As the two faculty representatives on the Committee for Investor Responsibility (CIR), we appreciate the Argus’ reporting on the administration’s axing of the committee. In this op-ed, we cannot address what brought about this development, but the committee will present a final report on its activities. As a reminder, the CIR was a WSA-supported, Board of Trustees-approved committee including students, faculty, staff, and alumni/ae. It was constituted in 2009 in response to student demands to divest from two weapons manufacturers. According to the first article of the CIR’s bylaws, it is tasked to “Consider issues of ethical, moral, and social responsibility in the investment policies of Wesleyan University.” Briefly dormant post-pandemic, the CIR proved to be of use when the administration found itself confronted with the events of May 2024: a WSA referendum overwhelmingly in favor of divesting endowment assets from companies involved in Israel’s occupation of Palestine and a student encampment in support of this demand. In the agreement between student protestors and the administration to end the encampment, the university pledged to “keeping the CIR active on a permanent basis.”

The administration instructed us that our work should be guided by “Wesleyan values.” It took the same value-touting university seven months to rescind its pledge to support the CIR. As soon as students and faculty had left campus after fall semester finals week, President Roth informed the committee that the “investment policy of the University has evolved” and that because the third-party managers in charge of investing Wesleyan’s riches are approved by the Investment Committee (WIC; a body of the Board of Trustees) and are sworn to “ESG (environmental, social, and governance) criteria,” there was no longer a need for the trustees to hear from the CIR regarding “ethical matters.”

To appreciate this decision, it is helpful to acknowledge that the body tasked with overseeing the actions of Wesleyan’s Investments Office (IO), the WIC, appears to be run by the IO itself. The September 2024 decision to reject the CIR’s proposal to divest from companies that supply weapons and services supporting Israel’s illegal occupations of Palestinian and Syrian territory was written on IO letterhead, was penned by the Chief Investment Officer Martin and her Deputy Farrar (with WIC chair Vogel receiving co-author credit), and was formatted as a memo from those three to the WIC. Nothing indicates that the WIC or the trustees discussed the proposal’s arguments in favor of targeted divestment action, nor any of the alternatives which we proposed in our resolution, and we have heard from attendees at the September trustees retreat that rejection of the proposal was a foregone conclusion.

What we have related so far does not indicate that the university takes “ethical matters” as having much to do with ethics, if by the latter we understand the rational capacity to distinguish between moral rights and wrongs and to act accordingly. Apparently, when it comes to “Wesleyan values,” “ethical matters” are the pesky “faux frais” of doing business: incidental costs that must be kept to a minimum because they do not add new value. Moral and financial values are two different species altogether, and the latter cannot tolerate when the former seeks to impinge on its freedoms. Financial values speak a language of their own. Let’s translate the four main points of the IO memo out of “finance-talk” and into plain English, followed by an editorial comment.

• “The Wesleyan endowment is a crucial financial resource that should not be treated as a political football.” Translation: “Financial values preclude ethical values.” Comment: It takes two to play political football. To reject the CIR’s recommendation to divest from entities that profit from violations of international law is a political decision. There is no such thing as a politically neutral investment decision.
• “We Must Honor the Intent of Donor Contributions. This endowment is the result of generous contributions from thousands of alumni, spanning many generations throughout Wesleyan’s history.” Translation: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Comment: According to this plainly unserious argument, imputed donor intent remains sacrosanct across generations. The IO cannot mean this literally: if we were to honor the intent of Wesleyan’s first donors, for instance, the university would not support the education of women, Catholics, Jews, or Muslims.
• “Practical Implications Make Divestment Unrealistic. Whereas divestment of individual securities was a relatively straightforward task in the 1980s [when the university divested from South African assets], it is much more complicated in a world in which Wesleyan has minimal direct ownership of securities.” Translation: “If we wanted to divest from South African apartheid today, we wouldn’t be able to do so.” Comment: The IO pursues an investment model that, by design, precludes accountability. This ingenious design shields the IO from having to deal with messy “ethical matters.”
• “Divestment is Costly Under Our Current Investing Model. The investment success of the endowment relies in large part on Wesleyan’s reputation as a desirable partner to the world’s best investment managers. We must be hypersensitive to the potential that we inhibit a manager’s ability to invest through restrictions we uniquely impose on them.” Translation: “Our priority is to invest with the same fund managers contracted by the likes of Yale, Stanford, or Harvard.” Comment: The IO has placed participation in the gilded fund manager industry above all other concerns.

There are two takeaways from the university’s liquidation of the CIR and the rejection of its divestment proposal: The university’s ESG principles are not worth the paper on which they are written: they have no practical meaning. More concerningly, however, is the university’s blind commitment to an investment model that makes it structurally impossible to fully know, let alone oversee the university’s investments. Wesleyan’s holdings in socially harmful assets, including fossil fuels and weapons, not to mention the private equity industry (a major driver in reducing quality and increasing consumer costs in health care and many other services), are obscured by design, disabling both ethical and fiduciary oversight. Real financial risks remain hidden – with potentially catastrophic consequences for the university’s financial stability.

Kerwin Kaye is Associate Professor and Chair of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University and can be reached at kkaye@wesleyan.edu.

Ulrich Plass is Professor and Chair of German Studies at the University and can be reached at uplass@wesleyan.edu.