Trinity College Rejects Divestment Proposal Pushed by Anti-Israel Activists
School says using its endowment ‘to exert political influence’ would injure it financially.
By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner
Trinity College in Connecticut has rejected a proposal to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
“Guided by its fiduciary responsibilities, the board of trustees has chosen not to change or revise Trinity College’s investment policies,” a statement issued by the school on Monday said. “We will continue with our primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity to support current and future generations of students.”
It continued, “The long-term and practical challenges of divesting or utilizing the endowment to exert political influence would create too much risk for the institution and potentially compromise its ability to carry out its primary educational mission. The college’s faculty, staff, students, and future students depend upon a strong and growing endowment to support our critical operations.”
In its communication, the college pointed to three groups which demanded divestment from Israel or “disclosure” of the extent of its financial ties to Israel or companies with which it does business, including manufacturers of armaments. Those groups include the Palestine Solidarity Encampment at Trinity College, TrinDivests, and a faction within the college faculty which called on school officials to comply with the students’ demands.
It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, American universities are largely rejecting demands to divest from Israel and entities at all linked to the Jewish state, delivering further blows to the pro-Hamas protest movement, which students and faculty pushed with dozens of illegal demonstrations to coerce officials into enacting the policy.
As Trinity College did on Monday, Chapman University trustee Jim Burra cited in September a “fiduciary responsibility” to future students and faculty which ruled out divestment as a possibility, explaining that “it is important that we make financial decisions based on risk and return.” The prior month, the University of Minnesota pointed to the same reason while touching on the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. However, the university did adopt a new policy for its investments, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.
“For the past several months, we have sought expert analysis and a variety of perspectives on how the university invests its Consolidated Endowment Fund,” University of Minnesota Board of Regents chair Janie Mayeron said in a statement at the time. “We have reviewed how this fund operates, how it supports affordable education for students, groundbreaking research, and community engagement, and the possible financial challenges of divestment … In the end, it is clear our community is divided on the topic. After careful consideration of all this input, we believe today’s action honors our fiduciary duty and the long term needs of the university.”
Several weeks earlier, Oberlin College’s Board of Trustees voted against divestment after reviewing a proposal submitted by “Students for a Free Palestine,” a spin-off of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations.
Colleges and universities will lose tens of billions of dollars collectively from their endowments if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel , according to a report published in September by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.
The losses estimated by JLens are cataclysmic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.
“This groundbreaking report approached the morally problematic BDS movement from an entirely new direction — its negative impact on portfolio returns,” New York University adjunct professor Michael Lustig said in a statement extolling the report. “JLens has done a great job in quantifying the financial effects of implementing the suggestions of this pernicious movement, and importantly, they ‘show their work’ by providing full transparency into their methodology, and properly caveat the points where assumptions must necessarily be made. This report will prove to be an important tool in helping to fight noxious BDS advocacy.”
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