ASOC’s Diversity and Equity Board (DEB) released a statement via email Dec. 12, 2025 detailing funding changes and listing businesses they are boycotting, citing inspiration from the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
According to DEB’s email, these businesses “[…] have been identified as facilitating apartheid, colonialism, deportation, militarization, surveillance, and genocide,” and therefore go against DEB’s stance against discrimination.
“Many of the companies which DEB is boycotting work alongside the U.S. government to further Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine,” the email states.
Dean of Students Vivian Santiago sent an email Dec. 12 to students in response to DEB’s announcement stating “Occidental College does not approve or endorse the boycott.”
“As stated in ASOC’s operating agreement, the expenditure of ASOC funds should reflect the ‘broadest variety of student interests.’ Use of ASOC student fees to promote individuals’ political causes, on the other hand, threatens the College’s longstanding commitments to free speech and academic freedom and can negatively impact the College,” Santiago said in the email.
ASOC President Trisha Bhima said the Executive Committee took a vote on whether or not to allow DEB’s funding changes, because if one branch of ASOC wants to add specific funding specifications, it alters ASOC’s funding guidelines.
“[DEB] came to the Executive Committee saying ‘We as DEB have voted to make these changes to our funding guidelines’ […] and the rest of the Executive Committee passed it unanimously to add that as a funding guideline for DEB specifically,” Bhima said.
Bhima said the Executive Committee’s decision to vote to allow these changes was based on the belief that DEB should have agency on how they choose to spend their money.
“It’s not outrageous. [They’re not] refusing to fund people on the basis of whether they publicly support DEB or not,” Bhima said. “Because they’ve voted unanimously, we want to support DEB and their judgment more than anything else.”
The Dean of Students’ office sent another email Dec. 26, encouraging students to keep submitting funding requests to ASOC.
“Student Affairs has been working with ASOC student leadership, with the goals of ensuring their funding guidelines represent the interests of all students, avoid potential inequities, and reduce any risk to faculty research,” the email said.
According to Bhima, DEB often takes funding requests from affinity groups that hold events to increase diversity and equity on campus.
“DEB is unique in that they also fund individual funding requests, so a lot of times if there are students who are struggling to pay for food, for shelter, for transportation, DEB is able to provide those needs for them,” Bhima said. “A lot of those are done very privately because we don’t want all the students knowing of the financial needs of a specific student.”
Bhima said DEB’s funding restrictions are similar to those of the Sustainability Fund (Sus Fund), which recommend that students put forth sustainable funding requests to their branch. According to Bhima, DEB was following in the footsteps of Sus Fund to be intentional about where their money is spent.
“The boycott that DEB [announced] last semester was essentially saying that DEB did not want to fund any requests to buy materials from the companies that they had listed,” Bhima said.
Some of the boycotted companies listed by DEB include Amazon, Target, Domino’s Pizza and The Home Depot.
In an email to The Occidental, Santiago said, “The college has been working with ASOC student leaders to ensure that funding decisions continue to be equitable and inclusive of our pluralistic student body.”
According to Bhima, there is a mismatch of expectations between DEB and college administrators in terms of the control DEB has over their funding guidelines.
“The college believes that DEB’s actions are violating the ASOC operating agreement, and obviously, if DEB thought they were violating the ASOC agreement, they wouldn’t have put out something like that, and so their discussions are mainly based on that,” Bhima said.
Contact Ava LaLonde at lalonde@oxy.edu
