Seven months after the revival of the Committee for Investor Responsibility (CIR), the University has downgraded its relationship with the committee. On Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024, President Michael Roth ’78 informed members of the CIR of this decision, although no campus-wide announcement has been made.

First created in 2017, the CIR resumed its operation as an auxiliary committee of the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) in May 2024. Assisting the Board with adhering to its policies on socially responsible investment, the CIR engaged in shareholder advocacy, considered investment proposals from the University community, and voted on investment recommendations.

Throughout its tenure, the CIR has adhered to bylaws written at its construction in 2017, which stipulated that the CIR would be composed of 13 voting members, including 2 faculty, staff, and alumni members and 7 undergraduate students. The Investment Office would provide one non-voting representative.

The University has now stated that it will no longer assign members to the committee, including staff, faculty, alumni, or representatives from the Investment Office. Instead, staff, faculty, and alumni will be able to choose to participate in the CIR on a voluntary basis. However, the University also stressed that the CIR would still exist as a student-led committee under the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA).

“The Committee for Investor Relations (CIR) continues to operate as an auxiliary committee of the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA),” the University said in a statement to The Argus. “Updates on the CIR’s activity can be found in the WSA’s committee reports, which are accessible to all students.”

The change in the CIR’s status means that it must now engage with the board of trustees through the latter’s Campus Affairs Committee, which would then report to the Investment Committee, rather than reporting to the Investment Committee directly.

The CIR’s recent revival was part of an agreement between the Wesleyan Palestine Solidarity Encampment and the administration. That agreement tasked the CIR with drafting a proposal to divest from any industries which the board of trustees determined were assisting the Israeli government with its ongoing military campaigns against Palestinian civilians.

“The CIR, in consultation with various university constituencies, will forward a proposal to the Investment Committee at their earliest Fall convening,” the agreement read. “The Board of Trustees commits to a vote on the resulting proposal as early as their September 22, 2024 meeting.”

The board of trustees voted against the CIR proposal in a Sept. 21, 2024 meeting, amid protests by dozens of students who supported its passing. Members of the CIR have speculated that the divestment proposal may have motivated the administration’s dissolution of their relationship with the group.

“Obviously it was a proposal that was very strongly worded, and it was a proposal that was supposed to represent the majority opinion of the community, which obviously the board of trustees did not share,” former CIR Chair Nicolas Millan ’27 said. “It was also an opinion that the board of trustees did not like, so that’s one possibility [for why the CIR was dissolved].”

According to CIR faculty member and Associate Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Kerwin Kaye, Roth did not provide a clear reason for the change, but instead referenced revisions to the CIR’s bylaws and the University’s investment policies, in the December email to the CIR.

“[T]he University and the Wesleyan Student Assembly (WSA) commit to keeping the CIR active on a permanent basis,” the May 2024 agreement to end the encampment read. “The CIR is responsible for any amendments and clarifications of those bylaws.”

The CIR bylaws from October 2017 were last mutually affirmed under this agreement and were included without changes in the bylaws of the 2024-25 WSA. No other changes to the bylaws have been mentioned in WSA minutes and committee reports between then and Monday, Feb. 10, 2025.

Kaye expressed skepticism at Roth’s explanation for the shift in the CIR’s composition and proposed his own theory.

“We were looking at the CIR as a mode of getting people much more involved, much more informed, more involved in laying more clear, detailed guidelines for the Investment Office,” Kaye said. “So my interpretation is that the reason why [the official relationship between the University and the CIR was dissolved] is just everything that we were wanting to do with the CIR, [the administration] would like not to happen, and they would like to run their investment office without democratic oversight of any sort.”

CIR faculty member and Professor of German Studies Ulrich Plass agreed with this assessment.

“[I felt] dismay that the administration broke its promise from May 2024 to continuously support the CIR,” Plass wrote in an email to The Argus. “But I cannot say I was surprised. There were many indications that the administration and particularly the Investments Office viewed the CIR as a toxic asset that needed to be liquidated.”

Kaye expressed pessimism at the changes the dissolution would bring.

“We’re definitely hampered in certain ways, because we’re no longer going to be getting information from the Investment Office about how things are invested, [and they won’t be] answering some of our questions,” Kaye said. “We’re not going to be a University-wide committee with representatives, representing the alumni, representing staff. Before, it was a University committee that faculty would be appointed to, and we got credit for that as faculty for doing service to the University. That’s no longer the case now; it would be on a volunteer basis.”

According to Kaye, the change to the University’s relationship with the CIR could make it difficult for students to trust Roth and the administration in the future. 

“It was especially disappointing to me when President Roth disbanded the CIR, as he has taken such significant stands in relation to academic freedom on the national stage,” Kaye said. “I fail to see, however, how students would really be able to take him at his word in any future negotiations when he is willing to break an agreement about the CIR that he had signed on the dotted line less than six months prior.”

Notably, the changes to the CIR have not been officially announced to the University community. 

“[The CIR] seems like something that everybody would want,” Millan said. “I think if [Roth] said all of a sudden, especially after all of the hubbub about divestment, that we’re gonna get rid of the only institutional channel between students and even alumni and small donors to the Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees, that doesn’t look great.”

At the present, current CIR members are looking for a way to continue their work.

“There is really no institutional path forward for this committee absent massive pressure from the student body,” Plass wrote.

With no official campus-wide notice in sight, members of the committee are trying to spread the word about the recent update across campus.

“One of the first things is simply to let people know what has happened, and to get the word out about what’s happened,” Kaye said. “We’ve also met with the student leaders in the WSA to talk with them about what’s happened. Apparently, President Roth reached out to them as well. So they have an awareness of what’s going on, but most of the student body, most of the faculty, are unaware at this point of what has happened.”

Spencer Landers can be reached at sklanders@wesleyan.edu.