Why campus protests against Israel probably won’t be e ective
An alien who landed on our planet during the current news cycle could be forgiven for concluding that the biggest foreign policy issue facing America today is what the U.S. government should do about Columbia University’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Otherwise, why would throngs of protesters be crowding the campus to protest actions more than 5,000 miles away?
The short answer is that they are advocating for a cease-fire in Gaza, for an academic boycott of Israeli universities, and for the administration to “divest all of Columbia’s finances, including the endowment, from companies and institutions that profit from Israeli apartheid, genocide and occupation in Palestine,” as one of the organizing groups put it. The longer answer is that American progressive activism, including Gaza activism, has become quite centered around college campuses.
While this might boost its influence among college-educated professionals, it often weakens the wider cause.
Divestment has become a popular idea on campus, meant to wound companies that offend protesters in various ways, from running private prisons to manufacturing firearms to producing fossil fuels. Many of these activists appear to have been inspired by the late 20th-century global campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against South Africa, which is often credited with helping end apartheid in that country.
More recent campus efforts have had some successes. For example, under pressure from student activists in 2015, the Columbia endowment divested from private prison firms. However, it’s not clear what effect this has had on anything other than the returns of the endowments.
It’s true that U.S. university endowments represent a vast accumulation of capital, at least $839 billion at last count. And it seems as though that much money must be able to change the world, if it could all work together.
But not all of that money is invested in stocks or corporate bonds; according to Columbia’s annual trustee report, at the end of last year, only a quarter of its investments, about $3.7 billion, were in global equities. (Another $3.6 billion is in private equity, and the rest is in cash, fixed income and various alternative assets.) This is tiny compared with the roughly $100 trillion global stock market.
Of course, if a university holds an unusually large share of some stock, then selling it might drive its price down, at least temporarily, particularly for smaller firms and markets where trading is less frequent. But as long as there are buyers with fewer ethical scruples – and there always are – the stock’s long-term price will mostly be set by market fundamentals, things such as expected returns, rather than ethical concerns. Even those temporary price changes will affect only the current owners, not the company that sold them stock long ago.
Stock prices can still influence company management decisions through indirect effects, but only to a point. If a company urgently needs to raise money for investment, a sell-off could make that harder. It also might make the now-poorer shareholders angry with management. But there are limits to the power of shareholder anger: Investors might demand that Exxonmobil do something to boost returns, but they are unlikely to demand that the company get out of the oil business altogether, because doing so would incinerate a lot more shareholder money. Similarly, shareholders are unlikely to demand that Boeing stop selling fighter planes to Israel.
It’s harder still to translate divestment’s small effect on companies into a change in the policies of the countries where those companies are headquartered. Countries such as Russia and Iran have persisted for years in the face of sanctions far more punishing than anything that the Columbia endowment, or all university endowments, could possibly impose.
This brings us back to our bewildered alien: Why Columbia? Why divestment? The answer is that Columbia is simply where activists are, and the endowment is something the Columbia administration can control, unlike the foreign policy of the United States – or Israel.
By now, this pattern is familiar; on the left, issue after issue has been filtered through the prism of the campuses where so many activists are concentrated. Concerns about sexual assault frequently ended up centered on the campaign against campus rape; concerns about economic insecurity became demands for student loan forgiveness; concerns over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza have become arguments about elite university endowments.
To some extent, this is natural. Universities have concentrated populations of progressive students whose flexible schedules that can be organized around political action, and of progressive administrators who can be expected to smile on these efforts. But it’s also costly, because 20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause. The most passionate, possibly, but not the most strategic.
The best hope that activists have of changing Israel’s behavior isn’t fiddling with university endowments; it’s changing U.S. government policy on weapons sales to Israel. The best hope of doing that lies in convincing ordinary American voters that policy should change. And as political writer Matt Yglesias keeps pointing out, “The median voter is a 50-something White person who didn’t go to college.” Is this protest going to change that person’s mind?
Hardly. It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of belligerent elite college students whose chants have at least once bordered on the antisemitic.
There’s only one real customer for that sort of performance: the participants themselves.
––Follow Megan Mcardle @asymmetricinfo on X (formerly Twitter).