PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) – At a meeting on Tuesday, the Brown Corporation rejected a student-led proposal that would have resulted in the university divesting 10 companies that students say “profit from and commit gross human rights violations by Israel throughout the occupied territories. Palestine.”
In one letter to the Brown communityChancellor Brian Moynihan and President Christina Paxson shared that the Corporation has voted to accept a recommendation from the University’s Advisory Committee on University Resources Management (ACURM) against divestment.
According to ACURM it is the committee could not find it “a causal relationship between the investment
or the expenditure of University resources and associated harms,” as the University does not directly invest in any of the companies listed in the student-led Brown Divest Coalition proposal nor does its indirect investment exceed 0.01 % of the “total market value of the ten companies.”
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Moynihan and Paxson said ACURM and the Corporation concluded that divestiture would serve more as a political statement on the part of the University than it would impose a significant financial burden on any of the listed companies. The Brown Divest Coalition 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 led the university to divest itself from South African apartheid, the Sudanese government and the tobacco industry.
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In response to this Paxson and Moynihan wrote“We recognize that in two cases – Sudan and South Africa – Brown made divestment decisions that might appear largely symbolic today. While we note that there are many important differences between these cases, the Corporation believed that the current backdrop of deep divisions within our community – not to mention nationally – clearly sets this proposal apart.”
(ACCRIP, which also preceded ACURM as the committee charged with managing Brown’s investments released a report in 2020 titled “Recommending divestment from companies that facilitate the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.” According to the students, Paxson told them in a Letter from December 2023 that she had rejected the original proposal because it “did not meet established standards for identifying specific entities for divestment or the formulation of how financial divestment of the entities would address social harm.”)
Paxson agreed to submit the Coalition’s divestment proposal to the Brown Corporation in April in response to a multi-day student camp on the college green.
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