Joshua Glucksman '24.5, Merih Etgu ’26 and Phoebe An ’27 are members of the divestment campaign by Middlebury Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP).
Since the beginning of October, Israel has invaded Lebanon, killing 2,367 and wounding 11,088, overseen the one year anniversary of its genocide in Gaza whose death toll likely soars above 100,000, and begun the ongoing siege of northern Gaza described by one United Nations envoy as “a genocide within a genocide.”
Last spring, the college committed to financial transparency and to begin talking towards codifying divestment from arms manufacturing as a result of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. This coincided with a landslide Student Government Association (SGA) referendum showing 90% student support for endowment transparency and 80% for divestment from arms manufacturing and war profiteering.
It is under these circumstances that four students presented to the Board of Trustees’ Resources Committee and the Middlebury College Board of Advisors yesterday afternoon. SJP demanded that the Resource Committee bring a vote to begin divestment with a list of 45 companies flagged under “Weapons and Military Equipment” by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). Simultaneously, we called to codify this divestment with Middlebury’s contracted investment firm Investure to ensure no future investments in companies profiting from war.
Unfortunately, Middlebury remains complicit in the devastation of the Middle East through their investments in companies that profit off of death. The college’s announcement last May titled “A Commitment to Common Educational Values” stated: “Middlebury is not invested in arms or arms manufacturers,” but we were deeply misled based on a technicality. In fact, 1.1% of our endowment’s roughly $1.6 billion is invested in the AFSC-flagged companies. That is approximately $18 million. This deception comes down to methodology. While the defense industry is a category in the major industry taxonomies, companies must be fully devoted to manufacturing weapons to be flagged as an arms manufacturing company. However, a majority of the companies we flagged for divestment, such as General Electric, one of the largest weapons companies in the world, is classified as ‘aerospace’ due to its other products.
Despite this, in hopes that a shorter list would prompt swifter action, the negotiators agreed to work with a list of 25 companies as a sign of good faith. These companies are the highest priority for divestment actions using the AFSC’s evaluation point system. However, even with this reduction, the Board refused to take further action, prompting negotiators to return to the list of 45 companies. With their lack of action, the Board of Trustees continues to allow their financial power to invest in companies whose products continue to annihilate the Palestinian people.
How can we reconcile that the college’s mission statement purports to “foster the inquiry, equity, and agency necessary for [students] to practice ethical citizenship” with their refusal to engage in concrete action towards divestment backed by the vast majority of students? It is very clear that our values must come before profit: after all, the endowment’s very purpose is “to provide sustainable financial support for Middlebury to service its mission.” An education funded by genocide is anathema to the practice of ethical citizenship. How can we first focus on fixing the world’s problems when injustice exists right here, on our own campus? The answer right now is that we, as the entire student body, can hold the Board accountable to divest from war.
Part of this support requires understanding the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement.
The Palestinian-created movement is a non-violent tactic endorsed by 170 Palestinian civil society bodies, based on the success of similar efforts during the struggle against South African apartheid, a regime that Middlebury activists successfully led divestment from in 1986. It has been a dynamic part of the Palestinian liberation struggle for almost two decades, and has gone through many campaigns, including the current encampment-related focus on endowments.
We know from the legacy of divestment at Middlebury that change does not happen overnight, but that the process must nevertheless commence. For example, Middlebury’s commitment to divestment from fossil fuels will take 15 years, but this divestment is an investment in Middlebury’s future. Similarly, divestment from war profiteering will ensure that we do not profit from any future civilian death, environmental destruction or annihilation of universities as is happening in Gaza. Middlebury must secure a legacy that is not funded by a continual cycle of violence.
Valid concerns about divestment and its impact on the financial state of students and staff are important to our intersectional struggles as a community. Divesting our endowment should never come at the cost of wages nor financial aid. We know this concern is real, with 45.5% of respondents to Middlebury’s Staff Council survey finding it necessary to find a second source of income to make ends meet. However, this is a reflection of a deeper issue with the college, as even when refusing divestment in the name of prioritizing profit, our institution still fails to pay its laborers a liveable wage. Thus, the fight for divestment from war should not be conflated with Middlebury’s far deeper problem of devaluing academic and non-academic labor.
In divestment debates now and throughout history, common concerns voice that if one does not buy a stock, someone else will. We urge you to consider that the point of a global divestment movement is not solely financial, as some of the main benefits of divestment are raising public consciousness so that moral actors divesting from stocks far outweigh immoral ones. Do not be tricked by moral apathy, or the nihilistic logic akin to the Israeli telling the Palestinian, “if I don’t steal [your home] someone else will.” As an elite educational institution, our influence is one link in a chain of the global movement, as has been the case with collegiate divestments from South Africa, Tobacco, Sudan and most recently fossil fuels.
As we write, the Israeli aid blockade of Gaza continues. Northern Gaza is encircled by occupation forces who have cut all internet and telecommunications. They are incinerating wounded children in hospital tents, gunning down those who leave their shelters in search of food and ethnically cleansing Jabalia. We are presently faced with a serious question about the kind of world we will accept living in. As children, many of us were told “you are the future” and “you are going to change the world.” We are children no longer; the future is now. As students of the humanities, we ask: is this compatible with any definition of humanity?
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated for online publication to better reflect the description of the arms manufacturing industry in relation to divestment.
