The students and others at Virginia Tech who were protesting Israeli actions in Gaza had multiple demands.
Some were beyond the power of anyone in Blacksburg: “Ceasefire now!”
Others were more specific to the university, such as wanting a meeting with Tech President Tim Sands.
I’m struck, though, by one sign that I saw on what appeared to be a bedsheet.
“Our demands,” it announced in red. Below there were three of them.
1. Divest from Israel, provide endowment transparency.
2. Official VT statement condemning Israel’s violence.
3. Define anti-Palestinian racism; acknowledge suppression of Palestinian students.
The first of those — divestiture — is hardly unique to this particular controversy. Divestment campaigns have been going on for a long time. In the 1980s, there was a push for universities (and others) to divest themselves of financial ties related to what was then apartheid South Africa. Other campaigns have focused on fossil fuel investments. There’s a whole field called ESG investments, where investors are supposed to focus on the environmental, social and governance aspects of the companies they invest in. Not surprisingly, that movement has come from the left — and has not won fans on the right. Last year, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares joined a 21-state coalition challenging the ESG practices at two proxy advisory companies. “By letting net-zero inform their proxy advice, ISS and Glass Lewis are abandoning their fiduciary duties to their clients, including Virginia,” said a statement from his office.
Divestment, though, is not entirely a liberal tool. In the 1990s, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-North Carolina, led a push to penalize foreign companies that invested in former U.S. firms that Cuba had seized with Fidel Castro and the communists took over. And when Russia invaded Ukraine, Gov. Glenn Youngkin was quick to order Virginia to divest itself of any Russian investments.
It is fair to argue whether divestment does any good. Former Boston University President John Silber — who otherwise was regarded as a liberal — made the case in the 1980s that universities divesting of investments in companies that did business with South Africa made no difference. “When the students were protesting the South African situation, I met with them, and they said BU must divest in General Motors and IBM,” he later recalled to Boston Magazine. “And I said, ‘Why should we do that? Is it immoral to own that stock?’ ‘Absolutely immoral to own it.’ And I said, ‘So then, we’re supposed to sell it to somebody? We can’t divest unless we sell it to somebody. And if we burn the stock, that just helps General Motors, because it reduces the amount of stock outstanding, so that can’t be right. If we sell it to somebody, we have just gotten rid of our guilt in order to impose guilt on somebody else.’”
That was not a popular position. The counter-argument is that divestment is symbolic, and that symbols often have power.
Of course, the real goal isn’t simply for a university to divest itself of any financial ties to whatever country is out of favor, but to bring enough financial pressure on companies that they stop doing business with the country in question, and perhaps change the country’s behavior. In a way, it’s a market approach to foreign policy. Disinvestment did play a role in political change in South Africa. Western investors — universities, among them — put so much pressure on some companies that they pulled out of South Africa entirely. Author Richard Knight, writing in the book “Sanctioning Apartheid,” traced how that cut off much-needed capital and put the white government in Pretoria under economic pressure to find a way out. Presumably that’s the ultimate goal of protesters here.
It’s the second demand that I am most curious about: “Official VT statement condemning Israel’s violence.”
Why must a university make any statement on foreign policy?
This is not a new question. It’s one that many universities wrestled with in the 1960s during the Vietnam War. In 1967, the president of the University of Chicago appointed law professor Harry Kalven to lead a committee to prepare a statement on “the university’s role in political and social action.” The result was what’s called The Kalven Report. It concluded that “the mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge” — political action was not. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the report said. “If it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted” — and that’s inimical to the fundamental university spirit of free inquiry. “The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints.”
Translated for the modern day, if a university — Tech or any other — were to make a statement condemning Israeli actions in Gaza, then that means the university is effectively censuring those on campus who might disagree and think Israel’s actions are quite justified in light of Hamas terrorism.
That’s not the view that seems to prevail at many campuses, however. Shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel in October, the president of George Mason University issued a statement on the matter: “While geopolitical differences that can produce armed conflict naturally produce competing perspectives and robust public debate, such craven acts of terrorism as we have seen in Israel simply must be repudiated.”
In an interview with The Washington Post, GMU President Gregory Washington explained himself this way: “I’m in the most diverse campus in my state. I have everybody here. And I have significant numbers of everybody here. So I’m going to have to address more issues.”
He’s hardly alone. Lots of universities have issued statements, many pointing out in October that they had large numbers of Jewish students who needed reassurance, and many pointing out now that they have large numbers of Palestinian students who need the same. Even before this latest round of encampments, both policy journals that cover higher education — such as Inside Higher Education and political news sites such as The Hill — have explored whether and when schools should make political statements. Generally, it’s been those on the left who think they should (universities are a major force in society and have a social obligation to speak out), and those on the right who think they shouldn’t (who cares what universities think on political issues; they should go back to teaching and fielding football teams). A year ago, long before the Hamas attack, columnist George F. Will of The Washington Post chastised universities for issuing statements on the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision on abortion: “Leave aside colleges’ and universities’ delusions that the larger society is interested in their advertisements of their predictable politics. The advertisement makes the advertisers feel good, a sufficient justification. But they really should read a 55-year-old report.” (That was the Kalven Report, now a year older.)
I see a somewhat different context here. In recent years, we’ve seen an unfortunate trend of local governments pulled into taking positions on things that have nothing to do with local governance. This has come from both left and right. A few weeks ago, the Blacksburg Town Council issued a statement on “the ongoing conflict and humanitarian crisis in Gaza and Israel.” That came from the left, as you might expect in a college town, but a few years ago we saw one conservative-leaning local government after another rush to declare themselves Second Amendment sanctuaries. Two very different issues, from two very different political perspectives. Yet both have the same effect: none whatsoever. They also both stem from the worrying trend of nationalizing just about everything.
Last fall, I spoke to a group in Southwest Virginia. One of the members was a candidate for the local board of supervisors. She told me that in going door-to-door, she found few voters conversant on — or even interested in — local issues. They all wanted to talk about national issues, and planned to base their votes accordingly. This is one reason our politics have become so polarized. Once people have decided how they feel about Joe Biden and Donald Trump, they don’t have to bother to think through the harder local issues that might defy ideological categorization.
If universities get into the routine of issuing statements on political matters, do they provide much-needed clarity for a society in confusion and in need of moral leadership — or do they simply exacerbate that polarization?