Dive Brief:
- A trustee at Brown University has resigned over the Ivy League institution's decision to vote on divestment from companies and weapons manufacturers doing business with Israel, labeling it a "stunning failure of moral leadership."
- Joseph Edelman, a hedge fund manager, called the university's decision to hold the October vote "morally reprehensible" in an adaptation of his resignation letter published Sunday by The Wall Street Journal.
- Pushing back on Edelman's allegations, Brown President Christina Paxson said in a response published by the Journal on Monday that the process for considering divestment proposals from the campus community has existed since the 1970s and is not a direct response to student demonstrators.
Dive Insight:
In April, the student-run Brown Divest Coalition organized a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus and called on the university to financially divest from what it describes as "all companies enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza and the broader Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory.” Some students at Brown have been making similar calls since 2011.
In exchange for clearing the encampment, Brown administrators agreed to let coalition members meet with the university’s highest governing body, known as The Corporation, to discuss their divestment proposal.
Students from the coalition also presented their case to Brown's Advisory Committee on University Resource Management earlier this month. That committee has until Sept. 30 to issue a recommendation to Paxson on the proposal. The Corporation will then vote on divestment next month.
Paxson, who has opposed divestment in recent years, shared an explanation of the process with Brown's community in August. She also noted that she had committed to accelerating the usual process.
“It’s important to bring clarity to an open and divisive question that has been of high interest to members of our community for years,” she wrote. “Brown has a long tradition of advocacy and activism, and also a strong record of directly tackling difficult questions with openness and respect for others.
Edelman, who had served as a Brown trustee since 2019, this week called the vote "a capitulation to the very hatred that led to the Holocaust and the unspeakable horrors of Oct. 7."
"The university leadership has for some reason chosen to reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown," he wrote in the adapted letter.
A university spokesperson rebuked Edelman's comments Tuesday.
"While we value the service of our former trustee, he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the decisions that led to the upcoming vote on divestment," the spokesperson said in an email.
Paxson’s response in the Journal noted that Brown has allowed members of its community to submit divestment proposals for almost five decades.
"The decision to respect this long-established process upholds the core belief that any institution must give fair and due process to formal claims challenging its ethical responsibility," she wrote. "This process doesn’t presuppose the merits of such claims and offers our university an important opportunity for close examination and investigation of any divestment proposal."
