SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — Protesters at UC schools have long called for divestment for various reasons. Experts say it is a complicated and thorny demand.
Chris Marsicano is an Assistant Professor and expert in education policy at Davidson College and founder of the College Crisis Initiative. He said there are tradeoffs whenever people make policy decisions and moral judgments such as this.
"It’s up to the endowment manager and the administration at these universities, in addition to students, and alumni, and other stakeholders to decide what’s the path forward," Marsicano said. "And it’s just not as simple as just turning off a switch and no longer being invested in a company.”
Much of a university's funding comes from its endowment, which is a fund that generates long-term cash flow through investments. A call to divest is a request for that endowment to stop investing in a particular business or sector.
The protesters at UC San Diego have generally called for three forms of divestment: an end to research funding from military or defense sources, whether from the United States government, Israeli government, or private contractors, an end to investments in Israeli businesses, and an end to investments with companies that do business with Israeli businesses.
Marsicano said that while it may not be too complicated to divest from certain specific businesses, divestment from the entire defense industry or any company that does business with Israel would be nearly impossible.
Even if the UC system did consider divestment, as protesters demanded, the scope of the divestment would likely significantly impact the endowment.
“They pay operating funds. They pay faculty salaries. They go into the operating budget which includes things like financial aid, which I think most students argue is a good thing for universities to be able to pay for. So divestment comes with the potential for the loss of revenue and then the potential for a loss of financial aid, or a loss of paying professors, or a loss of paying grad students a livable wage," Marsicano said.
This is not the first time protesters have called for divestment as part of their strategy. The UCSD library has campus newspaper articles dating back at least as far as the 1970s, with requests for divestment in several areas.
Marsicano says this current climate most reminds him of the 1980s, when students at UC schools, as well as other universities across the country, called for divestment from the apartheid government in South Africa. Protesters could claim success, as more than 100 schools did take action on divestment.
However, according to Marsicano, only a handful went through the complete divestment, including businesses that did business with South African companies.
More recently, student climate protests helped encourage the UC system to divest from fossil fuel companies, which it did in 2020.
Marsicano argues that while university leaders may be worried about the signal sent by giving in to protesters, there can be positives, as well.
“It’s my least favorite argument against student protest, but it’s the slippery slope argument," Marsicano said. "If today they’re protesting fossil fuels, tomorrow they’re protesting Israel, who knows what they’ll protest next? At the end of the day, protest is generally a positive for any university that wants to develop strong leaders to lead our civic space in the future.”
ABC 10News reached out to UCSD media relations to request information on the amount of funding it receives from military, defense, and Israeli sources and the extent to which the university's endowment is connected to those sources. The university has yet to respond.
