UPDATE: This story was updated with a clarification at the bottom on 5/4/2024 at 11:10 am
More than ten days into Gaza solidarity encampments at the University of Michigan, the mood in Ann Arbor is tense. But it’s been relatively calm compared to dozens of other campuses where hundreds of protesters have been arrested, with clashes at times becoming violent and some students seizing campus buildings.
Still, on the eve of commencement, protesters say university administrators have “still essentially refused to meet with us to talk about divestment,” said Katya Olson Shipyatsky, a doctoral student in political science, and a co-chair with Jewish Voice for Peace at the University of Michigan. “We are still camping out on the Diag, demanding that the university come talk to us about divesting from weapons manufacturers, and from other like entities that are enabling the genocide in Gaza. And that still has not happened.”
The coalition of students behind the encampments at the University of Michigan is calling for the administration to divest “from any and all companies that…profit off of the human rights violations committed by Israel, and aid in the apartheid system maintained against Palestinians.”
But Michigan’s Board of Regents says divesting in response to Israel’s war in Gaza would violate a “longstanding policy” to “shield the endowment from political pressures.”
Yet student movements have gotten the university to divest in the past. And experts say there are crucial lessons to learn from that history.
Who is calling for divestment now? And why?
The TAHRIR coalition, which describes itself as “90+ student organizations united for Palestinian liberation at the University of Michigan,” including Jewish Voice for Peace, has led the calls for divestment. The Faculty Senate also passed a resolution in January calling on the university “to divest from its financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.”
That campaign is killing tens of thousands of civilians and “more children have been killed in Gaza in recent months than in four years of conflict worldwide,” according to the United Nations. Protesters say any ties the university’s reported $17.9 billion endowment has to that military campaign makes the university complicit in a humanitarian crisis.
TAHRIR’s referendum alleges that “student FOIA requests have revealed previous direct investments in Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and other companies sustaining Israel’s war machine,” and that the “University commits over $6 billion to investment managers who have profited from investments in Israeli companies and/or military contractors.”
Calls to end financial support for Israel aren’t new: the Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) movement has a long history on campus. In 1989, U of M students built a “shantytown” to “symbolize the struggle and oppression of the Palestinian people” on the campus Diag, the same place where encampments are now.
Critics like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) see these efforts as fundamentally antisemitic. “This campaign is pure and simple, aimed at delegitimizing Israel,” said Carolyn Normandin, regional director of ADL Michigan. “Students that are demanding divestment are advocating for Israel to be targeted for a single pariah purpose.” And by using phrases like “from the river to the sea” or making threats, “what that says to me is you're advocating for violence,” she said.
How has U of M responded?
At the Board of Regents’ most recent meeting in March, board members said they looked into the divestment calls and are declining them for financial reasons and “to shield the endowment from political pressures.”
Regent Michael Behm said U of M’s endowment doesn’t have any “direct investment in any Israeli company.”
“What we do have are funds that, one of those companies may be part of a fund,” Behm said. “Another statement that was made was that $6 billion or roughly one third of our endowment is invested in these Israeli companies. I asked the endowment team about that and, in actuality, less than 1/10 of one percent of the endowment is invested indirectly in such companies.”
A university spokesperson clarified that the university has less than $7.2 million — under .04% of the overall endowment — indirectly invested through larger funds in technology companies "related to autonomous flying, cyber defense, digital forensics, aerospace or similar fields."
It's not clear if the university has direct or indirect investments in Israeli companies outside those fields. The spokesperson did not answer questions about that in time for publication.
It’s hard to verify specifics about how the endowment is invested. The university releases an annual report giving a broad overview, but it doesn’t disclose all of its detailed investments and has fought to avoid sharing that information with the public.
“After deliberation, we have decided to stand by our longstanding policy,” said Regent Sarah Hubbard. “We will continue to shield the endowment from political pressures and base our investment decisions on financial factors such as risk and return.”
Russia, tobacco, apartheid: when has U of M divested before?
But when universities say their endowments “should not be a political issue, it just rings hypocritical to student activists,” said U of M history professor Matt Lassiter, whose research looks at campus political movements. “Because the universities have repeatedly negotiated with, and sometimes caved in to student activism on this issue.”
Divestment has a long history at Michigan, including:
- Years of anti-apartheid activism in the 70’s and 80’s were one of the main reasons the university ultimately divested from South Africa.
- In 2000, the university divested from tobacco companies after a committee decided “both tobacco and the tobacco companies’ activities are antithetical to the University’s missions of research, teaching and service.”
- In 2021, the university announced it would “shift” its investment strategy away from fossil fuels to “ensure the university’s investment portfolio reaches a ‘net-zero’ carbon footprint by 2050.” The announcement said the shift would help protect investments from “climate change-related financial risk.”
- In 2022, U of M announced it would “make no further investments in Russia and will move as quickly as is practical to exit its remaining investments” after the invasion of Ukraine. Again, it nodded to the “increasing financial risk associated with such investments.”
What can history tell us about the current protests on campus?
The University of Michigan’s history of campus activism shows divestment campaigns can take years, are often controversial, and crucially, must eventually gain a broad social and political consensus if they’re going to be successful, experts say.
In the university’s stated policy, it says divestment should be “rare,” and that “the concern to be explored must express the broadly and consistently held position of the campus community over time.”
Even if there is consensus, divestment campaigns still have to figure out challenging questions about what, exactly, to divest from.
“Where do you draw that line? I mean, Ford Motor Company sells cars in Israel. Do we divest from Ford? That's not really clear,” said Andy Hoffman, a professor of sustainable enterprise at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. “...There are a lot of people in Israel that don't like what's happening in Gaza. Do you still have to go after them, or are you just trying to change the administration of Benjamin Netanyahu?”
The current unrest at college campuses across the country is reminiscent of student protests during the Vietnam War, history professor Lassiter said.
“We look back on it now as this mass movement, but it was extremely small and extremely unpopular in the mid 1960s,” he said. "By the early 70s, a majority of Americans thought the Vietnam War had been a mistake, and a majority of Americans thought that campus activists were a bunch of privileged troublemakers who should be arrested and put in jail and expelled."
Campus movements are also shaped by how administrators respond to them, he said.
“There's also a lesson there that university administrators, most of them, don't seem to understand the history…which is if you crack down hard on a small group of mostly nonviolent protesters, you're just going to create a larger protest movement,” Lassiter said.
“And regardless of your position on the Gaza issue, what the Columbia president did [last week in arresting and suspending students who initially erected encampments] was guaranteed to exacerbate, not quell, the situation on campus. And anybody at Columbia or elsewhere who thought that was going to work and thought that was going to calm it down, doesn't know anything about the history of campus activism.”
Jewish Voice for Peace co-chair Katya Olson Shipyatski said the protests in Ann Arbor won’t end with the semester.
“Those of us at the encampment are committed to staying until the university divests,” she told Stateside. “The rest is really in the hands of the university…But we will be out here until they do.”
Editor's note: U of M holds Michigan Public's broadcast license.
UPDATE/CLARIFICATION:
Following publication of this story, officials at the University of Michigan disagreed with our use of the word “divestment” to describe all of the disinvestment activities described in this story, and sent the following statement:
U-M has divested twice: Apartheid in 1978 and tobacco in 2000.
At the April 1983 Regents meeting, the Board of Regents voted to divest from companies operating in South Africa, with the exception of corporations headquartered in Michigan. This Board action occurred after the Michigan legislature passed Act 512 in 1982, which mandated that Michigan public colleges and universities divest from companies doing business in South Africa.
In June 2000, the Board of Regents voted to divest from investments in tobacco companies, which represented less than one-quarter of a percent of the university’s then total holdings. The university took the stance that tobacco was antithetical to the university’s mission of research, teaching and service, especially given the university’s world-class healthcare system and medical school.
In more recent years, U-M made changes to its investment approach related to Russia and climate change; those changes were not divestments but based on financial factors.
The action related to Ukraine in 2022 was taken as a result of US government sanctions on Russia. Most Western institutional investors, including the university, moved swiftly at the time to reduce their exposure to Russia and Russia-domiciled investments to comply with the law and to mitigate the impact on their portfolios.
In 2021, the university shifted its natural resources investments to focus more on renewable energy. The Board of Regents approved certain climate change-related policies, including certain investment restrictions and certain proactive initiatives, for the specific purpose of reducing the impact of climate change-related risk on our investment portfolio.
The university wants to make a distinction between investment decisions they agree were made for “political or non-financial reasons” (South Africa and tobacco) and investment decisions they say were made not for political reasons, “but based on an informed belief that the risk and returns of such investments may be materially adversely impacted.” (Russia and fossil fuels).
Michigan Public reached out to both an independent fact checker and a banking executive to review the story and the concerns raised by the University of Michigan. Both reviewers believe Michigan Public's use of the word “divestment” throughout this story to describe the university actions is appropriate. We stand by our story but are providing the university this opportunity to explain how it defines "divestment" and the reasons behind their past investment actions.
Correction: A previous version of the history of divestment table said activists believed the university had "$1.3 billion" in Dow Chemical stock during the Vietnam War. It was $1.3 million.
