The 27-member Board of Trustees of Macalester College has unanimously rejected a student proposal for the college to divest its endowment from Israel, Macalester President Suzanne Rivera announced on Thursday.
Instead, the board is allocating funding to invest in campus programs on peacemaking in the Middle East, and is authorizing $1 million from unrestricted endowment funds to fund scholarships for students from conflict areas.
The scholarships’ initial focus will be on Palestinian students.
“It is among Macalester’s most important and cherished values that all voices and views are able to be expressed and heard within the college community in a civil and respectful exchange,” said a letter from the board explaining its decision to focus on investment rather than divestment.
“To adopt the divestment proposal would not, in the Board’s determination, serve to espouse those values,” the letter said.
The divestment proposal was written and submitted by the student-led Mac for Palestine Coalition, which is deeply critical of the board’s rejection.
“What use is a scholarship to a Palestinian student if the college profits from the companies that bulldoze their home?” Mac for Palestine said in a statement on Instagram. “This decision is illegitimate, and so is the board’s claim to represent this college.”
The group launched a petition for a vote of no confidence in the board. Mac for Palestine aims instead for “a truly democratic vote” where all students, staff, and faculty can vote on divestment.
The board’s vote came months after a Macalester committee recommended it consider divesting the college’s endowment from Israel.
Macalester has $1.66 million – 0.19% of the total endowment – invested in the 11 companies singled out by Mac for Palestine’s proposal, mostly in two equity funds with Intel, Caterpillar, and Chevron stocks. The college has no direct investment with the companies.
The Macalester committee recommended another Mac for Palestine proposal, to end study abroad programs to Israel, be taken up by the college’s faculty.
Currently, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Haifa are on the college’s pre-approved list of study-abroad programs.
The board’s letter said it rejected divestment from Israel in part because of its fiduciary duty to the college.
“It is the Board’s view that the divestment proposal would impair the college’s ability to invest responsibly in support of its mission, including through market index funds and large equities portfolios offered and managed by third-party asset managers,” the letter said.
Another consideration was Minnesota’s anti-BDS law, which prevents the state from having contracts with entities that are part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“While the Board, with advice from outside counsel, believes this law, in its present form, may not apply to Macalester, there is no legal precedent to confirm this,” the board’s letter said.
“If this law were to apply to Macalester, or if future legislative action or amendment was taken in response to divestment, the Board believes that financial support, including student financial aid that the State of Minnesota provides to the Macalester student body, could be put at risk.”
The board’s decision comes after months of soliciting feedback from the Macalester community. Among the voices was Joshua Cororve, a Jewish junior at the college.
“The main thing I did was just connect with a lot of people, making sure they submitted feedback…a lot of my non-Jewish friends even came out and were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t like this,’” he said. “Honestly, I kind of think their feedback was almost more valuable.”
Ethan Roberts, the deputy executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas — and a 1996 graduate of Macalester — was pleased with the decision.
“The board of trustees is very ideologically diverse, and they reached, in our view, the right decision,” said Roberts, noting that universities large and small in Minnesota have rejected divestment efforts. “[Divestment] will make no difference in terms of the outcome of the war. It sounds like they followed, by all appearances, a very deliberate and inclusive process, which befits Macalester.”
Cororve suspects the board’s decision was also influenced by the U.S. presidential election. President-elect Donald Trump’s administration may punish colleges that attempt to divest from Israel.
One thing is clear: The campus is buzzing about the board’s vote.
“I definitely heard people talking about it,” Cororve said.
“Mostly people who are in student government because, apparently, President [Rivera] came to meet with them…I think for unrelated reasons, but it was a big topic of conversation,” he said.
