perspectives on how the university invests its Consolidated Endowment Fund,” Board of Regents chair Janie Mayeron said in a statement. “We have reviewed how this fund operates, how it supports affordable education for students, groundbreaking research, and community engagement, and the possible financial challenges of divestment … In the end, it is clear our community is divided on the topic. After careful consideration of all this input, we believe today’s action honors our fiduciary duty and the long term needs of the university.”
Several weeks earlier, Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees voted against divestment after reviewing a proposal submitted by “Students for a Free Palestine,” a spin-off of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations.
“Accepting this proposal could substantially limit our ability to deliver on Oberlin’s mission, namely, by reducing our financial resources and restricting critical discourse, as described below,” the college said in a statement. “The burden it would impose on Oberlin could be substantial and out of proportion with the direct and indirect impact of divesting.”
Oberlin also explained that divestment would undermine its mission to create a space in which students “express contested views,” adding that adopting the divestment proposal “would be taking a clear institutional stand on one side of a fraught and contested issue that divides the Oberlin community.” It continued, “The board believes that doing so could constrain critical thinking, discourse, and debate on the subject, which would jeopardize the college’s mission.”
Oberlin fears that were it to adopt BDS as its official policy, the BDSers would declare victory, and all further “critical thinking and debate on the subject” — which the university rightly regards as its the university’s core mission — would end. And the university does not want to be seen as “taking a clear institutional stand” on one side of what is a hotly contested matter. Some might argue, however, that in rejecting BDS, the university is taking a side in the matter.
These colleges and universities are not the first to reject divestment from Israel, a core tenet of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate the Jewish state from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
Williams College’s Advisory Committee on Shareholder Responsibility (ACSR) rejected a proposal to divest from weapons manufacturers that sell their products to Israel in May, handing an early and substantial loss to the anti-Zionist movement in the final days of an academic year convulsed by pro-Hamas demonstrations. In addition to ruling out divestment as a possibility, ASCR declined to make itself a permanent standing committee or to recommend adopting controversial Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles which have been pushed by far-left groups aiming to use the market as an accelerator of social change.
ASCR cited a number of reasons why the move would be disadvantageous to the college, including that some of its funds are potentially “commingled.” Divesting from them, it explained, “could have a negative impact on investment performance out of proportion to the negligible impact on the targeted company.” It also said that the anti-Israel activists’ demands were “broad” and target companies such as Boeing, which “not only builds missiles, but also satellite systems and commercial aircraft.”
ASCR added that there is no “shared understanding” among scholars and experts, nor among its own community, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would make divestment from Israel as morally cogent as divesting from South Africa in the 1980s or, more recently, fossil fuels.
In other words, there are a great many people who strongly support Israel, reject the calumnies launched against it, and regard divestment from Israel as rewarding Hamas terrorists.
With all the Sturm-und-Drang on American campuses emanating from the raucous supporters of BDSers, the latter have practically nothing to show for their displays of the screaming meemies. California State at Sacramento and Union Theological Seminary in New York appear to be the only academic institutions, among the hundreds where demands for BDS have been made, that have decided to enforce such a policy, and they may find, once they do so, that anti-BDS legislation runs the risk of violating anti-BDS state laws in both California and New York. President Paxton of Brown has agreed to hear the arguments presented by the BDSers, but that is the extent of her commitment. And she has been warned of possible legal consequences, in a letter from two dozen attorneys-general, if the university decides to enforce BDS. Meanwhile, the pushback against BDS has been ferocious. And it is not only in the universities, but in local and state governments. Nearly three-fourths of states now prohibit their instrumentalities from “contracting with, investing in, or otherwise doing business with entities that discriminate against Israel, Israelis, or those who do business with companies that participate in BDS policies.” And more states are passing anti-BDS laws every month. Don’t be fooled by the anti-Israel chanters on campuses. On hundreds of American campuses, as in Gaza, the pro-Israel side has been relentlessly winning.
Alkflaeda says
The protesters may have shot themselves in the foot by raising the profile of BDS – like mushrooms, anti-Semitic policies flourish most in the dark, and their best option would have been to slip in trustees who would operate BDS without ever giving the real reason for their investment decisions, offsetting the consequent losses with donations from UAE or Saudi Arabia, and thus becoming more dependent on such funders. As it is, if a university’s portfolio goes pear-shaped, one of the first questions that will be asked will be whether there was significant divestment from high performing companies that happen to do business with Israel.
Spurwing Plover says
When t hey go and replace the American Flag with the Flag of another Nation then its time to cut them all off