Seventeen Brown University students in the eighth day of a hunger strike broke their fast on Friday after coming face-to-face with the board members who have been the targets of their protest campaign.
The students on hunger strike, along with hundreds of others, have been asking the Brown University Corporation Board of Fellows and Trustees, the body that governs the university’s $6.6 billion endowment, to take a vote on a measure that would divest from companies they say profit from human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.
The student activists have been participating in a week of public rallies and actions on campus that came to a head Friday, as the students surrounded the Watson Institute building on campus where the board members were meeting. They stood outside chanting and singing for hours. The students then moved inside where they sat silently waiting for board members to come out of the meeting room.
At about 2 p.m., students took turns admonishing the members as they filed out of the room, but the protesters’ remarks were met with silence.
The meeting of the board came as 41 students who were arrested last semester while protesting for a similar cause are set to be arraigned next week.
Kalikoonamaukupuna Kalahiki, one of the students who ended their hunger strike today, said they felt the students have done all they could to try to persuade the board, and that it was disappointing the board members did not respond to the students. The board has been meeting for over a week, and will conclude its meetings tomorrow.
“It was discouraging in those moments, but I also feel like it shows that our ability to organize is effective because they are scared to even acknowledge our presence right now,” Kalahiki said.
Board members did not respond to questions from The Public’s Radio. A spokesperson for Brown University, Brian Clark, said the school expects to release more information on Monday about decisions made by the board at the meetings.
Board’s inaction follows escalating calls for divestment on Brown campus
As attention around the hunger strike spread this week, the students were joined by roughly 242 students and 26 faculty and staff in a 32-hour “solidarity fast” which began Thursday morning and ended early Friday evening, according to numbers provided by a spokesperson for the hunger strikers.
In the days since the strike began, the campus center became the primary indoor hub for activities aimed at supporting the hunger strike. Students played string music, sang, made art, and distributed flyers.
Ariela Rosenzweig, a Jewish student at Brown who participated in the hunger strike, says the university responded by enforcing rules they’d never seen in the campus center before – like cracking down on live music performances. Students were also prohibited from using the campus center to promote social media campaigns that drew attention to the hunger strike.
“It’s clear that the university is threatened by us. And it’s clear that maybe they don’t love student activism as much as they pretend to,” she said.
The school denies it selectively enforced rules in the campus center to undermine the students on hunger strike and their supporters. Brown says officially recognized campus groups are entitled to more privileges in the center than groups that don’t have official recognition. Some of the groups that supported the hunger strike in the campus center are recognized, while others are not.
The university has also prohibited journalists from reporting on the campus, beginning with a vigil on November 27 for Palestinian Brown junior Hisham Awartani, who was shot and paralyzed while wearing a keffiyeh and speaking Arabic with his friends in Burlington, Vermont, over Thanksgiving break.
Confrontations between students and Brown University President Christina Paxson took center stage at that vigil. Paxson was shouted down from the microphone by student protesters calling for divestment.
Some students accuse Paxson of acting in self interest, call board members zionists
None of the university’s board members have received more criticism throughout the divestment protests than the school president. Paxson has maintained the school’s board should avoid taking a stance on thorny issues “on which thoughtful people vehemently disagree,” but some students say she’s taken that stance to protect her career.
Sherena Razek, who is the president of Brown’s Graduate Labor Organization and Palestinian-Canadian, believes Paxson has been dodging the divestment controversy because she’s being influenced by what has happened to other university presidents, like Liz Magill of UPenn and Claudine Gay of Harvard. After testifying before U.S. lawmakers, those presidents resigned amid pressure from groups who accused them of anti-semitism.
“She’s just trying to keep herself out of Congress honestly, and she’s worried about her own career,” said Razek.
Paxson has not responded to student criticism that her handling of the situation is influenced by how it could affect her career. Brown’s endowment is indirectly invested in companies that meet the recommendations for divestment previously made by a school advisory board. In a 2019 op-ed in the Brown Daily Herald, Paxson said the school can’t share information about how its investment managers make their decisions, calling it their intellectual private property.
Razek also accused several Brown Corporation board members of being zionists and said that’s why they want to avoid voting on a divestment measure.
None of the board members have spoken publicly about the controversy at Brown. It’s unclear whether any of them identify as supporters of Israel. Students have specifically criticized Brown trustee Maria Zuber, who sits on the board of the Providence-based aerospace and defense firm Textron.
The students have received support from others at the school. In the fall, about 250 Brown faculty members signed a letter saying the school should reopen discussions on divestment. Niyanta Nepal, a junior who participated in the hunger strike, said she and her peers now prefer to sign up for classes with the professors who are validating their concerns.
“I think that’s become a new culture at Brown. During shopping period, you cross-reference the names of your professors with the names who signed the faculty letter, because ultimately those professors are the ones who care about their students and care about the lives of all their students equally,” said Nepal.
Why a measure for divestment was not brought for a vote
Much of the divestment debate on Brown’s campus has centered around a four-year-old report in which a now-disbanded advisory body charged with ensuring the school’s endowment was responsibly invested recommended the university divest from companies “which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” Since then, student activists have repeatedly brought up the recommendation and a preceding student referendum as reasons for divestment. Each time Paxson has struck it down.
The 2019 undergraduate student referendum calling for divestment passed with 69% of the vote. The same year, a graduate student referendum passed with 87% of the vote.
The advisory body, called the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, or ACCRIP, has since been replaced by the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management, or ACURM.
President Paxson has cited procedural reasons related to the committees as reasons for not bringing a divestment proposal to the corporate board.
Responding to the ACCRIP proposal, Paxson wrote in March 2021: “In my view, the recommendation did not adequately address the requirements for rigorous analysis and research as laid out in ACCRIP’s charge, nor was there the requisite level of specificity in regard to divestment.” More recently, Paxson said she would not revisit recommendations made in 2020.
Fulvio Domini, professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown and a former member of ACCRIP, said the advisory body was not done with its work at the time Paxson dismissed the proposal.
“Our intention was to go forward with that and start investigating,” he said. “What I would do, if I were the president of the university, I would say, ‘I am going to build a task force, which is going to dig into our investments and try to figure out possible ways we are going to do this. So that we can take away this money.’ I mean, if we want to do it, we will do it.”
Domini said he did not know why ACCRIP was replaced, though he said the body did know it was likely to be replaced before it authored its report. Brian Clark, the spokesperson for Brown University, wrote in an email that it was not “disbanded but transitioned” to a new committee following a faculty vote during a May meeting. Clark said the new committee differs because it is not limited to investment policy in its scope, like ACCRIP was.
Some student activists think the new advisory body is a watered down version of the old advisory body. There are more staff members and people from the administration on the new body. And, according to Clark, all staff, faculty and alumni on the new advisory body were chosen “with advice from the President.”
A representative from ACURM said the committee has not yet received a proposed divestment measure related to Palestine from anyone from the Brown community. But students say there isn’t time to follow that protocol, given the amount of violence and destruction that has taken place in Israel and the Palestinian territories. Since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the United Nations reports more than 27,000 Palestinians and more than 1,200 Israelis have been killed.
Rosenzweig, the student who participated in the hunger strike, said this week the urgency of the situation requires more immediate action by the school.
She called it “absurd to suggest that we would pass the same report to the same committee and wait another year for them to give the same recommendation – and for President Paxson to give us the same ‘No.’”
