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CNN
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One of the main demands of Columbia University's pro-Palestinian student group over the past week has been for the university to divest investment funds from companies it says are profiting from Israel's military actions in Gaza.
Columbia University's endowment is worth $13.6 billion and is managed by a university-owned investment firm.
Requests from Columbia University Apartheid Divest, a coalition of student organizations supporting the movement, include stripping donations from several weapons manufacturers and high-tech companies that do business with the Israeli government. There is. The group says these companies profit “from Israel's apartheid, genocide and military occupation of Palestine.” Israel denies the charges of genocide.
This is not the first time such a request has been made. Columbia University has been involved in his now-famous 1968 hunger strikes over issues ranging from student takeovers of multiple campus buildings to raise awareness of the Vietnam War to the university's expansion into upper Manhattan. There is a history of student movements.
And student protesters have a history of pushing for the sale of Columbia University's stock. with different movements.
In 2000, the university established an Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investments, made up of students, faculty and alumni, to provide feedback to Columbia’s endowment investment managers, and 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 divest from Israel-related investments, but has not yet been successful. Students at Columbia University, the university's undergraduate school, voted last week to support the proposed sale.
And students continue to urge universities to adopt the proposal.
“We build on the decades-long legacy of students around the world who seek freedom, liberation, equality, and an end to the apartheid system for all oppressed peoples,” Columbia University said. student organizer Katherine Elias told CNN earlier this week.
Currently, the Colombian government has identified five areas in which it will refrain from investment: tobacco, private prison operations, thermal coal, Sudan, and fossil fuels, all decisions made in the past 10 years. But the history of school sales goes back even further.
In the 1980s, a group of Columbia University students began demanding that the school sever financial ties with companies operating in South Africa, citing the school's apartheid racial segregation policies.
Daniel Armstrong, who founded the South African Free Federation as a Columbia University student in the early 1980s and now runs a mentoring business in Los Angeles, said the initiative started with flyers and guest speakers, but over the years has grown. He said he was growing up.
Students “started to understand that this was not a strange position to be in,” Armstrong told CNN. “Then our student newspaper started supporting it, which I thought was a big step in terms of legitimizing the call for divestment.”
In 1983, Columbia University's student senate approved a divestment move with near-unanimous support, but university trustees said no.
In April 1985, students led a three-week demonstration against Columbia University's investment in South Africa, The New York Times reported at the time. During the demonstration, approximately 150 students blocked entry to campus buildings.
Frankie Ziss/AP
Pete Seeger (right) speaks to the crowd at Columbia University on April 8, 1985, as hundreds of students continue to protest the university's ties to South Africa. The protest was against the university's investments in South Africa.
A few months after the protests, the board voted to sell most of Columbia's shares in American companies operating in South Africa. It includes an extensive list of investments in notable companies, including American Express, Chevron, Ford, Coca-Cola, and others, with a combined stake of $39 million, more than Columbia's entire portfolio. The New York Times reported that it accounted for about 4% of the total.
Columbia University became the first Ivy League university to pull out of South Africa, and a variety of other universities followed suit, including the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Apartheid in South Africa ended in his early 1990s.
Since then, student activists have successfully pushed Columbia University to withdraw from several other fields.
Columbia University became the first U.S. university to divest from a private prison company in 2015 after more than a year of student activism that raised concerns about human rights abuses. The university sold its stake in G4S, the world's largest private security company, and Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the United States.
In 2019, a group of Columbia University students affiliated with the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion launched an initiative to encourage the university to go beyond its previous commitments to divest from thermal coal and divest from all fossil fuels. They went on a week-long hunger strike at the library.
Carla Ann Court/NurPhoto/Getty Images
In October 2019, students and activists occupied Columbia University's Law Memorial Library in New York, urging staff and alumni to take concrete action to address the looming climate crisis.
Despite pushback from university leaders in the months that followed, the group submitted a formal sale proposal to the Socially Responsible Investment Committee.
“People criticize the divestment goal for using it to their advantage, because it's a symbolic goal, and if the university divests, someone else will just buy those same shares,” said Savannah Pearson, who participated in the 2019 hunger strike as an undergraduate at Columbia. But she said “symbols have a lot of power, and they can inspire other schools to do the same.”
The fossil fuel divestment proposal was approved by Columbia's 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, which eventually led to similar efforts at other Ivy League universities.
“A small group of students can transform a university like Columbia, but they can't do it without support and buy-in from the broader community,” said Michael Cusack, a 2019 graduate student at Columbia University's Teachers College who helped write the group's proposal.
