Occidental administration agrees to bring divestment proposal to Board of Trustees in June

1298
A list of demands at the Occidental Students for Justice in Palestine encampment on the Academic Quad at Occidental College in Los Angeles, CA. April 29, 2024. James Miller

According to a memo obtained by The Occidental titled “Investment Committee Response to SJP Proposal,” Ronald Hahn, Chair of Occidental’s Board of Trustees’ Investment Committee, has agreed to bring Oxy Students Justice for Palestine (Oxy SJP) and Oxy Jewish Voice for Peace’s (Oxy JVP) divestment proposal to the Board of Trustees next meeting, in June.*

Occidental’s Director of Communications Rachael Warecki confirmed the memo’s statement. 

“The Investment Committee of the Board of Trustees has agreed to convene to make a recommendation to the Board of Trustees at the next scheduled meeting,” Warecki said via email. 

According to Oxy SJP spokesperson Matthew Vickers (junior), during a May 2 meeting between representatives from Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP’s executive boards and Occidental’s Chief Financial Officer Amos Himmelstein, there was talk of Himmelstein agreeing to bring the IC’s divestment recommendation to the Board of Trustees before the June meeting, but no expedited meeting was officially agreed upon.

“One of our [updated] demands was an emergency trustee meeting, and if this proposal is to fully go through, if we were to have this proposal fully in writing, that would be meeting the definition of one of our updated demands,” Vickers said.

The emergency meeting was one of the five updated demands listed in a May 1 Instagram post. The other demands included divestment from companies Lockheed Martin, Elbit, Caterpillar and Boeing, amnesty for all participants in the demonstration, ending censorship of faculty teaching, emailing and discussing Palestine and for Occidental to “end the silence” around “what is happening to Palestinian people.”

Vickers said that demonstrators at Occidental considered constructing a barricade to surround some or all of the encampment, to protect it from the possibility of aggressive counterprotestors, but have decided against it.** Students have painted plywood boards, with eyes and barbed wire iconography, as well as the text “silence is violence/ dont look away/ from genocide,” on one section. 

In a campus-wide email sent 4:57 p.m. May 2, President Harry Elam updated the campus community on college leaders’ meeting with the encampment’s representatives.

“We have reaffirmed our ongoing expectations relating to conduct and safety, especially given how peaceful demonstrations have changed in tenor at some other institutions across the country,” Elam wrote. “We feel that we have made valuable progress in opening communication and identifying concrete actions for a shared resolution.”

In an email to The Occidental, Warecki ​​wrote that students at Occidental broadly have freedom of speech on campus to express their views on social and political issues. 

“Our Right to Dissent and Demonstration Policy requires that protest activity on campus be peaceful and that it does not restrict the freedom of thought or movement of others who hold different views,” Warecki wrote. “This has not changed.” 

By the afternoon of May 2, the pro-Palestinian encampment at Occidental’s quad grew to 116 tents and a handful of hammocks. Around and within the encampment, dozens of cardboard signs stand with messages such as “money for healthcare not genocide” and “resistance is the deepest form of love.” In the encampment, on the concrete pathways that intersect at the center of the Academic Quad, messages such as “¡f*** your Zionist agenda!” and “crush one campus another rises” are written in chalk.

This is a continuing story and The Occidental will continue to report online.

Ava LaLonde, Noah Kim and Avinash Iyer contributed to The Occidental’s reporting.

*This article was updated at 6:45 p.m. May 2 to reflect the fact that Occidental has not agreed to convene the Board of Trustees for an expedited divestment vote. A previous version of this article quoted Matthew Vickers as saying that the next board meeting is in October 2024, and that the college had agreed to bring a divestment proposal to the Board of Trustees at a retreat in June.

**This article was updated at 6:45 p.m. May 2 to reflect the fact that Oxy SJP does not plan on building a barricade around their encampment. A previous version of this article quoted Vickers as saying that they were building one, but after publication the Oxy SJP executive board no longer plans on doing so.

Loading

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here