The Point: Divestment Now!: UMass and the Economy of Genocide
11/20/2025
This week’s edition was written by The Point committee. As always, The Point represents the views of the authors and is not the official position of the FSU.
This week, the Point collective wants to call your attention to the important efforts being made by our colleagues in the UMass Divest Coalition. This group of faculty and staff from around the system have been working for the past year to persuade campus leaders to divest from any businesses or institutions that materially support the government and military of Israel in response to the genocide and famine in Palestine.
For many of us the campus activism of the late 1970s and 1980s aimed at persuading American institutions of higher learning to divest all holdings from apartheid South Africa is a living memory. Encampments, protest rallies, op-eds and more were constituents of a nationwide collective strategy to apply moral suasion as a political tool. While the Reagan administration pursued a policy of “constructive engagement,” campus activists argued with their words and deeds that it was long past time for major players in the US economy to use divestment as a lever to effect necessary social and political change in South Africa. By the mid-1980s this once radical position had come to define the political landscape of the United States. What once seemed an impossibly ambitious strategy turned out to win the day.
We face a similar challenge today vis-à-vis Israel, though of course anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s did not face anything like the concerted repression and discipline we are seeing currently.
On Sept. 16, the UN Commission of Inquiry officially declared that the crisis in Gaza is a genocide and announced that all countries must immediately cease activities contributing to it. While no one expects notoriously conservative university administrators or Boards of Trustees to lead the way in refusing to do business in Israel, it has been remarkable to see these powerful forces come to serve as enthusiastic agents of cruelty against those students, staff, and faculty members who dare to call this question.
Our own system has become deeply complicity in this massive historical crime: UMass leadership refuses to divest the millions of dollars it holds in companies whose products are used to carry out atrocities in Palestine, claiming its responsibility is not to human welfare, but only to the unbridled success of its investments.
There is simply no gainsaying that Israel has killed a heartbreaking number of Gaza’s residents,
the overwhelming majority of them civilians–and disproportionately women and children. Israel has carpet-bombed residential blocks, blanketing refugee camps with internationally-banned chemicals like white phosphorous, destroying almost every hospital, every school, and 80% of Gaza’s water-treatment capacity. It has blocked aid in order to enact a brutal campaign of mass starvation that a UN World Food Programme official has called “unlike anything we have seen in this century.” Our taxes and our corporate investments have substantially underwritten this terrifying violence. Our government officials–both Democrats and Republicans–support it financially and politically. However, as UMass employees and students, we shoulder additional responsibility. This is because our university endowment is invested in corporations and banks that supply funding and equipment being used to commit it.
The UMass Foundation is the private, nonprofit corporation that manages university investments. It has roughly $1.1 billion in total assets. Many millions of dollars of these assets are invested in several of the corporations and five of the seven Israeli banks that have been directly supporting and profiting from the genocide (The Shoestring). There is no democratic mechanism for the university community to decide together how these assets should be invested. As entire governments around the world are questioning and ending their financial relationships with the Israeli occupation, we watch in horror as the Foundation forces us to continue breaking international law as well as domestic human rights law.
The financial benefits these investments provide to the UMass system perhaps explain the bureaucratic and legal stonewalling of every attempt our community has made to use divestment as a protest strategy. For example, they explain the violent repression of our free speech rights on campus, including Chancellor Reyes’ decision to violently mass-arrest 133 students, faculty, staff, and community members simply for asking the university to consider divestment. This outrageous assault on our freedom of speech cost Massachusetts taxpayers around $100,000, and the mock “investigation” that later absolved Reyes cost a jaw-dropping $446,000.
On April 23, 2025, the UMass Divest Coalition, a group of professors from across the system, submitted a Request to Review to the Socially Responsible Investing Advisory Committee (SRIAC) of the UMass Foundation. The Request contains three pages of evidence linking UMass Foundation investments to corporate entities credibly accused of aiding or profiting from war crimes and human rights violations around the world, and it was signed by around 300 UMass faculty, students, staff, librarians, and alumni. In response the Divest Coalition received a perfunctory note, stating that the committee had met and decided to “respectfully deny” the request.
No clear reason was given for this denial nor did the Foundation representative explain what process they followed. It should be noted that of the nine listed members of the SRIAC, eight are from the world of business, marketing, or financial relations (the ninth is a professor at the Chan Medical School). It should be concerning that no one with a background in politics, history, or any other discipline that might shed light on the broader context played a role in determining what “socially responsible investment” might mean.
After the Divest Coalition requested an explanation from the SRIAC concerning the denial, they received the following response:
“The conclusion largely centered on the Foundation’s mission and policies. The Foundation is committed to insulating the endowment from external influences. This ensures that investment decisions are grounded in fiduciary considerations, including risk mitigation, and maximizing impact to the University’s mission.”
The email starkly clarifies what “social responsibility” means to the UMass Foundation. It has nothing to do with contributing to the welfare and rights of actual human beings, nor with ensuring that our investments are not being used to burn people alive in tents, destroy universities, or murder journalists. Rather, it seems that for the UMass Foundation, “social responsibility” exclusively concerns the Foundation’s responsibility to its investments.
The anti-democratic practices of the UMass Foundation are troubling, to say the least. The unelected group of business and finance experts who make all our investment decisions are preventing the actual UMass community from having any control over the ethics of university investment practices. Instead, they view the community as an “external influence” from which the endowment must be protected at all costs.
For all these reasons, the UMass Divest Coalition demands a voice in meaningful shared governance with respect to the university’s investment choices. Until there is some guarantee that the material resources of this institution are spent in an ethical way, all of us will remain complicit with war crimes. Only when we seize control from the hands of these administrators, bankers, and market analysts, and put it into the hands of faculty, staff, and students, can we ensure that our university stops supporting genocide and contributes instead to a more just and peaceful world.
For more information, please contact the UMass Divest Coalition