new york
CNN
—
One of the main demands made by a pro-Palestinian student group at Columbia University over the past week is for the university to divest from companies that profit from Israel's military action in Gaza.
Columbia University's endowment is worth $13.6 billion and is managed by a university-owned investment company.
Demands from Columbia University's Divestment from Apartheid, the coalition of student groups behind the movement, include divesting funding from several arms manufacturers and tech companies that do business with the Israeli government, which it says profit from “Israeli apartheid, genocide, and military occupation of Palestine.” Israel denies the genocide charges.
This is not the first time such demands have been made: Columbia has a history of student activism, from the famous 1968 student occupation of several campus buildings to raise awareness of the Vietnam War, to hunger strikes over issues like the university's expansion into Upper Manhattan.
Protesting students have a history of forcing Columbia to divest. With different movements.
In 2000, the university established an Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investment, comprised of students, faculty, and alumni, to provide feedback to managers of Columbia's endowment investments, and the committee has a formal process for submitting divestment proposals.
Columbia University's Apartheid Divestment Group formally proposed Israel-related divestment to the committee in December but has not yet succeeded. Students at Columbia College, the university's undergraduate school, voted last week in support of the divestment proposal.
And students continue to call for the university to adopt the proposal.
“We are continuing a decades-long tradition of students calling for freedom, liberation, equality and an end to the apartheid system for oppressed people around the world,” Catherine Elias, a student organizer at Columbia University, told CNN earlier this week.
Columbia University currently lists five areas in which it will divest — tobacco, private prison operations, thermal coal, Sudan and fossil fuels — all decisions made in the past decade, but the university's history of divestment goes back much further.
In the 1980s, a group of Columbia University students began calling for the university to cut financial ties with companies doing business in South Africa, citing apartheid's racial segregation policies.
Daniel Armstrong, who founded the South African Freedom Coalition as a Columbia University student in the early 1980s and now runs a mentoring business in Los Angeles, said the effort started with flyers and guest speakers but expanded over the years.
“Students started to realize that this wasn't a crazy position to take, and then our student newspaper started supporting it. I thought that was a big step in legitimizing the demands for divestment,” Armstrong told CNN.
In 1983, Columbia University's Student Senate nearly unanimously approved a move to divest, but the university's Board of Trustees opposed it.
In April 1985, student protests against Columbia University's investment in South Africa lasted for three weeks, The New York Times reported at the time. Around 150 students took part in the protests, blocking entrances to campus buildings.
A few months after the protest, the board voted to sell most of Columbia's stakes in U.S. companies operating in South Africa, including a number of big-name investments in American Express, Chevron, Ford and Coca-Cola, for a total stake of $39 million, or about 4% of Columbia's total portfolio, according to The New York Times.
Columbia University was the first Ivy League university to divest from South Africa, and many others, including the University of California, Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed suit after apartheid in South Africa ended in the early 1990s.
Since then, student activists have successfully forced Columbia to divest from several other areas.
In 2015, Columbia University became the first US university to divest from private prison companies after more than a year of student protests raising 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 prison company in the US.
In 2019, a group of Columbia University students affiliated with the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion staged a week-long hunger strike in the library to pressure the university to go beyond its previous commitments to divest from coal-fired power and end funding for all fossil fuels.
Despite some pushback from university leaders in the months that followed, the group submitted a formal divestment proposal to the Committee on Socially Responsible Investment.
“They've been criticized for exploiting the divestment goal because it's a symbolic goal, and if a university divests, someone else will just buy the same stock,” said Savannah Pearson, who participated in a hunger strike in 2019 as an undergraduate at Columbia University. But, she said, “symbols are powerful, and they can inspire other universities to do the same.”
The fossil fuel divestment proposal was approved by Columbia University'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.” Student support followed Columbia's announcement, and eventually other Ivy League universities made similar pledges.
“A small group of students can transform an institution like Columbia, but they can't do it without support and buy-in from the broader community,” said Michael Cusack, who helped write the group's proposal as a graduate student at Columbia University's Teachers College in 2019.
