A proposed referendum on whether the University of Connecticut should divest from companies that conduct business with Israel failed in the student senate on Wednesday night.
The referendum would have been released to the public university’s undergraduate student body to put to a public vote several questions, including whether the university should disclose its investments in companies and organizations that “profit from, engage in or contribute to the state of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and apartheid regime.”
The university’s chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine, Muslim Students Association and Jewish Voice for Peace sponsored the document.
The student senate voted against the referendum 15-8, with four abstentions.
“We dodged a bullet,” Joel Harris, a sophomore and student senator at the university, told JNS. “We dodged protests erupting on campus, urging students to vote a certain way,” he said, noting that the wording of each question “featured words like ‘genocide,’ ‘apartheid’ and ‘ethical’ in a way to imply a correct answer.”
Some student senators who had initially been in favor of the proposed referendum ended up voting against it, according to Harris.
“University bylaws state that a referendum has to be concise and neutral, and this particular referendum was neither of those two things,” he said.
Harris added that he hopes the campus community “can return to normal,” adding that “with this behind us, we can get back to just being Jewish and being proud of our identity.”
Sophie Rifkin, a sophomore and student senator at the university, told JNS that the Jewish community “has been very vocal” in speaking out against the referendum.
“We put ourselves out there, spoke our minds, stood up for ourselves even though it wasn’t necessarily a popular opinion,” said Rifkin, who is also an Emerson fellow at StandWithUs. “A lot of students were very scared to speak out, but they did anyway.”
“We were able to get our point across well and prevent something really biased and really harmful from being passed,” she said.
