The results are in — after students set up an encampment on Parkhurst Hall’s lawn and demanded that it respond, the Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility has finally published its evaluation of the proposal for divestment from companies complicit in Israel’s violations of international law. The results are as expected: ACIR has voted unanimously to not forward the proposal for further review.
I say “as expected” because there was never any illusion among student activists that the College would ever seriously entertain a proposal to divest from Israeli human rights abuses. Such a move would certainly infuriate the many students, faculty and influential alumni with connections to Israel and could potentially put the College in the crosshairs of the Trump administration and its crackdown on universities. For an administration that was loath to even sign onto an open letter with all our Ivy peers offering surface-level criticisms of Trump’s crackdown, allowing a proposal for divestment to advance beyond a token review would be unthinkable.
That this result was inevitable is clear from even a quick glance at ACIR’s criteria. Most glaring is the requirement that any proposal demonstrate “consensus” in the Dartmouth community among students, faculty, staff, and alumni – as if divestment is ever a comfortable and noncontroversial process. Certainly, there was little consensus in the 1980s when Dartmouth divested from South African apartheid, a highly contested and hot-button issue that led to student encampments being smashed with sledgehammers by conservative students – one of whom, I should mention, was recently invited back to Dartmouth to lead a Dartmouth Dialogues panel on free speech.
ACIR’s response — which only came after students set up encampments demanding a response after months of silence — has only confirmed the suspicion that the proposal has been mostly shrugged off without serious consideration.
Take, for instance, the rationale behind ACIR’s grade of “only partially complete” on Criterion 1. The committee concluded that the proposal “does not engage sufficiently with counterarguments asserting that Israeli government actions are consistent with Dartmouth’s history, values, and/or its mission.” What those counterarguments might be – that dropping bombs on civilian centers and intentionally starving millions of civilians is conceivably consistent with Dartmouth’s mission – was conveniently omitted.
In fact, these counter arguments have already been addressed in the reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International cited in the proposal. These both conclusively demonstrate the systemic human rights abuses – including the crimes of apartheid and genocide – being committed by the Israeli government in Gaza with the help of corporations that Dartmouth invests in. Nowhere in ACIR’s response does the committee address the basic reality of these crimes, which, when committed in not-as-controversial Sudan, swiftly pushed Dartmouth to divest from companies supplying weapons to the Khartoum regime.
This is the crux of the issue. Regardless of whatever bodies Dartmouth has set up to regulate itself, or to paint the illusion of regulating itself, neither the College administration nor ACIR can pardon itself from its basic moral duty to not be invested in corporations perpetuating crimes against humanity. Regardless of how controversial it may be, and how much attention it may draw to the College, to not use our tuition dollars to pay for bombs that will be dropped on hospitals and refugee camps is a moral imperative.
As it stands the College is making the bar for divestment obstructively high, until either the outrage goes away, or it becomes convenient to go ahead with it — perhaps when the dust has settled, the genocide is over and Gaza is either free or “completely destroyed,” as the Israeli finance minister called for earlier this month. This much is clear: ultimately, more so than any ethical imperative, what really matters to our administrators is their bottom line and PR image.
So, one might ask, why bother with the proposal? Why bother with working with the College at all?
At the end of the day, the point of the proposal was never to win divestment through ACIR’s, President Beilock’s and the Board of Trustees’ stamp of approval. Much more work lies ahead on this campus and around the country to build the material conditions that will eventually force their hand. The point of the formal proposal has always been about rallying the struggle for divestment, developing the strength and clarity behind the movements’ arguments and bringing attention to the urgency to have Dartmouth divest from apartheid and genocide.
As far as that goal goes, the results are not yet in — but after innumerable protests, three sets of encampments, more than 90 arrests and a formal divestment proposal officially submitted and reviewed, it is undeniable that the movement for divestment is stronger now more than ever.
Opinion columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Ramsey Alsheikh is an opinion editor, staff columnist, and aspiring jack-of-all trades. He enjoys eating popcorn and thinks it would be cool to maybe write a novel someday. He is currently double majoring in Middle Eastern Studies modified with Jewish Studies and Computer Science.
