The Board’s Announcement
In a June 10 email from the Occidental Board of Trustees, Board Chair Lisa H. Link P’18 announced the rejection of a divestment proposal from Oxy Students for Justice in Palestine (Oxy SJP) and Oxy Jewish Voice for Peace (Oxy JVP). The announcement comes a month to the day after Oxy SJP, Oxy JVP and other demonstrators decamped from the Academic Quad in exchange for a Board vote on the proposal.
The proposal asked the Board to direct the College’s investment manager to cease investing in Boeing Co., Caterpillar Inc., Elbit Systems and Lockheed Martin due to their “direct ties to war crimes against civilians.”
According to the announcement, the Board “particularly focused its attention on the level of College community support for the proposal and the potential impact of divestment on the four targeted companies.” The Board chose to not divest “because taking a position on a complex geopolitical situation would potentially chill the expression of diverse opinions, undermine the expression of pluralism, and alienate members of our community.” The Board also “found no expectation that divestment would significantly or adversely impact the targeted companies.”
The Occidental previously reported that the Board’s Investment Committee would convene at a special session before the June Board meeting, considering Oxy SJP’s proposal and drafting a recommendation for Board members on whether or not to support it. The Investment Committee’s recommendation was not disclosed in the announcement.
According to the announcement, the Board received hundreds of messages from individuals and collectives within the Occidental community and “non-Oxy affiliated persons and groups” concerning divestment, and evaluated these messages during their deliberation process. The messages received by the Board were “diverse.” The announcement said that correspondents supporting and opposing the divestment proposal indicated that should the Board choose the opposing course of action, they would pull their support for Occidental.
“The diversity of community members’ opinions was a compelling reason to refrain from acting on the proposal, as the Board believes a decision in favor of the proposal would be divisive and damaging to the College community,” Link wrote in the announcement.
Occidental is not directly invested in any of the companies included in the divestment proposal and “the Board does not intend to make such direct investments in these or other companies in the future,” the announcement said. According to the announcement, the College invests indirectly in the companies up for divestment through funds that aggregate the capital of multiple individuals or groups, which are “managed by third-parties.” According to the announcement, the financial exposure to the companies up for divestment represent less than 0.1% of Occidental’s total endowment assets.
“The College cannot simply divest from specific securities within a fund without withdrawing from the entire fund, which would significantly impact endowment returns,” Link wrote in the announcement.
According to Occidental’s 2023-24 Fact Sheet, Occidental’s endowment was $604 million Nov. 1, 2023.
The announcement also states that “to be clear, tuition and fees are not used for investment purposes.”
The protesters respond
Oxy SJP Spokesperson Matthew Vickers (senior) said that he was disappointed, but not surprised, when he learned of the Board’s decision. Vickers said he believes that a complaint filed by the The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging antisemitism at Occidental, was a factor in the Board’s decision.
“Since the school is scared of this federal complaint from the ADL, plus pressure from students and non-campus organizations, that was the greatest pressure,” Vickers said. “However it comes down to the institution’s assessment that doing nothing is better than doing anything.”
Link was unavailable to be interviewed by The Occidental, but authorized Occidental’s Vice President for Marketing and Communications Rod Leveque to provide additional information in response to questions from The Occidental. In response to Vickers’ quote, Leveque said that the reasons for the Board’s decision are those given in Link’s announcement.
Oxy SJP posted the group’s reaction to Instagram in a joint post with Oxy JVP and Oxy Alumni for Justice in Palestine (Oxy AJP) June 10 stating that “Oxy [was] once again on the wrong side of history” and referring to the Board as the “Board of Tyranny.” A second post from Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP that day condemned the Board’s goal of “plurality” as an invalid argument for not divesting.
A third Instagram post was shared by Oxy SJP, Oxy JVP and Oxy AJP June 12 criticizing Jeh Johnson, a Barack Obama Scholar Program advisory board member and US Secretary for Homeland Security from 2013 to 2017, for “exposing [the] institution to direct complicity with the US empire, border violence, and Israel’s genocide.” In addition to mentioning other public and private sector roles Johnson has held, the post cited his current positions on the Board of Directors at Lockheed Martin and the Columbia University Board of Trustees as being directly related to these claims.
Vickers said he found the Board’s decision “incoherent.”
“As a school that leans into its progressive, pluralistic image, I think that [divestment is] a pretty easy thing to do. Especially if it’s 0.1% of the College’s investments,” Vickers said. “The school will be like ‘oh, if it’s such a small amount why does it matter anyway,’ but at the same time the rationale of [Link’s announcement] is ‘oh, that’d be too difficult.’”
Vickers said that the language of Link’s announcement made it seem as if Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP were unaware that Occidental was not directly invested in the four companies up for divestment. According to Vickers, the groups learned during disclosure, a step preceding divestment that offered transparency into the College’s investments, that Occidental was only exposed to these companies via indirect investments.
“We feel as if the decision made us out to look like fools for somehow not knowing that we were directly invested,” Vickers said.
Vickers said that the framing of Link’s announcement was extraordinarily manipulative, making it seem as if divestment would mean an apocalypse on tuition and financial aid for the most vulnerable students.
“I believe you can have an operating educational institution without being invested in four companies. Simply saying ‘this is too much’ is a patent absurdity, as if the school can’t find alternative diversified funds,” Vickers said.
With one exception, Vickers said, the divestment proposal targeted American arms manufacturers. Elbit Systems, an international company, is headquartered in Israel.
“This is not divestment from Israeli investments and bonds more generally. This is four arms companies, four arms companies with probably the grossest and most egregious records of supporting human rights violators more broadly. Even if one is against BDS — just the idea that Israel should be directly targeted — I think most people with an inclination against violence more generally should be in support to divest from arms companies.”
Professor Jacob Mackey, a call for “institutional neutrality”
In his Feb. 7 Letter to the Editor, Comparative Studies in Literature and Culture (CSLC) Professor Jacob Mackey responded to faculty criticizing his statement that calling Israel a “settler-colonial” state is “inaccurate and dangerous.” In the introduction, Mackey said he is “convinced that a professor’s job on campus is to model exploration of nuance, complexity and the whole picture rather than to issue categorical denunciations of entire nations.”
The Board’s decision to not divest, Mackey wrote in a June 12 email to The Occidental, is one he fully endorses and is necessary in order to maintain “institutional neutrality” as outlined in the 1967 Kalven Committee “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.”
“The Report advised that institutions of higher education should strive to be welcoming homes for scholars and students devoted to a wide variety of social and political criticism and activism, but they should guard against becoming institutional agents of social and political criticism and activism themselves,” Mackey said via email.
Additionally, Mackey said he believes colleges have begun to lose democratic legitimacy as more people consider the institutions to be “transparently partisan political actors” that cater to specific viewpoints instead of “neutral, truth-seeking” parties that allow for the discussion of all viewpoints.
“A crucial step to regaining broad democratic legitimacy is for institutions like Oxy to refrain from publicly pronouncing on every fraught situation, foreign or domestic, that arises, and simultaneously to make clear that they strive to create supportive environments for scholars and students representing the full spectrum of views found in this country,” Mackey said via email. “To speak freely on such situations, no matter how controversial the views they express may be.”
Occidental alumnus, Professor Bill Mullen, a fiery dissent to the Board
Bill Mullen ‘81, a professor emeritus of English and American Studies at Purdue University — where he served as the faculty advisor to Purdue’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine — and the co-author of a May 9 letter sent to The Occidental and Occidental Administration voicing the solidarity of 21 Occidental alumni with student protesters, said that the message the Board is sending is that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim lives don’t matter.
“The Board’s decision not to divest suggests the normalization of genocide under the cover of pluralism,” Mullen wrote in a June 12 email to The Occidental.
Mullen said that Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP’s efforts have been heroic in raising awareness about Israel’s crimes against humanity.
“I hope the students will continue in their struggle to end Israeli apartheid, just as Oxy students and the world used the strategy of divestment to end South African apartheid,” Mullen said via email.
Oxy SJP’s next steps
When asked if Oxy SJP and Oxy JVP will bring a divestment proposal to the Board again, Vickers declined to answer.
“Stay tuned, that’s all I can say,” Vickers said.
Contact James Miller at jmiller4@oxy.edu and Kawena Jacobs at jacobsk@oxy.edu
