‘Immediate and Profound Legal Consequences’ Await Brown If It Votes To Divest From Israel, State Attorneys General Warn
Brown University will face “immediate and profound legal consequences” should its governing body vote next month to divest from companies with connections to Israel.
Although the university’s president, Christina Paxson, has previously rebuffed student-led divestment efforts, her administration agreed last spring to have the Corporation, as Brown’s governing body is known, vote on the divestment proposal, known as Brown Divest Now, as part of an arrangement with anti-Israel encampment organizers.
In turn, the student protesters agreed to clear out their encampment on the university’s Main Green and not stage protests through commencement. The Corporation — which is run by 12 Fellows and 42 Trustees — is slated to vote on the measure during its October meeting.
Just the agreement to take a vote on the matter was controversial enough that one trustee, a prominent New York hedge fund manager, Joseph Edelman, resigned from his post, slamming the upcoming vote as “morally reprehensible.”
In his resignation letter, which he published in the Wall Street Journal, he criticized the administration for choosing to “lend credence” to “antisemitic voices” and choosing to “reward, rather than punish, the activists for disrupting campus life, breaking school rules, and promoting violence and antisemitism at Brown.”
He continued: “Brown’s policy of appeasement won’t work. It’s a capitulation to the very hatred that led to the Holocaust and the unspeakable horrors of Oct. 7.”
Just hours later, the president of Brown University, Ms. Paxson, published a letter in response, claiming that Mr. Edelman “misunderstands and mischaracterizes the decision behind the October vote” and that the decision reflects the university’s commitment to giving “fair and due process to formal claims challenging its ethical responsibility.”
If the measure passes, the Brown Divest Now proposal would require the university to dispose of its investments in Textron, Safariland, Volvo Group, Airbus, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola, and RTX Corporation because the companies do business with Israel.
That, though, could trigger a whole new round of difficulties for Brown. Should Brown vote to divest, according to a letter issued by Arkansas’s attorney general, Tim Griffin, and 23 other state attorneys general, the University would be subject to anti-boycott, divestment, and sanction laws in numerous states.
“If adopted, the Brown Divest Now proposal will have immediate and profound legal consequences for Brown, its employees, and its student body because it may trigger the application of laws in nearly three-fourths of States prohibiting States and their instrumentalities from contracting with, investing in, or otherwise doing business with entities that discriminate against Israel, Israelis, or those who do business with either,” the coalition of attorneys general wrote in a letter issued at the end of August.
As a result, hoards of states would be required by law to terminate business relationships with Brown and divest from university debt held by state pension plans and other investment vehicles. The anti-BDS laws, the attorneys general wrote, “reflect the States’ interest in aggressively combating antisemitic conduct and national origin discrimination, and those laws require States to take decisive action in response to discriminatory conduct.”
The coalition underscored the seriousness of the potential consequences by citing what “others have discovered to their detriment” — that “those laws have profound financial consequences.” The coalition urged the university to “learn from those past examples.”
Such was the case with Ben & Jerry’s, a subsidiary of Unilever, which faced swift retaliation after it refused to sell ice cream in the West Bank. After the anti-BDS laws took effect and hundreds of millions of dollars were pulled from Unilever stock, the parent company eventually overrode the boycott.
“It shows that these attorneys general are not bluffing,” a law professor at Boston University, David Webber, who advised the campaign against the Ben & Jerry’s boycott, told Bloomberg. “I frankly think they would welcome a high-profile fight with Brown.”
Brown’s October vote comes as universities have faced mounting pressure to reassess their policies on academic boycotts at the demand of anti-Israel protesters who took hold of college campuses after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7.
The anti-Israel group behind Brown’s divestment proposal is Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization which is currently facing a lawsuit for allegedly acting as the American campus arm of Hamas. The group, which boasts local chapters at universities across the country, used October 7 to reignite efforts to pressure universities to divest from Israel.
For the most part, student-led divestment efforts have had little success. Even at universities that agreed to put divestment to a vote, most boards ultimately voted against the proposals. Such was the case at Occidental College and Williams College, both of which concluded that divestment would pose financial risk to the college’s endowment. At the University of Minnesota, the Board of Regents declined to divest and instead adopted a policy of institutional neutrality.
However, San Francisco State University, after facing pressure from anti-Israel student groups, voted to add new screening policies for investment decisions, including additional restrictions on companies which make more than 5 percent of their revenue from weapons manufacturing. While the new policy isn’t specifically directed at Israeli companies, it required the university to divest from three companies which campus anti-Israel protesters accused of supporting “genocide.”
Wesleyan University and Chapman University are set to vote on divestment proposals later in September.
Before the Brown Corporation votes in October, the group will receive a recommendation from the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management — an advisory body to the president of Brown University that “considers how ethical and moral standards are applied across all of Brown’s business and investment practices in a manner consistent with the University’s mission and values.”
The group is composed of current and former students, faculty, and staff. The advisory committee has held online public forums to hear from students arguing both in favor and against divestment. It will offer a recommendation to the president by September 30.
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