The University’s board of trustees will have the opportunity to hold a vote on a divestment directive outlined by the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA)’s Committee for Investment Responsibility (CIR), entitled “Proposal Concerning the Divestment of Wesleyan University’s Endowment from Companies which Supply Services, Equipment, or Weapons Involved in Israel’s Illegal Occupation of Palestinian and Syrian Territory,” on Sunday, Sept. 22. The proposal recommends that the University’s financial instruments divest from close to 650 companies supporting the internationally-sanctioned occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.

The CIR submitted the proposal to both the board of trustees and the Wesleyan Investment Committee on Friday, Aug. 30. The recommendation follows a formal request from the University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) issued on May 16 and an accompanying petition from the Faculty Ad-Hoc Network for Palestine (FJP) expressing similar concerns about the University’s investment in companies which they deemed complicit in genocide. The agreement between SJP/Wesleyan Palestine Solidarity Encampment (WPSE) and the University administration, announced on May 18, 2024, also included a clause stating that the CIR would be responsible for advising the Wesleyan Investment Committee on these divestment matters. 

The committee was revived after several years of inactivity in response to campus-wide interest in divestment following the establishment of the WPSE. At its full capacity, the committee is composed of seven students, two faculty members, two staff members, two alumni, and a non-voting member from the Office of Investments. 

Student members include Chair Nicolás Millán Prieto ’27, Vice Chair Miles Horner ’26, Trevor Brooks ’27, Yifei Zhao ’25, Zoe Hecht ’26, B Frankenstein ’25, Liam Dorrien ’27.

“The Wesleyan Committee for Investor Responsibility (CIR) is a student, faculty, staff, and alumni panel that advises the University’s Board of Trustees on ethical matters related to the endowment,” the WSA states on its website. “It has no direct fiduciary responsibility, which rests with the Board of Trustees, but seeks to represent and empower the Wesleyan community in advocating for greater transparency and shareholder engagement with respect to endowment assets.”

Though the board of trustees and the University Investments Office would ultimately decide any technical aspects of a divestment plan, student members of the CIR hope the committee will help renew on-campus conversations about ethical investing. They also hope that the Office of Investment, through its non-voting member on the committee, will engage with the committee to craft proposals which suit the financial realities of the University’s future.

The CIR convened for its inaugural meeting on May 18, with all elected members present. Because some student members do not have backgrounds in financial education or investment and were not previously familiar with relevant University policies, the CIR agreed to convene over the summer to discuss how to best ensure that the complex web of University finances reflects the socially responsible investing outlined by the board of trustees in 2015. 

A June meeting with all CIR student, staff, and faculty members present created the divestment subcommittee and tasked it with writing up a proposal in response to the SJP’s request. Any member could join this subcommittee, and ultimately six of the seven student members and both faculty members joined and established bi-weekly check-ins.

“When we formed the committee there, I was really excited about the prospect of the entire committee meeting over the course of the whole summer to put everything that we had into this proposal,” Hecht said. “But it was clear that that was not going to be able to happen. So that is what spurred the creation of the subcommittee…. There was really a spirit of collaboration.”

The divestment subcommittee held summer meetings via Zoom, reviewing what members had accomplished asynchronously during the previous week and defining upcoming tasks. Members updated the rest of the CIR on writing progress and received relevant feedback.

Within the first few weeks, committee members developed questions ranging from how the University’s investment portfolio and endowments were managed to the histories of occupation and the Israel-Hamas war. Members of the CIR met with activists from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives to obtain insight, and they outlined a proposal aligned with the ethical standards of the University. 

“We made sure we knew how investments work at Wesleyan,” Hecht said. “[And we looked into] other precedents around the country and around the globe for divestment and then realized our overarching goal and our charge was to determine whether or not it was ethical to be invested in companies that are profiting off…Israeli apartheid, basically, and occupation.”

One critical aspect of the proposal was determining what exactly students wanted the University to divest from—the longest conversation that the committee held, according to Frankenstein and Hecht. The committee discussed whether the proposal should draw from a smaller or larger pool than a public list of 650 companies that had been compiled by international legal organizations, with some members proposing that the University divest from all companies affiliated with aerospace and defense. The committee ultimately decided to recommend the 650 companies that they had initially flagged.

“We eventually sort of came to the understanding that these lists are not compiled out of nowhere and that [they] rely on widely agreed-upon standards of global governance, civil rights, and humanitarian law, and that that would then be our standard,” Frankenstein said. “It is really difficult to determine which companies are the most socially injurious, [but] if a company was to cease doing its unethical behavior, it would be taken off of the list and then could be back on the docket for further reinvestment.”

Not all members of the committee support divestment from aerospace and defense companies. Because the decision remained divisive, the committee cited three relevant reports on violations of international law in Gaza and the West Bank published by the United Nations, the American Friends Service Committee, and Who Profits research.

“In the future, if student groups were to come to us with proposals that ask us to look into the ethics of investing in weapons writ large, then that’s…something the CIR [would be] looking to,” Hecht said.

Because only members of the board of trustees and employees of the Investments Office have access to certain information about the University’s investments, the CIR members are limited to information which is already publicly accessible. Information that is not publicly accessible includes comprehensive breakdowns of investment categories and investments in private or semi-private corporations. 

Unlike sectors targeted for divestment in the past, such as fossil fuel industries or weapons and aerospace manufacturing, corporations deemed by the CIR to be unethical due to their association with the Israel-Hamas conflict are difficult to divest from because they do not form a singular asset class. This, coupled with the University’s complex investment apparatus, including external investment advisors, makes the specific mechanisms of divestment challenging to uncover.

“This makes it very hard for the University to invest ethically and very difficult for the CIR to live up to its charge,” Hecht said. “That was our final statement to the board, that we found it unethical if Wesleyan invested in any of the companies on those three lists, and we were not privy to the kind of information which would have allowed us to make a fully fleshed proposal.”

Despite these roadblocks, the CIR has continued to discuss the scope and effectiveness of different divestment options. 

“The mechanism of divestment was [a] thing that we had some talk about,” Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and CIR faculty member Kerwin Kaye said. “We made a series of alternate possibilities…. One of our suggestions was just [to] ask the Investment Office to come up with [their own] way to divest.”

When considering ethical divestment practices, the committee utilized The Ethical Investor: Universities and Corporate Responsibility, which has been adopted by universities nationally, as a framework for its proposal. The 1972 book discourages investment and divestment as a mode of student activism. 

“This book is very…clear to say that universities need to be money smart when it comes to the endowments,” Professor of German Studies and CIR faculty member Ulrich Plass said. “They need to put their money where the returns are. If they think a company is engaged in unethical behavior, then there are ways in which the universities can engage with these companies through shareholder activism and similar mechanisms.”

If companies do engage in socially irresponsible behavior, making a statement via divestment is not so much a fiduciary decision as it is an ethical decision, Plass argues. The ethical framework in this context fits within a larger legal framework outlined by the International Court of Justice, which considers Israeli occupation of Palestinian and Syrian territory to be in violation of international law.

Student members had finalized a draft of the report by early August, when a second all-subcommittee Zoom call was held. The subcommittee discussed a timeline for approving the proposal, agreeing that there would be a few days for members to freely edit the draft on their own.

The final proposal cites the aforementioned violation of international humanitarian law, and the implications of University divestment and divestment criteria. It concludes with an analysis of the actions of other universities and additional CIR recommendations. 

“If it is indeed a technical challenge for the Investment Office to handle 650 changing companies, what is a mechanism of divestment that is possible, that is feasible within the current investment structure?” Kaye asked. 

Although the CIR considered recommending divestment from all companies headquartered in Israel, many on the committee expressed doubt, citing internal committee polling which found complete divestment to be far less popular than moderated divestment. In addition, more limited divestment was found to have far more robust legal backing. 

“We placed the ethical framework in the larger legal framework that’s been provided by the United Nations and the International Court of Justice and its most recent opinion this summer that judged the issue of Israeli occupation…to be in violation of international law,” Plass said. “It seems clear to us, and it’s also written in our investment policy, that violations of international law [and] war crimes are unethical behavior, right? If that wasn’t already evident, it’s actually also in the [University’s] ethical investment guidelines.”

Whether the board of trustees votes yes, no, or doesn’t hold a vote on the proposal altogether, the student members of the subcommittee feel that they have fulfilled their duty. 

“A lot of people…busted their butts over the summer and put a lot of work into a document that I think that we’re all quite proud of,” Hecht said. “Now…the ball is in the board’s court, and I’m hoping that they will vote and that they will take what we have to say seriously.”

Regardless of the outcome of the proposal, and according to the SJP-WPSE agreement, the University and the WSA must commit to keeping the CIR in operation on a permanent basis. As a crucial part of the University’s socially responsible investment initiatives, the CIR will continue to serve as an advisory role for the University’s investment practices. 

Carolyn Neugarten can be reached at cneugarten@wesleyan.edu. 

Miles Craven can be reached at mcraven@wesleyan.edu.