Over 1,200 Princeton University affiliates signed a letter opposing a divestment proposal set forth by the Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest group.
The Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest group submitted a 66-page proposal, dated June 2024, to the Council of Princeton University Community Resources Committee, a group of students, faculty, and staff that considers “questions of general policy concerning the procurement and management of the University’s financial resources.”
The proposal calls on the university to divest and dissociate from Israel, recommending the following institutional policy: “Princeton University is committed to divesting its endowment of entities that enable or facilitate human rights violations or violations of international law as part of Israel’s illegal occupations, apartheid practices, and plausible acts of genocide.”
The proposal was endorsed by 32 organizations, including the Alliance of Jewish Progressives, the Princeton Young Democratic Socialists of America, the Pride Alliance, and Ellipses Slam Poetry.
On Tuesday, a letter with nearly 1,300 signatures — including Princeton students, alumni, faculty, staff, and parents of students — was submitted to the Resources Committee expressing opposition to the proposal.
“University guidelines stipulate that decisions to divest at Princeton should be made only to preserve central values of the University,” reads the letter, which was reviewed by National Review. “Not only does the PIAD proposal fall well below this bar, it undermines the University’s central values of truth-seeking and ethical leadership in the service of humanity. We see PIAD’s proposal for what it is: a document steeped in bias and demonizing double-standards that threatens real harm to our campus community. We oppose PIAD’s proposal in the strongest possible terms.”
The letter further states that “the proposal fails to mention Hamas and the other terrorist groups attacking Israel at all.”
Other critics of the divestment proposal have also noted that it does not discuss Hamas or the crimes of October 7.
“In Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD)’s 66-page proposal for divestment, there is not a single mention of Hamas, unless you count the titles of articles in the footnotes (which I don’t),” Judah Guggenheim, an undergraduate student, wrote in the student-run publication the Daily Princetonian.
At least one member of the Resources Committee, which will evaluate the divestment proposal, has publicly expressed support for pro-Palestinian activism. Arika Hassan claims on her LinkedIn to serve as the Outreach Chair for the Muslim Engineers for Social Impact and Justice association, which endorsed the Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest proposal. Hassan was also one of over 600 Princeton affiliates who signed an open letter “in solidarity with Gaza” that stated “the ongoing Israeli assault upon the Gaza Strip must be stopped.” Hassan did not respond to National Review’s request for comment by the time of publication. The chair of the Resources Committee, professor Jay Groves, also did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest’s proposal states that pro-Palestinian activism has existed on Princeton’s campus for over two decades, beginning in 2002 with a rally and divestment petition delivered to Nassau Hall with over three hundred student signatures and thirty faculty signatures.
During the 2024 spring semester, the Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest group helped establish and maintain the “Princeton Gaza Solidarity Encampment” that lasted over three weeks. National Review previously reported that at least three professors held classes within the encampment. The Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest group also promoted a “take over [of] Clio Hall” building, specifically Dean of the Graduate School Rodney Priestley’s office, which led to thirteen arrests.
The proposal claims that Princeton “divested and dissociated from South Africa in 1987 and Darfur in 2006, citing human rights violations.” Princeton University did not fully divest from all corporations with business in South Africa during apartheid, but instead adopted a policy of selective dissociation from 1978 to 1994, under which the university’s funds could not be invested in companies doing business in South Africa that did not meet corporate-conduct standards or failed to provide sufficient information about employment practices.
“The University, as an educational institution, has a strong presumption against taking political, economic or social positions,” John Beck, then the chair of the trustee committee on finance, told the Princeton Weekly Bulletin in 1994 when the university ended its selective dissociation policy towards South Africa. “However, the policy of the trustees certainly continues to allow for selective disassociation should compelling situations — not limited to South Africa — arise in the future.”
In 2006, Princeton University announced that, although it did not have any direct holdings in companies operating in the Sudan, the finance committee of the University’s Board of Trustees had adopted a policy of “disassociating from companies that directly or indirectly conduct operations in Darfur that support acts of genocide, and to prevent future investment in such companies.”
In 2022, the Board of Trustees of Princeton University voted to dissociate from 90 companies that are “all active in the thermal coal or tar sands segments of the fossil fuel industry, which are among the sector’s largest contributors to carbon emissions.”