Brown University announced on Wednesday that it is rejecting demands from anti-Israel protesters to divest from companies that do business with the Jewish state.
The university’s president, Christina Paxson, and Brian Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America and chancellor of Brown’s governing Corporation, announced that a majority of Brown’s trustees and fellows voted against student demands to boycott Israel-affiliated companies.
“Brown’s mission doesn’t encompass resolving or adjudicating global conflict,” Paxson and Moynihan wrote. “Our greatest contribution to the cause of peace, for which so many members of the community have advocated, is to continue to educate future leaders and produce scholarship that informs and supports their work.”
The vote followed a deal that Paxson and campus protesters struck in the spring to end Brown’s anti-Israel tent encampment in exchange for the university considering divestment from 10 companies that, the protesters allege, help Israel maintain its “occupation of Palestine.”
The companies include Motorola, Volvo and defense contractors like Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
The administrators noted that Brown’s advisory commission on resource management found that the school’s $6.6 billion endowment had only small, indirect investments in the companies.
“Based on data from June 30, 2023, Brown’s indirect investments in the ten companies represent only 0.009% (i.e., nine-thousandths of 1%) of their aggregate market value,” they wrote. “Any indirect exposure for Brown in these companies is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm.”
Universities across the country have taken a range of positions on anti-Israel campus protests, from forcible police dispersals to accommodation with the protesters demands.
A growing number of universities has also formally adopted “institutional neutrality” on social and political issues, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression recording 17 colleges that adopted that stance in 2024, amid widespread anti-Israel protests.
Brown’s administrators suggested that they were open to the idea of the university using its investments to make a political statement, but that lack of consensus between pro- and anti-Israel voices precluded doing so in this instance.
“Divestment is inherently a social and political action,” Paxson and Moynihan wrote. “We recognize that in two instances—Sudan and South Africa—Brown made divestment decisions that could, today, appear to be largely symbolic.”
“While we note that there are many important differences between these cases,” they added, “the Corporation felt that the current backdrop of deep divisions within our community—to say nothing of nationally—clearly distinguish this proposal.”
Todd Rokita, the attorney general of Indiana, called the vote a “huge win.”
“The Brown Divest Now proposal would have given the university a green light to divest from several companies just because they do business with Israel. Pursuing this anti-Israel divestment would’ve carried serious legal consequences for Brown, its employees and its student body,” Rokita wrote.
“We, along with 23 other states, called on their fellows and trustees to reject this antisemitic and unlawful policy back in August and are pleased they made the right decision and voted it down,” he added. “We will continue working to fight back against the rising antisemitism happening in our state and across the country.”
The Anti-Defamation League welcomed Brown’s vote. “BDS-aligned investment strategies are not only morally misguided, but also economically unsound,” the ADL said.
