After weeks of escalating protests, arrests, and a faculty-led occupation, The New School in Manhattan came to an agreement with encampment participants to have the board of trustees investment committee hold a vote on divestment from companies complicit in Israeli violence by June 14. The deal, struck on May 20, ended a tense standoff during which professors joined students in an encampment inside the school’s welcome center to demand divestment and keep the police off campus.
Faculty launched an encampment and grade strike on May 8 after The New School shut down a student-led encampment on May 3, with university officials calling in police to arrest more than 40 students. The grade strike and faculty encampment were launched after the arrests to pressure the university to meet student demands. Faculty named their encampment the Refaat Alareer Faculty Solidarity Encampment after a prominent Palestinian poet and professor killed by an Israeli airstrike.
“We want to demilitarize the [investments] that we have at The New School,” said Hala Abdel Malak, a strategic design and management assistant professor at The New School and co-director of the Master of Fine Arts in transdisciplinary design. “We’re also asking that all cops are [kept] off campus.”
On May 14, faculty and students occupied the school’s welcome center, renaming it the Lama Center after 9-year-old Lama Jamous, a girl who made headlines reporting on the war in Gaza. The encampment is just one of many actions that faculty at The New School have taken to support student protesters, including direct action and behind-the-scenes support.
“Faculty stepped in to work with the students to prepare for their suspension hearings and attended all these hearings with them,” Abdel Malak said. “There has been a move to create more working groups for financial transparency to really ask, ‘How do we actually do this divestment,’ and push in that way.”
Police and campus security have responded to the protests with aggression. On May 9, the day after the faculty protest started, police arrested 13 people outside the school, with protesters alleging that they were sprayed with a chemical. On May 14, a confrontation took place at the encampment site between New School security and protesters, with protesters alleging security being violent against faculty and students and denying bathroom access. The aggression against faculty at The New School has manifested at several other schools, although some universities have taken stronger action against faculty than others.
“I’m facing a trespassing charge legally,” said Alex Boodrookas, an assistant professor of history at Metropolitan State University of Denver who was arrested at a pro-Palestine protest on April 26 on the Auraria campus. “My administration has not penalized faculty at this point in time, which is very different from many other institutions around the country, and it has made an enormous difference.”
Besides arrests and violence, faculty fighting for divestment are also up against bureaucratic administrations that do not want outside interference in investment decisions. Administrators often use the argument of fiduciary responsibility—the principle that endowment managers are required to ensure maximum return for their shareholders—to argue that divestment would limit their ability to seek the best investments, particularly since endowments do not often invest in individual companies but private equity and exchange-traded funds that often include dozens of companies. While many investors use environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors to determine where to invest, divesting according to these factors can be complicated and time-intensive.
“No doubt it is complicated, but if you look at the campaigns for fossil fuel divestment, which are under ESG, there is quite a large number of universities that have divested from fossil fuels,” said Kelly Grotke, a higher education finance consultant who provides research services to students, alumni, and unions on university endowments. “If that’s possible, then so are the demands [students are making now], and there are varied demands from the student groups leading the divestment requests.”
The impact of divestment is also up for debate. While economic analysis suggests that divestment from South Africa in the 1980s did not significantly impact the country’s economy, other experts argue that the reputational damage South Africa suffered from university divestments contributed to the abolition of the country’s apartheid system.
At many schools, faculty who have chosen to support pro-Palestine protests have done so by writing letters in support of student protesters. At Harvard University, more than 300 faculty members signed a letter calling on interim President Alan Garber to negotiate with encampment protesters, and more than 500 faculty and staff signed a letter condemning unprecedented disciplinary action taken against the protesters after several seniors were barred from graduating. Professors at several colleges have also led teach-ins and sometimes camped with students. In cases such as these, faculty have used their prominent positions to provide support for student activists.
“Faculty inhabit prominent positions within these institutions … but faculty, particularly at institutions that have tenure systems, can be around for a long time,” said Lee Smithey, a peace and conflict studies professor at Swarthmore College. “Faculty become sources of institutional memory, and we like to think that our vocation as educators carries a certain level of respect.”
At some schools, faculty have called for no-confidence votes against university leaders for cracking down on pro-Palestine protesters. On May 16, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Columbia University passed a resolution of no confidence in President Minouche Shafik, condemning her decision “to ignore our statutes and our norms of academic freedom and shared governance, to have our students arrested, and to impose a lockdown of our campus with continuing police presence.” Faculty at Emory University also voted in favor of a resolution expressing no confidence in President Gregory Fenves after the university unleashed police on the student encampment on Emory’s quad, leading to the arrest of 17 students and three faculty members.
Some universities have been easier to negotiate with than others. The University of California, Riverside (UCR), came to an agreement with student protesters to make its investments more transparent in return for pro-Palestinian protesters ending their encampment. David Lloyd, a distinguished professor of English and a founding member of Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCR, said the deal fell short of creating a substantial impact, but he added that UCR had a more constructive environment for negotiation on this issue given the large number of faculty involved in Faculty for Justice in Palestine and UCR’s relatively low reliance on wealthy donors.
“We’re not isolated, and we have in the past been able to put pressure on the administration to back off from its positions with regard to students through making statements, through asking for meetings with the chancellor, and so forth,” said Lloyd. “Riverside is also not a campus which historically has had very large donations.”
Lloyd said that professors with tenure should not be afraid to speak up for Palestine, particularly given that faculty have more employment protections than most people. He said that if faculty do not speak up at this moment, it is hard to imagine when they would.
“I was part of the organizing among faculty during the South African anti-apartheid movement, and you could count on a few hands the number of faculty who were actually active in that,” Lloyd said. “Now, I think you would be hard-pressed to find anybody at UC Berkeley of that generation who would not claim to have been part of the anti-apartheid movement.”
