The University of Minnesota Board of Regents voted not to divest endowment funds from Israel on Tuesday morning, concluding a process that started in April when anti-Israel protesters set up an encampment on Northrop Mall on the University’s Twin Cities Campus – and setting up the possibility of more protests to welcome students back to campus. The vote at the special meeting was 8-1, with three absent.
“Be it resolved that the Board, in exercising its fiduciary duty over the [e]ndowment, adopts a position of neutrality with respect to the Endowment and directs the [p]resident to continue to base investment decisions on financial criteria as defined by Board policy. Given that position, the Board declines the request to divest of certain investments related to Israel,” the resolution read.
The resolution also said that divestment “may be appropriate in rare circumstances. It directed new University President Rebecca Cunningham to develop a process for request submissions, which “must require that requests demonstrate fundamental incompatibility with the University’s mission and values, show broad consensus within the University community and beyond, consider the potential impact on relevant social and political matters, and assess the financial and operational effects on the [e]ndowment.”
“The reason we are addressing this resolution now, rather than at the September board meeting, is to let students and other members of our community know what our decision is with respect to our endowment before we start the fall semester together and work with President Cunningham to provide a safe and welcoming environment,” Board of Regents chair Janie Mayeron said prior to the introduction of the resolution.
Following the vote, an estimated 20 protesters from the UMN Divest coalition loudly booed the result.
The board had an initial review of the resolution in July and had a June work session on “understanding the university’s centrally held endowment,” which helped shape the policy.
Mayeron said the final language of the policy was shaped by feedback from the regents and “members of the university community, including input that was received in the last 48 hours from just university community as well.”
“Based on that feedback, at least the feedback that we had received prior to the docket going public on Friday, we worked closely with the President to prepare the revised resolution that is included in the docket materials,” Mayeron said.
Regent Robyn Gulley was the lone no vote. She offered an amendment that removed the word “neutrality” but kept the spirit of the original resolution intact.
“I still really feel challenged by using the word neutrality in this way, because to be neutral is to not do any of these other things,” Gulley said. “So it kind of makes my brain spin to try to figure out how we’re neutral and how we have other positions that are not neutral.”
Gulley also sought to change the “broad consensus” to “broad support.”
“[Consensus is] a very specific thing; it means that everyone agrees and that everyone has come to the same conclusion,” Gulley said. “We probably couldn’t even have consensus on what color the sky is at the whole university.”
Gulley’s amendment failed for lack of a second.
Ethan Roberts, the deputy executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said the organization applauded the result of the vote.
“The Board of Regents explicitly rejected divestment,” he said. “This was a core demand of the [encampment] protesters, and the university is absolutely not going in that direction.”
Divestment and disclosure were two of the six items that the school, then under the leadership of Interim President Jeff Ettinger, put in a message to encampment organizers as part of the concessions to end the encampment before graduation in the spring.
However, there was no promise to divest; the UMN Divest coalition and encampment organizers were invited – as were Jewish, pro-Israel student leaders – to “share your advocacy priorities” with the Board of Regents on May 10.
The University of Minnesota disclosed that about one-tenth of 1 percent of the school’s $2.27 billion endowment is invested in Israeli companies.
According to reporting by MPR News, which received the U’s figures from the UMN Divest coalition, the school’s endowment has “$2.4 million (or 0.11 percent of the total fund) in exposure to stocks and bonds of publicly traded Israel-domiciled companies, with an additional $2.6 million (or 0.12 percent of the total fund) in other publicly traded companies of interest, including select U.S.-based defense contractors.”
At the May Regents meeting, Minnesota Hillel outgoing president Alex Stewart detailed efforts by the Divest UMN coalition to have the school boycott, divest, and sanction Israel in 2016 and 2018, and the harassment that Jewish and non-Jewish students faced for participating in educational trips to Israel. She also pointed out the SJP national conference held at the University in 2019 under the title of “Dismantling Zionism.”
“In the face of the conference’s hateful imagery and messaging, Jewish students placed our own referendum on the all-campus election ballot asking if the University should adopt a definition of antisemitism to help identify and address anti-Jewish hatred on campus,” Stewart said. “That referendum easily passed because most UMN students reject hate. However, UMN Divest launched a forceful ‘Vote No’ campaign to prevent Jewish autonomy in defining and identifying the hate directed against our people.”
Last spring, UMN Divest ran another referendum on the all-campus ballot targeting Israel and calling for an academic boycott. The non-binding referendum passed overwhelmingly, although only about 10 percent of the campus voted. The referendum question was written in a broad way to appeal to students who have connections to any number of countries with human rights violations and war – though Israel is the only country explicitly named.
“We hope you see the same pattern we do: UMN Divest has done little more than inflame our campus, pit minority groups and friends against one another, and create a toxic environment that no longer feels safe for many students,” Stewart said. “All of these efforts have also marginalized Jewish students during a time when antisemitism has already been a growing concern, and they have left little space for good-faith dialogue across differences.”
Protest policies reiterated
Cunningham, who started as the University president on July 1, 2024, took the position as the previous administration came under fire from multiple constituencies over the handling of the anti-Israel protests and encampments at the end of the last school year.
Graffiti reading “Glory To The Resistance” on the walls of Coffman Union on the campus of the University of Minnesota.
“The University is firmly committed to academic freedom, freedom of expression, and the rights of students, faculty, and staff to express their views in the community. Core to this commitment is free, open, and respectful dialogue, regardless of viewpoint,” Cunningham said during her report at the Regents meeting. “Every member of the University community has this right and the accompanying responsibility not to interfere with or impede upon the rights of others to speak, study, teach, work and learn.”
As part of the report, Cunningham wrote that using tents, damaging University property or grounds – including graffiti and stickers – and interfering with classes, research, work, or other University operations, were not permitted.
“These policies are not new, and they were not altered at all in response to the events of last spring or last year,” she said. “These are existing university policies.
“We must be transparent so that our policies and the consequences for violating those policies are very clear. Given our timeline, I’ve been working intensely with members of my leadership team this summer to solidify our procedures in alignment with existing policies as it pertains, specifically to spontaneous civic engagement at the University of Minnesota.”
The guidelines on spontaneous civic engagement include time, place and manner restrictions. The restrictions come from a unanimous 1941 Supreme Court ruling that, although the government cannot regulate the contents of speech, it can place reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on speech for public safety.
“State entities like the University have the authority to impose [those],” said University of Minnesota Professor Jane Kirley, the director of the Silha School for Media Law and Ethics at the U’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communications. “For example, if you want to use bull horns or [amplification], the university would be within its authority to say you can’t do that at two in the morning when it’s going to disturb students who are studying or trying to sleep. Those would all be acceptable restrictions, and it would not violate the First Amendment to impose them.”
By law, time, manner and place restrictions have to be applied in a content-neutral manner.
“We would all hope that students and others would follow the rules…you can’t have one set of rules for the pro-Hamas protesters and another set of rules for others,” Roberts said. “You don’t have to have studied constitutional law to know that the government can’t pick and choose sides when it comes to protesters. These policies are long-standing. All we’re asking is to enforce your own rules.”
The Board of Regents meeting materials said that: “When civic engagement occurs, we seek to understand the nature of the event to protect protesters and to support students, staff and faculty who may feel targeted.” But, “engagement that is inconsistent with University policies becomes civil disobedience.”
When that happens, the board materials outlined four tiers of goals when responding to violations of school policy, ranging from educating on university policies to legal action.
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