Nineteen students at Brown University say they’ve begun a hunger strike, in the hopes that the board that oversees the school will agree to bring the issue of divestment to a vote. The news comes amid Brown’s Corporation Board’s winter meetings, which end on Feb. 10.
The students say they will not end their hunger strike until the Board of Fellows and the Board of Trustees of Brown Corporation agree to introduce a proposal for Brown University to divest its $6.6 billion endowment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” Alongside the hunger strikes, students are rallying today and plan to throughout the week.
On Friday, they gathered at the Campus Center to voice their demands.
Nour Abaherah is a second-year student at Brown University’s School of Public Health who is participating in the hunger strike. She grew up in Johnston and was born in Jordan to a Palestinian family. Her grandparents fled from their village near Haifa during the Nakba. She said she saw firsthand the destruction that displacement caused.
“I was lucky enough to visit one time. And we actually got to visit our village that is complete rubble. It was really a bittersweet moment,” Abaherah said. “Witnessing the colossal losses in not just Gaza, the West Bank all around the world, and the ongoing impact of the humanitarian crisis, it’s really fueled my commitment to this hunger strike.”
Since Oct. 7, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, nearly 27,000 Gazans have been killed. UNICEF said up to 70% of the fatalities are children.
Abaherah added that trying to prevent the university from continued investment in arms manufacturing is a priority.
Students are basing their suggestions for divestment around a report from 2020 authored by an advisory committee at Brown University responsible for ensuring the University’s endowment investments meet the school’s moral and social obligations (formerly the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, or ACCRIP, now replaced with the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, or ACURM).
The advisory group released the report following a referendum that showed that 69% of undergraduate respondents supported divestment. The report recommended divestment and suggested criteria, including businesses that provide “products or services that contribute to the maintenance of the Israeli military occupation” and “contribute to violent acts against either Israeli or Palestinian civilians.”
Brown University’s endowment is invested in seven funds which are in turn invested in a variety of stocks. For example, it holds 19,167,905 shares in an American Century fund, whose portfolio is .2% comprised of investments in a defense contractor, according to its most recent full quarterly holdings report in 2022. The university also owns 122,263,167 shares in a company with portfolio holdings in at least 6 defense and aerospace companies.
It’s unclear how many of Brown’s holdings would meet the advisory board’s recommendations. But students participating in the hunger strike say divestment would send a strong symbolic message, even if the value of the investments is relatively low.
“Any amount of money, which is going to war profiteering, occupation, Israeli settlements, we feel that it’s blood money,” said senior Ariela Rosenzweig, who is among the students who began the hunger strike on Friday. “We really understand that universities, and particularly universities like Brown, are at the helm of building civil society pressure, and that civil society pressure can influence policy.”
In 2019, Brown University President Christina Paxson declined to bring a divestment proposal to the Brown corporation board for a vote. In an open letter to the school community, Paxson said, “Brown’s endowment is not a political instrument to be used to express views on complex social and political issues… Its role is not to take sides on contested geopolitical issues.”
In an op-ed in the Brown Daily Herald in 2019, Brown’s investment managers also cited why they could not share exact details about the university’s holdings, explaining that doing so would violate their outside investment managers’ “intellectual property” rights.
Brown has previously divested its endowment from equity holdings on social responsibility grounds, including during Paxson’s tenure as president.
In 2020, the school announced divestments from assets tied up in the fossil fuel industry. Paxson cited the decision as being “consistent with Brown’s values.” In recent decades, the university has also divested from holdings in tobacco, Sudan and Darfur, and HEI Hotels and Resorts because of criticism of its treatment of workers. In 1988, the Brown Corporation board also agreed to divest from inequitable companies doing business in South Africa during apartheid.
The stepped-up student activism this week follows other calls for divestment since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
On Nov. 8, Brown University students from a campus group called Brown U Jews for Ceasefire Now were arrested for trespassing during a sit-in in an administrative building after hours. The school later pushed for the charges against the students to be dropped after a Palestinian junior from Brown University was shot and paralyzed while wearing a keffiyeh and speaking Arabic in Burlington, Vermont. But a few weeks later during a second sit in, 41 students associated with another group called Brown Divest Coalition were arrested. They are scheduled to be arraigned on Feb. 12 and 14.
Brown University said it expected to issue a statement related to the hunger strikes later today.
Most of the students who will be hunger striking in protest say they have never been on hunger strike before. Students with vitamin deficiencies and who require medication will continue to take their medication and vitamins, and all students will drink water.
This is a developing story. We will post relevant updates as they come.
