Source: Waging Nonviolence

The pro-Palestinian divestment movement has erupted across the country, after over a decade of bubbling and stirring under the guidance of organizations like Students for Justice in Palestine. Students have built encampments, led walkouts and passed student government resolutions demanding that their universities cease investing their endowments in companies that uphold Israel’s genocidal apartheid system.

Some student governments have even passed resolutions preventing their own budgets from being used to benefit Israel’s regime in any way. University of California Davis was the first to do so, blocking off its $20 million budget from genocide-supporting companies. This of course pales in comparison to the full demands of the students in the University of California, or UC, system, the divestment of its entire $27 billion endowment. 

These divestment fights are important and open up a path towards a struggle that can make divestment permanent, and change the country’s political landscape forever. The power to divest lies in the hands of unelected college governing boards and any movement that can seize even a small portion of that power will have the potential to redirect billions of dollars away from Israel, oil companies and any corporation or entity that seeks to harm the oppressed and the planet. 

While boards are currently dominated by Zionists, Democratic and Republican party political lackeys, and corporate CEOs, they should be put to a vote and under the control of those most impacted by colleges — students, faculty, staff, alumni and the communities that surround them. This idea isn’t new. The first university in Western history, the University of Bologna, was founded as a student-governed mutual aid society, and students across the U.S. gained small amounts of governing power during the 1960s and 1970s. It is not guaranteed that democratically-elected boards will deliver justice, but they are significantly more likely to than the undemocratic boards we currently have. 

A fight for more democratic boards could place the question of divestment into the hands of students and faculty and move large amounts of funding from genocide and toward social movement projects. And even if it fails, the threat to the power of boards could lead to them buckling on the reasonable demand of divestment from genocide.

The board game

Most colleges have some form of a board of trustees (sometimes called a board of regents or governors when they oversee an entire system like the University of Texas or the UC system) that serves as their main governing body. These boards are the ones that use endowments to invest in corporations that bulldoze the homes of Palestinians and support Israel’s army in murdering children. 

While student governments and faculty senates exist, and sometimes have independent budgets like within the UC system, they have little to no power over the larger decisions of a university. And while administrators have a lot of say in day-to-day campus affairs, most of their decisions and direction come from the board of trustees or the college president or chancellor, who are chosen by the board.


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