Hampshire College and the Politics of Divestment
by Advocate Staff
In 1977, Hampshire College became the first US institution of higher learning to divest from companies that did business with and helped to support apartheid South Africa. Shortly after this divestment, the college president and administration took steps to distance themselves from that landmark decision. Now, thirty-two years later, history is repeating itself.
Students for Justice in Palestine, a Hampshire-based social justice group, is claiming that the college has become the first academic institution to effectively divest its holdings in several companies that do business with the Israeli military. And, once again, the president and the board of trustees – responding to pressure from outside interest groups – have sought to play down and effectively deny this claim. Despite a significant change in its investment policy, which supports SJP’s claims of Israeli divestment, the administration asserts that there has not been any kind of selective divestment and that the changes are simply consistent with their policy of socially responsible investing. So who’s right? Has Hampshire become the first college to tackle the ethical dilemmas of investing in occupation or is this all just a case of overly enthusiastic undergraduates with good PR skills? The answers to those questions depend on who you ask and how exactly you choose to define divestment.
On February 7, the Hampshire College Board of Trustees, after reviewing its investment portfolio (the State Street global Advisor’s index fund), agreed to temporarily suspend its current investment policy and authorized the creation of an ad hoc committee to investigate alternatives for future investment to be completed by November 2009. The decision to investigate the fund was made immediately following a formal petition for divestment that was brought to the Finance Committee by members of the group Students for Justice in Palestine. The college’s investment policy was then suspended after a commissioned investigation by KLD research group, which screens companies and portfolios for socially responsible investing, found that several of the companies in the State Street index were in violation of the college’s current investment policy. According to an official statement dated February 24 from the college president, Ralph Hexter:
KLD found that of the fund’s 455 holdings, well over 200 raised significant concerns relative to Hampshire College’s socially responsible investment policy and were in violation of values of socially responsible investing. It was on this basis that the investment committee voted as it did to exit from the fund when an alternative fund has been identified.
President Hexter then went out of his way to strenuously deny that the board’s decision had anything to do with divestment from Israel, claiming that the decision was based solely on the college’s policy of responsible investing.
Despite his attempts to distance the college’s actions from the divestment, the president nonetheless admitted that “it was the good work of SJP that brought this issue to the attention of the committee.” This statement, as well as the series of press releases that were issued by SJP following the February 7 decision claiming victory for their efforts to achieve divestment, set off a firestorm of criticism led by none other than Harvard University Law School professor and staunch pro-Israel advocate Alan Dershowitz, who condemned the college’s actions as anti-Semitic and out of proportion, claiming that divestment was “motivated purely by hatred for the Jewish state.”
It was only after this response from Dershowitz and the media blitz that followed the SJP’s publicity campaign that Hexter responded with his February 24 statement. Indeed, although President Hexter and the board have done everything they can to deny that there has been any kind of divestment from Israel, both critics and supporters of the idea seem to agree that the college’s actions are potentially groundbreaking and could potentially mark a serious milestone in the ongoing efforts to form a mass divestment movement.
Since at least 2007, the SJP organized to force Hampshire to divest all funds from six companies that the group claims are complicit in the occupation and destruction of the Palestinian territories. These six companies include United Technologies, which manufactures Blackhawk helicopters used by the Israeli military, General Electric, which supplies the propulsions systems for Apache helicopter gunships, also used by the Israeli Defense Forces, ITT Corporation, which provides night vision goggles to the Israeli military, Motorola, which is engaged in a $400 million project to provide radar systems for enhancing security at illegal West Bank settlements Terex, which provides trucks for logistical support to the Israeli military, and Caterpillar, which provides many of the bulldozers and construction equipment used to build new settlements and to destroy Palestinian homes in the West Bank and Gaza.
The Hampshire student group, which has been calling for divestment from Israel for several years, and which had stepped up their calls for divestment in response to the recent Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza in January, has claimed responsibility for the Board of Trustees decision. In an official statement issued the day of the decision, SJP stated:
This landmark move is a direct result of a two-year intensive campaign by the campus group, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The group pressured Hampshire College’s Board of Trustees to divest from six specific companies due to human rights concerns in occupied Palestine. Over 800 students, professors, and alumni have signed SJP’s “institutional statement” calling for the divestment.
SJP believes that the board’s decision, regardless of the several other companies involved, represents a divestment from the six companies associated with the Israeli occupation, which is precisely what they were calling for. While the administration may deny that the changes, which actually only affect four of the six companies on SJP’s list, have anything to do with criticizing or punishing Israel, the effect is the same. Beyond the semantic argument at the heart of this debate SJP argues that regardless of the administration’s position, the movement belongs to the students, and that the more than 800 signatures (on a campus with little more than 1,200 students) represent their “collective desire to see the end of the Occupation and the restoration of justice to the Palestinian people.”
Shortly after the board’s meeting, several left wing newspapers, blogs, and news programs around the nation began to run stories, based on SJP press releases, that claimed Hampshire had become the first US college to officially divest from Israel. Grit TV and Democracy Now!, for instance, both ran brief stories suggesting that Hampshire had divested from Israel. In response to these stories, Dershowitz published an article in the Jerusalem Post on February 15 claiming, among other things, that the SJP’s goal was to “end the existence of Israel.” In that same editorial he called on “all decent people – supporters and critics of Israel alike – to make no further contributions to a school that now promotes discrimination and is complicit in evil.”
In other words, Dershowitz issued his own call for divestment, essentially seeking to force the Hampshire administration to repudiate and denounce its own students. Sadly, Dershowitz’s gambit succeeded. Rather than defend the rights of their students to speak freely and to interpret the political situation as they saw it, Hexter and the Hampshire administration caved in to the powerful fear of being labeled anti-Semitic.
As the author Howard Friel reported in ZNet, Hexter and the Hampshire administration essentially threw their own students under the bus in their response to Dershowitz. In a conciliatory letter to Dershowitz and the Jerusalem Post Hexter wrote
“[we] urge you to understand us clearly, when we say that students do not speak for the college and may not willfully misrepresent the school. It will be, and must be, the college’s task to undertake any disciplinary action, according to its established rules and procedures. Discipline is an internal process that is not shared with the public.”
As Friel explained, this talk of disciplinary punishment only furthers Dershowitz’s false claims that the Hampshire divestment movement – a peaceful, nonviolent attempt to end a hostile and racist occupation – is, in effect, driven by bigotry and hatred instead of a desire for peace and justice.
As of the publication of this article, there seems to have been no disciplinary action taken against any of the students involved in the divestment movement, and for their part, the students seem genuinely unperturbed by the series of events. As Adam Horowitz put it in one SJP blog post: “The bottom line is that before February 7, Hampshire College was invested in companies that directly profited from the occupation. Today, we are not. This is a direct result of pressure and efforts by SJP.”
Leaving aside the contentious issue of who divested from what and why, the movement that began at Hampshire, has, as Dershowitz feared, exploded. Divestment from Israel has become an increasingly debated topic on campuses across the country, an issue that previously enjoyed little or no activism on its behalf. Students and student governments at UMass Amherst, Columbia, and NYU have all begun to talk about divestment, while closer to home, the Campus Antiwar Network will be hosting a Student Divestment Strategy Day at Hunter College on Sunday March 29. Whether or not these movements can attain the same level of success as Hampshire College remains to be seen, but clearly Hampshire has once again set the standard for successful, if controversial, student social activism.
