Courtesy of Connecticut Public
The weekend of Feb. 21, the Connecticut College Board of Trustees will vote on whether or not the College should divest from military weapons manufacturing companies, after over a year of conversations with CC Students in Solidarity With Palestine. This week, the students hosted a series of meetings and a rally ahead of the major vote in order to generate student interest and plan the final weeks of action before the Trustees make a decision.
Over the course of the year, the students have met with administrators and trustees multiple times, communicating their demands that the College’s guidelines on investment policies be made public, and that the College divest from military weapon manufacturers, particularly those that do business with Israel or that manufacture weapons for the U.S. that are then sold to Israel, amidst ongoing violence in Gaza and the West Bank. This also includes gun manufacturers, amidst ongoing gun violence throughout the U.S. The movement intends to continue the legacy of previous divestment movements at Conn, including the previous movement in 2015 to bring attention to previous escalations in Gaza.
If the Board of Trustees divested and met student demands, it would mean that Connecticut College would communicate to their fund managers at Cambridge Associates that the College did not want their money going into or coming out of military weapons manufacturing, and that this would be added to and expressed through their pre-existing guidelines, such as the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) statement. Another student demand includes the Board of Trustees publicizing their investment guidelines to all community members, so that students would be aware of the movement and implications of the College’s endowment money.
This was the first of multiple meetings and rallies the students held and planned before the final vote in February to generate student interest and support. The previous year, they held a rally in the spring that attracted hundreds of students, and their members released a statement with the Muslim Students Association to support divestment and the College’s acknowledgment of ongoing occupation and violence in Palestine that was signed by over fifteen clubs. In the fall, they held a vigil and art event to mourn for Palestinians and advocate for divestment. Since their formation in the fall of 2023, they have secured the establishment of the Muslim Cultural Center and Prayer Room in Knowlton House, and began the process for hiring a Muslim Imam, recently resulting in the hiring of Dr. Abo Rabia.
Divestment has a long history at Conn, both successfully and unsuccessfully: students in the early 1990s won divestment from South African apartheid, and since then, multiple movements have sprouted, notably to advocate for divestment from fossil fuels and from Sudan. Since Connecticut College has a relatively small endowment compared to more prominent colleges at which students advocate for divestment, protesting students here champion the symbolic effect of divestment, hoping that it will encourage and aid those movements at other universities.
One student in CC Students in Solidarity With Palestine described their support for divestment as based in “our identity as an educational institution, meaning that we ought to be cultivating possibilities, not funding their destruction through military weapons causing harm domestically and abroad.” This statement references that, at least by May of 2024, all twelve universities in Gaza had been either destroyed or severely damaged during Israeli air raids. The student continued and said: “To divest is to stand up for that identity, and to vote against divestment is to prove that our institutional morals are a performative sham.”
Earlier in the semester, on January 24, taking inspiration from similar events at Wesleyan University, the students hosted a thrift sale in collaboration with the CC Feminist Coalition to raise funds for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, in which people could donate unwanted clothes and purchase new ones from the donations. In total, the event raised $806 over the course of two hours, and excess clothing was donated to the Dressing Room, an Office of Sustainability and Gender and Sexuality Programs on-campus free thrift shop.
All funds were donated to the PCRF, an organization that helps place severely injured or ill Palestinian children in hospitals in the U.S. and Europe where they can receive free, specialized healthcare, as well as sponsoring orphans in Gaza. As none of the remaining hospitals in Gaza are operating at full capacity, with most being severely or entirely damaged in air strikes or impacted by embargos on medical supplies, including those previously owned and operated by the PCRF, a large majority of those injured during bombings or affected by rampant disease and famine spreading throughout displaced populations are unable to receive treatment.
Another student, involved in both CC Students in Solidarity With Palestine and with the CC Feminist Coalition, said: “Connecticut College prides itself on moral and ethical values, along with a commitment to academic freedom, yet our financial portfolio contributes to genocide. This disregard for Palestinian students is reflected in the rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia across campus during the last year and a half. If the BOT votes against divestment, they are reaffirming the fear of Arab and Muslim students on campus that we’re not welcome here.”
