PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) — In a meeting on Tuesday, the Brown Corporation rejected a student-led proposal that would have seen the university divesting from 10 companies that the students say “profit from and facilitate gross human rights abuses committed by Israel throughout occupied Palestine.”
In a letter to the Brown community, Chancellor Brian Moynihan and President Christina Paxson shared that the Corporation voted to accept a recommendation from the university’s Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM) against divestment.
According to ACURM, the committee was unable to find “a causal link between the investment
or expenditure of University resources and the associated harm,” as the university is neither directly invested in any of the companies listed in the student-led Brown Divest Coalition’s proposal, nor does its indirect investment exceed 0.01% of the “aggregate market value of the ten companies.”
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Moynihan and Paxson said ACURM and the Corporation concluded that divesting would serve as a political statement on the part of the university more than it would be a significant financial burden on any of the companies named in the Brown Divest Coalition’s proposal.
The Coalition identified Textron, Safariland, Volvo Group, Airbus, Boeing, General Dynamics, Motorola Solutions, General Electric, RTX Corporation, and Northrop Grumman as “[providing] products or services that contribute to the maintenance of the Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank,” citing previous decisions by Brown’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices (ACCRIP) that resulted in the university divesting from South African apartheid, the Sudanese government, and the tobacco industry.
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In response, Paxson and Moynihan wrote, “We recognize that in two instances — Sudan and South Africa — Brown made divestment decisions that could, today, appear to be largely symbolic. While we note that there are many important differences between these cases, the Corporation felt that the current backdrop of deep divisions within our community — to say nothing of nationally — clearly distinguish this proposal.”
(ACCRIP, which preceded ACURM as the committee tasked with managing Brown’s investments, also released a report in 2020 titled “To Recommend Divestment from Companies that Facilitate the Israeli Occupation of Palestinian Territory.” According to the students, Paxson told them in a December 2023 letter that she had rejected the original proposal, as it “did not meet established standards for identifying specific entities for divestment or the articulation for how financial divestment from the entities would address social harm.”)
Paxson agreed to bring the Coalition’s divestment proposal to the Brown Corporation back in April in response to a multi-day student encampment on the college’s green.
In a statement following Brown’s decision, the R.I. Coalition for Israel said it is “gratified to see that the adults in the room have won out.”
“It should never have gotten to this point, but at last Brown has shown some spine in dismissing the movement,” the statement reads. “As the pendulum of morality and common sense slowly starts to return to normalcy, and Israel’s inevitable victory over the evils of Iran and its allies draws closer, we will continue to see the lies of the anti-Zionist movement fall apart of their own weight.”
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