[music]

Participant: We're in the middle of finals, but we're here and we're camping out and we're condemning our university who continuously funds and supports and is complicit in this genocide.

Participant: This is something that me and all other Palestinians will never turn their back on. We're here and we're not leaving. I will stay here for three weeks if I have to. I will quit my job.

Participant: They cannot take us down. If we are kicked out, we will not stay out. We're going to find a way to resist.

Participant: No movement really succeeds unless there are young people involved in it.

Participant: The people want something new. The people are tired of just standing around.

Participant: We have woken up and we've seen how Congress and Biden are about to send $14 billion in aid for weapons to Israel, so we have to just take matters into our own hands.

Participant: We are just getting started.

[music]

Protesters: [chanting]

Kai Wright: It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. Welcome to the show. On April 17th, hundreds of students at Columbia University created what they call the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. I don't have to tell you what's happened since then. Encampments at at least 160 schools around the world, University administrators calling Riot cops on their own students, daily headlines with everybody from President Biden to Macklemore weighing in. It is safe to say these students have made themselves heard, and yet, for all the talk about the protests, I'm not sure we've heard quite enough about the actual ideas the students put forth or the history and context around those ideas.

This week, we're going to have two conversations about the substance of the matter. We go first to Brown University, while schools like Columbia and Emory University have met the protest with force and punishment, a growing number of schools have instead chosen to negotiate with students to see if they could find a path forward. Brown was the first school to do so and they did reach a compromise.

Isabella Garo, is a senior at Brown. She's one of roughly 60 Brown students who have been arrested during campus demonstrations since November. She still has charges pending against her, but she is also part of a group of students who represented the protestors in their negotiations with the university. They demanded and won a corporation vote on divestment from companies that do business in the occupied territories. I sat down with her to talk about it. She goes by Bella. Bella, welcome to Notes from America.

Isabella Garo: Thank you for having me.

Kai Wright: First off you are a senior, which means that you are graduating in just a few weeks, so congratulations on that.

Isabella Garo: Thank you.

Kai Wright: What's been your experience with Brown over these four years?

Isabella Garo: I mean, it's been a complicated one as I'm sure you can imagine. I found an incredible group of people on this campus that I feel very supported by and who I've been very grateful to know them. The faculty, so many of them are just absolutely incredible. Learning from them has been such a privilege. I do feel very, very privileged to have the opportunity to go to a school like this, especially being the first in my family to ever attend an Ivy or anything of this caliber.

That's been really exciting, but of course, then also having to contend with how the university functions. I often hear from my peers and I agree that private schools like Brown operate more like hedge funds. That just so happen to also the schools and existing in that kind of environment is very strange, especially when, I mean I didn't grow up among wealthy people.

I don't come from that kind of background, so to then have to be surrounded by so much wealth in this way and dealing with how wealthy people operate and how wealthy institutions operate has certainly been jarring and has made me quite uncomfortable and at times even very angry, which is why I'm a student activist and why I've been doing this work for a while.

Kai Wright: Did your student activism begin right away? How much have you been politically engaged on campus prior to this current movement?

Isabella Garo: Yes, so it didn't begin right away. I started during COVID and that was hard. Getting involved in anything on campus was really hard during that time. I was of the opinion of like, "Well, I've just got to the school. I'm going to put my head down, do the work I need to do and then walk away with my degree." It wasn't actually until the end of my sophomore year that a professor in a class that I was in on environmental justice, which is what a lot of my studies focus on, said, "Hey, you guys should start an environmental justice student group on campus. Wouldn't that be cool?"

Specifically, he said a Sunrise hub, a group for the Sunrise National Movement. My self and a couple other people got to work over the summer setting up the infrastructure and we started a new Sunrise hub at Brown at the beginning of my junior year.

Kai Wright: When did you first become interested in the movement for university divestment as it relates to Israel?

Isabella Garo: January 2023. A few folks in a different group at Brown decided, okay, it's time we start back up the Brown Activist Coalition which had existed before COVID but fell apart during COVID as many student groups did. January of last year we restart this activist coalition and the agreement was basically, if any of us has a campaign and we need support, we can call on the other advocacy groups for support.

Kai Wright: This is like a coalition of student groups on campus, basically?

Isabella Garo: Yes, a bunch of different [crosstalk]

Kai Wright: We could help each other out. Got it.

Isabella Garo: Exactly, but it was this mutual understanding of we are all fighting issues that stem from a lot of the same systemic problems, so we should be in coalition and supporting one another. Then of course, come October of last year, the big campaign on campus is SJPs, Student for Justice in Palestine. Their campaign became the big one which is of course divestment, which they'd been fighting for, for years, but up until October, it had been just another campaign among the many campaigns being waged by various student advocacy groups on campus.

My self, like many other student activists on campus, we were just offering some support in ways that we could. Whether it be being like, "Oh, we have some paint to paint signs and banners, we'll lend you paint. Or we'll get our people to show up to your rallies or we'll help organize this and that." That wasn't my main thing. My main thing was still Sunrise, but then December came, it was right up towards the end of the semester and one of my friends approaches me and says, "Do you want to do another sit-in?"

Because there had been a sit-in, in November, Jews for Ceasefire Now, a new student group did a sit-in 20 of them and were arrested. December comes and they go, "It's time for another action. Let's escalate. We're going to double it. We're going to get 40 or more people to do a sit-in at University Hall." I decided, yes, okay, this is something I can do.

I had been getting more and more frustrated with how our country was responding to this problem, how my university was responding to this problem. Just seeing this genocide on my phone in real time and feeling like I couldn't do anything about it, it was one of those things that was growing more and more frustrating.

Kai Wright: Bella knew she was signing up to get arrested, but that didn't really scare her. Her real worry was that the university had pretty much unchecked power to discipline her internally, which could have huge consequences for her family among other things.

Isabella Garo: That's what scared me. I was worried about being suspended for the rest of the semester and therefore not being able to complete it and losing that semester. I had gone $17,500 in debt for that semester, so the fear of suddenly having lost that money for no reason. Making that choice was certainly difficult, but at the end of the day, I realized if the first time in my journey as an activist, which is a journey at this point I knew I'd want to continue for the rest of my life.

The first time in that journey I am not willing to accept risk, personal risk, what does that say about me? What does that say about the values I hold, that I'm not willing to assume risk to act on those values? For me personally, I knew I had to do it. Sit-In happens, there's 41 of us who go in on December 11th into the university hall, the main administrative building which is also where the president's office is. Our demand was to present a divestment resolution or proposal to the corporation, which is the university's governing body and then to have them vote on divestment.

That was the big thing, because we've had many meetings with the administration and corporation members, not just over the course of the school-year but again, like I said, this movement has been years in the making on Brown's campus. We wanted a corporation vote. That was the center of our demand. We get told pretty much flat-out by the university president, "It's not happening so you better get out by 5:00 PM."

We said, "Well, we told you we're going to stay in this building until you agree to hold the corporation vote." That is what we did and we were arrested that evening, all 41 of us. Whereas the university eventually did drop charges for the JFCN 20 who were arrested the month prior, they have not dropped charges against us.

Kai Wright: Were you disciplined internally?

Isabella Garo: Yes, we were also disciplined internally. Luckily, we got probation and not suspension, [laughs] and probation, it goes on my record. Obviously that's not ideal, especially because I do intend to apply to grad school, so that does suck, but at the same time, I'm very sound in the decision I made to participate in this sit-in.

Kai Wright: As you said, the demand was for a vote on divestment. Can we just talk about divestment for a minute? Why that goal? Why divestment? Why is that the thing that you feel like is a place to apply pressure?

Isabella Garo: I like to look to history. For example, the anti-apartheid in South Africa movement for divestment, the first divestment movement, they really led the charge in those conversations in the United States. At that moment, people really turned to the youth and what they were doing on college campuses. That is where the power of divestment lies. I think a lot of people misunderstand it as you're trying to tank the share value of these companies that you're trying to divest from. That's where the power comes from. Actually, that's not the case. In fact, divestment doesn't necessarily decrease share value of companies at all.

If our university sold their shares in these companies, someone else would just buy them, someone who does not care about what's going on in Palestine. The value of divestment as it occurred in the '80s and through many movements since and today is the stigmatization of continued political, financial, social, economic connections to human rights abusers. What happens is divestment serves as a very easy avenue for protesting those connections.

Having that target of we're going to cut off our institution's support of these human rights abusers, their connections that offers these human rights abusers a social license to operate is often the phrase that's going to, first of all, galvanize a lot of people as we're seeing the student movement has galvanized further movements on and off campuses everywhere. It's also going to send a signal to those in power, the next generation is not accepting this. You need to do something about it.

Kai Wright: The immediate point of divestment isn't the money. It's that it's a concrete example of what is and is not morally acceptable.

Isabella Garo: Exactly. Especially an Ivy League university being one of the most recognizable or prestigious institutions in the country, that's going to send a signal to people in power, some of whom send their kids to this school or graduated from this school or other schools in the Ivy League. We felt a particular responsibility to push for this on our campus because we know that we have a platform right now that not everybody has the privilege of having. If we don't use that platform to the best of our ability, it would just feel irresponsible.

Kai Wright: I'm Kai Wright, and I'm talking with Brown University student Isabella Garo. She was part of a delegation of students who negotiated an agreement with the school's leadership to take a vote on divestment from companies that do business in Israel's occupied territories. More of our conversation coming up.

[music]

It's Notes from America. I'm Kai Wright. This week, we are talking about the actual ideas that students have put forth in campus protests around the country in opposition to Israel's war in Gaza. The students' demands have varied from campus to campus. In addition to calling for an immediate ceasefire and the end of US arms shipments to Israel, many have demanded that universities divest from companies with ties to Israel that are considered to be profiting from war.

We'll talk about the history in broader context of divestment movements later in the show. Right now, I'm speaking with Brown University student Isabella Garo, who was part of a student delegation that negotiated an agreement with their university. She was arrested in December during a previous protest on campus and was part of the Gaza Solidarity encampment students set up this spring. I asked her why the students decided to escalate their protests to those encampments.

Isabella Garo: Yes. At this point, we'd had multiple actions over the course of the school year, like I said, the two sit-ins, as well as an eight-day hunger strike consisting of 19 university students back in February. All with the same demand of a court vote for divestment from Israel. Yet, the university, specifically the president, was still blocking that ability to reach the corporation. She was this number one barrier there. Then we see these encampments propping up.

It starts with Columbia, which is another school in the Ivy League. A lot of students within the Ivy League, there's a lot of communication between them. We'd already been in contact with student groups at these other universities just in the past. We're seeing what's going on. We're just thinking, this is a crazy moment. There was definitely just a desire to show solidarity, to show you're not alone, but also a recognition that this is a very, it felt like a turning point.

This was a significant moment. In the past, it felt like we're doing a lot of these actions, shouting into the void, and you feel lonely. In this moment, we see all these encampments propping up. We're thinking, this might give us the power and energy and leverage we need to actually have this demand get met finally, after all of these actions. Because for sure, especially within the Ivy League, these administrations are communicating with each other.

They're going, well, this is what's happening here. They're watching each other very closely. We figured if our administration, if our corporation is looking at what's going on in Columbia and in other schools and thinking, they're getting nervous and they're like, "Oh, I don't know if we want that." That's just an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

Kai Wright: It did work.

Isabella Garo: Yes.

Kai Wright: This is what brought the university to the negotiating table. Why do you think that is? When hunger strikes hadn't, when two rounds of students being arrested hadn't, that this was the thing that brought them to the negotiating table?

Isabella Garo: I've heard a lot of people say, oh, Brown University is so, look at them. They're so generous. They're so reasonable. That they have treated their students so kindly. No, they have never been scared to ignore us. Their students were not eaten in eight days as they looked at them in their face and just asked to meet with them and plainly wouldn't even look them in the eyes. Arrested 61 of their students. Clearly, these university has had no problem suppressing this movement. What was different here and what became very apparent during the negotiations was that they had seen what happened at other campuses and were desperate to avoid it.

Kai Wright: What's the it? The chaos or the negative news coverage or just the putting them in an impossible position?

Isabella Garo: It was all of that, all of the above. First of all, wanting to avoid any conflict between protesters and counter protesters just to avoid the violence that might break out as a result, as we've seen at schools like UCLA. Another desire was to avoid any interference with commencement, graduation. That's a huge donation event for these private schools because it's also when their alumni come. Reunion weekend is the same as graduation here at Brown.

Kai Wright: I forget that fact that commencement is not just about you graduating. This is a massive event.

Isabella Garo: In fact, I'd say it's more about the money. I worked reunion weekend last year and at the end of the weekend, each class that is there represented, they had this big check to show how much money they raised for this.

Kai Wright: Wow.

Isabella Garo: Just unimaginable amounts of money that come flowing in from this weekend. I think just this panic of trying to protect that event. That's what gave us leverage. Like I said, the donors have a lot of power here.

Kai Wright: You knew that?

Isabella Garo: Oh, we've always known that, but it was never quite knowing how to use that. This was the first time we realized like, oh, just go for the donation events. That's hitting them where it hurts. We'd thought about this in the past. We didn't realize that they'd be so sensitive about commencement that they'd be nervous about any protest, even happening weeks out from it, just because they were scared about preparing the Main Greens lawn to look nice enough for commencement.

That was enough of a nerve to hit that they freaked out. That was definitely a big source of leverage for us there. Ultimately, it was them not wanting the media backlash of sending in police in riot gear. They already got some media backlash from the arrests from the sit-ins, but those were very peaceful. We complied. It was very much in line with the history of civil disobedience of just, they arrested us. We did not resist. We moved on. What they were seeing on campuses was very different during the encampments.

They're seeing the NYPD, a very militarized police, wage an incredible amount of aggression on students who, for all intents and purposes, had also been partaking in a peaceful encampment. They did not want to have to do that because they knew how bad they would look. Also, we showed no signs of going away. It put them between a rock and a hard place of just, well, how do we get them off? The answer was listening to us.

Kai Wright: We asked the university for comment on why they chose to negotiate and why they accepted the idea of a corporation vote. They said in an email that they were, in fact, concerned about what they saw on other campuses. That "protecting" the safety of our community members has been among Brown's most fundamental priorities during these challenging weeks and months, and reaching a peaceful end to the unauthorized encampment was an important focus.

The statement also noted the need to begin preparing for commencement and reunion weekend. You can read the full statement in the show notes for this episode. The negotiations included some back and forth, of course. The students wanted all charges dropped against people who'd been arrested, and the university did not agree to that demand, but they did agree to a corporation vote on divestment. In turn, the students agreed to end the encampment as well as any other unauthorized protests for the rest of the term. The big risk for student activists in this deal was that the corporation vote wouldn't happen until October. Bella and her delegation took this idea back to the full encampment to see if everyone agreed.

Isabella Garo: Obviously there was a lot of different opinions. There were so many people in that encampment, you're going to have people who disagree. Of course, there were some people who said, "That's not good enough. Let's just escalate." You had other people saying, "Let's just wait on the green a few more days and see." Other people who are saying, "No, let's fight for it to be in May." Just a lot of different opinions flying around. Overall the majority was, "Okay, if this is the proposal we're going to get, then we are willing to leave the encampment."

Kai Wright: What, for you, in thinking about what does it mean to have made progress, and if the progress you've made is an agreement to a vote in October that could end in right back where you started, in terms of the university's policy, not divesting at all, how will that feel to you as a sign of progress or not progress? How are you measuring what was victory in this?

Isabella Garo: This was a small win. Ultimately, the goal is a free Palestine, and the way we're compelling our university to contribute to that is through divestment. We have yet, of course, to meet either of those goals. This is just another step on that journey. A lot of people say, "Well, why not push for that vote to have occurred during the May corporation meetings?" Which I think that's a very reasonable question to ask. Quite honestly, the first thing is we did push [laughs] for that, but we didn't necessarily get it. It was looking like October was what we were going to have to settle for within this agreement.

The second thing is, honestly, in my personal opinion, and I know everyone has their own thoughts on this, in my opinion though, I don't think they would've voted in favor of divestment if that vote had happened in May. I don't know if you've seen this, but the backlash from donors to Brown to even agreeing to hold this vote has been swift and significant. To have a corporation vote in the midst of that initial backlash, I don't know if the corporation would've been willing to take that kind of heat. I really don't think, and I also know that we would not have had the time to contact and lobby every member of the corporation, of which there are over 50.

Kai Wright: Which is now the work is that you're going to work on.

Isabella Garo: Yes, exactly. That is of course, what we are very prepared to do. The hunger strike we had in February was around the last corporation meeting. We are not unfamiliar to escalating around certain corporation meetings, but to lobby every member of the corporation within such a short amount of time, especially given all of us are doing our finals or are just absolutely exhausted. I personally was worried I'd fail certain classes this semester because I gotten so behind from contributing all of this time to initially the hunger strike in the beginning of the semester, and then the encampment that it was just like, "I might not finish my finals on time."

Again, I can't lose this semester, not even just for my own personal reasons, but there are family members depending on me graduating this semester. This is bigger than myself. I'm not the only one who was in that position, and so to have the capacity and the people power to effectively lobby every member of the corporation before a may vote, I don't know. I honestly don't think it would've been a yes vote. To have a no vote in May, I think would've been much more demoralizing for the movement, not only on our campus, but more broadly than the hope of a yes vote in October.

Kai Wright: I was talking to somebody the other day, about the news cycle and the campus protests and how-- Oh, the country's on fire with these protests. They said, "Well in a couple weeks, it's all going to be over because they're all going to go home. School's going to be over. Then that's going to be the end of this." I wonder, is there any truth to that? What would you say about that as somebody who is in the middle of it?

Isabella Garo: Well, I will say that first of all, student activists at least in Brown are very well aware of how the university throughout its history has used the academic calendar and its many gaps to try and stall student campaigns on campus. This is something we've known about long before we ever started this school year, and so that's not something we're not used to dealing with, that summer break gap. Also, I would point people to the fact that we had been organizing around this issue again for years, and especially this school year, very consistently organizing.

That hunger strike was planned over winter break, and we hit the ground running at the beginning of this semester. We're definitely not unfamiliar to the idea of continuing to organize between semesters. I'm sure our university's very much hoping that the summer break will take the wind out of our sails, but honestly, with this corporation vote, I don't think people have ever been this excited on campus to see where this goes. Again, this is the first major step in the right direction we've made in this campaign in years, and people are ready.

[music]

Kai Wright: Well, Bella, I thank you so much for this time. Congratulations again. I hope that you didn't in fact fail any of those classes.

[laughter]

Isabella Garo: Yes, me too.

Kai Wright: I hope did all right.

Isabella Garo: Yes, so far I'm doing all right. I've managed, it's just been very exhausting, but I've figured it out. Yes, thank you for having me to speak on this for sure.

[music]

Kai Wright: Isabella Garo is a graduating senior at Brown University.

[music]

What does divestment actually look like in practice for universities? What's the history of this political idea and how different or similar is this moment, this call for divestment in companies related to Israel's war and occupation from previous divestment debates? I'm joined by Chris Marsicano, who is an assistant professor of educational studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. Chris has been studying past divestment movements and examining the politics and technical structures of university endowments. Chris, welcome to Notes from America.

Chris Marsicano: Kai, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Kai Wright: Brown University was the first university to come to an agreement with students. We just heard one of the students talk to us about that. Thinking about the history of divestment movements, where does Brown specifically sit in that history? Is it a surprise to you that they were the first, or does that make total sense for this campus to lead the way?

Chris Marsicano: It makes total sense to me for a variety of reasons. The deal is one that is fairly narrow in scope. There's a plan to basically bring forward a proposal based on an earlier proposal that really just ask for divestment in a small number of companies, rather than the whole global economy, which is what many student organizations and protests are asking for.

Just functionally from today, it's one of the more reasonable proposals in the eyes of a college administration, something they actually can achieve. In terms of history, Brown has a long history of protests. Some colleges have honor codes. Brown has a free speech code and has for a long time. I'm not surprised that student activists at Brown have engaged for months on this issue, and I'm certainly not surprised that the administration had a conversation with their students about potential divestment in the future.

Kai Wright: Bella told us that she felt like her and her classmates had a particular responsibility to lead in this debate precisely because they are at an Ivy League school that obviously gives them a unique amount of privilege, but also a unique amount of political leverage. Is that true, do you think? Do you agree with that?

Chris Marsicano: Absolutely. When we think about the field of higher education and studying in colleges and universities, we talk often about this concept called institutional isomorphism. Now, what that basically means is that over time institutions start looking like each other, and the way they start looking like each other and start doing the same things as other institutions is they look to the places that they want to be like.

Everybody looks to the Ivy League and the Ivy-plus institutions, places like Stanford, Duke, and MIT, places like that. When those institutions make a decision, other institutions start to follow. I'm not surprised that Bella said that. That makes a lot of sense to me that students who are at Ivy League institutions probably feel some level of responsibility to lead.

Kai Wright: Yes. Because again, everybody's going to follow them, just like with the institutions. How would you characterize the state of this movement right now? As of May 10th, there are at least seven schools that have come to some kind of agreement with their students. Thinking about just where we stand right now, what would be your broad characterization of this movement? What kind of progress it has or hasn't made or might make?

Chris Marsicano: Given that it's the middle of May and that institutions are about to head towards graduation in summer, there's sort of a clock. There's a shot clock here, and students have to shoot their shot now before encampments are removed, Allah, Columbia, or before summer break happens, and many students will head home. Now, there are students attending these universities and colleges all throughout the summer, but certainly not in the number that we would expect during the semester. Those that are getting deals are getting deals quickly so that they can move on to graduation. We'll see if these continue through the fall.

[music]

Kai Wright: I am Kai Wright and I'm talking with Davidson College scholar Chris Marsicano, about the history of university divestment debates. Coming up, what can we learn from earlier divestment movements over South Africa and over fossil fuels? Stay with us.

[music]

Katerina Barton: Hey, it's Katerina Barton from the show team at Notes for America with Kai Wright. Something happens to me when I listen to this show. No matter the topic, or the guest, I can always think of someone I want to tell about what I just heard and I do. If you're thinking about who in your life would enjoy this episode or another episode you've heard, please share it with them now. The folks in your life trust your good taste, and we would appreciate you spreading the word. If you really want to go above and beyond, please leave us a review. It helps more people, the ones you know, and the ones you don't find the show. I'll let you get back to listening now. Thanks.

Kai Wright: This is Notes from America, I'm Kai Wright. Before we continue, a note about an upcoming show that's related to this one and dedicated to the class of 2024. This year's graduating class has had a unique journey, to say the least. They graduated high school at the peak of the COVID pandemic. They lived through an insurrection and a wild economy, and now their college graduations are intimately tied with this debate over Israel's war in Gaza. We are curious about how all of that has shaped them and how they might shape all of our future as a result.

If you are part of the graduating class of 2024, we want to hear from you. How do you imagine the future? What are the norms and expectations of today that you're like, "Nah, that's not going to be me, I am not following that." Maybe it's about careers and jobs, or maybe it's political assumptions or family or your own identity, whatever it is, leave us a voicemail at 844-745-8255. That's 844-745-8255, or you can record a voice memo and email it to us @notesatwnyc.org. Thanks.

Okay, back to this week's conversation. I'm talking with Davidson College scholar Chris Marsicano, about the history of divestment debates on college campuses. Chris, where does this idea of targeting a university's investments in order to make a political point originate? Where does that even start?

Chris Marsicano: It's a great question, Kai. When we think about divestment, the earliest cases we have of student protests asking for universities to divest their endowments comes from the Vietnam War but they really didn't become in vogue and popular around college campuses until about 40 years ago as students tried to combat the apartheid regime by asking their universities to divest from South Africa.

Students tended to ask for two things, divestment from South African companies and divestment from American companies that did business in South Africa. A hundred and fifty five universities came to agreements with their students. Only five of them though did that total divestment, that divestment from all investments from South Africa, whether they be South African companies or American companies in South Africa, but still, 150 other colleges and universities in the United States and Canada did divest in some way from South Africa.

The slow drip of news headline after news headline after news headline for a period of about eight years meant that increased political pressure continued to come to the South African government and to the American government as well. That political pressure helped build a global political movement that eventually toppled the South African apartheid regime. Students protesting the war in Gaza are absolutely considering themselves the spiritual successors to that movement.

Kai Wright: Certainly Bella, the Brown student we talked to earlier in the show, she was explicit that she was inspired by this movement as were her classmates. Do you know why the anti-apartheid movement began as a divestment movement? Why that tactic in particular?

Chris Marsicano: I think it has a lot to do with the fact that university endowments around this time for the first time were getting very, very large. Today, Harvard's endowment is almost $50 billion. Yale's is almost $40 billion. Columbia and Brown are in the teens of billion dollars. They certainly weren't that big in the '80s, but they were big enough to be seen as a key target.

I should also mention that it's not like this was the beginning of the political movement against the apartheid regime. Certainly after the American Civil Rights Movement and civil rights movements in India and Ireland and and throughout the world, there was already sort of an anti-colonial, anti-apartheid push in South Africa. This divestment tactic was seen as a new idea, a new way to get at the same goal.

Kai Wright: Chris points out though that the way these schools built up all that money in their endowments also changes the math on if and how they might respond to political questions about their investments now.

Chris Marsicano: Prior to the 1970s certainly, colleges and universities were stock pickers. They were calling up brokers and saying, "Hey, I'd like to buy five shares in such and such company. In the late '70s and early '80s, we began to see a shift to move to private equity and hedge funds, and index funds, what most of us have in our 401(k)s. Those changes certainly brought attention to university endowments as they got bigger and with attention comes student activism. Never doubt that students are paying attention.

Kai Wright: Is that also why the endowments grew so much in the '80s?

Chris Marsicano: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yale is sort of credited with a shift towards more private equity, more what we consider to be alternative investments. Real estate trusts and cash investments and foreign currencies and their endowment ballooned. The returns were for the time, certainly off the charts. Yale did something, so then Brown did something, so then Dartmouth did something, so then Duke did something et cetera, et cetera.

Kai Wright: Everybody wants to be like Yale.

Chris Marsicano: Now that requires a level of finance that most universities don't have, but there are some select places like Brown that do invest heavily in private equity and those places make it hard to divest today. In the '80s and '70s, students could say, "We would like you to divest from South Africa," and universities knew exactly what holdings they had in South Africa, exactly what percentage of shares of a company in South Africa they had and could say, "Okay, we'll do that. We will now take that money and invest it somewhere else and it's going to be fine."

Today, the complexity of our system is so difficult that is really, really hard for universities to do what students want to do, which is one of three things, or some combination of three things. The first is to divest from weapons manufacturers. The second is to divest from Israeli businesses. The third and most difficult is to divest from businesses that do business with Israeli businesses. That one is the hard one. You can probably find an index fund that doesn't include weapons manufacturers.

Goldman Sachs will definitely put that together for you. You can even divest directly from Israeli companies, but it is very, very hard to divest from companies that do business with Israeli companies. I think a great example here is Microsoft or Amazon. Amazon and Microsoft, their Azure and Amazon web services products are used by the Israeli government. If you're going to divest wholly from anybody doing business in Israel, that also means divesting from Amazon and Microsoft. That's a hard pill for university endowment managers to swallow. It's much harder to do than in the 1980s.

Kai Wright: All of this, I have to say, Chris, it then makes me feel like when I hear students say things like, "This isn't really a school, it's a hedge fund." It makes me feel like they have kind of a really strong point there. Everything you're saying may be true, but I do not hear a lot about education or moral truths in these details.

Chris Marsicano: [laughs] It's a fair point. A good friend of mine has consistently said that Harvard is a hedge fund with a university attached. There's definitely that feeling among many. I would point to the fact that these endowments that make so much money, that receive so much money, they are required just like a retirement account is, to pay out every year. The paying out that they're doing is going into the operating funds for the university.

Now, I think about places like Yale and places like Harvard, students whose family income is twice the median family income in the United States attend those institutions tuition-free. That generosity to basically say, look, you can come here and you will not have to take out loans if your family can't afford. It comes from the endowment. The ability to hire high-quality faculty comes from the endowment. Let's not lose sight of that. The fact that these endowments really prop up some really good things for colleges and universities.

Kai Wright: Okay. Let's talk about the politics here because there's all of these questions about the actual financing and the choices of the investments, but ultimately, the point is to make a political and moral statement. As we've said, the success of the anti-apartheid movement really was less the divestment itself than the conversation that it forced, the way it kept the conversation going. How is this movement surrounding Israel and the debate surrounding Israel in general different from the one surrounding South Africa and apartheid?

Chris Marsicano: Sure. I have to apologize to every student protestor in America because when these protests began, I thought to myself, there is no way that Prime Minister Netanyahu, a person who has the ability to stop this war is paying attention to students on college campuses. They're not going to reach him. This is a futile effort. I was wrong. Just last week, Prime Minister Netanyahu mentioned specifically student protests in America. President Biden has mentioned specifically student protests in America, and I'm reminded of the fact that a professor of mine in graduate school used to say that the greatest threat to any leadership anywhere is a well-organized, committed group of students.

That students themselves have the ability to push forward the advocacy positions that others may not have the same ability to do. As long as these protests are in the news, members of Congress are going to have to answer questions at town halls about these protests. It is certainly the case that these protests are absolutely affecting the public discourse and building political will to force a ceasefire in Israel. I would not be surprised if these continue, if a ceasefire comes, certainly before the fall when students are mostly back on campus.

Kai Wright: How does it differ though politically in this moment? Debate over Israel, How is that different from the debate over South Africa and apartheid, or are they different at all?

Chris Marsicano: They're slightly different in that by the time student protestors were protesting the apartheid regime, the vast majority of Americans and certainly of free liberal democracies around the world did in fact believe the apartheid regime was wrong and needed to end. Those Americans who did believe that the apartheid regime could continue believed that the South African regime was anti-communist, and therefore in the context of the Cold War, we needed to ally with them.

That was a very small population within the US broader population. Certainly by the time of 1985 when most of these divestment efforts were taking hold. That is not the case now. You have had places like Brown and Harvard and others, people, donors, very wealthy donors saying, I will withhold my funds if you divest from Israel. I will not give any more money and I'll be very upset with the administration and my wealthy donor friends will be very upset with the administration as well.

You have people who rightfully make the argument that Israel was attacked in October. This is a response to an attack. This is not as universally one-sided as the apartheid regime protest in the '80s was at the time that those protests were happening. There's still some groups of students and faculty and staff and donors who disagree with the idea that a ceasefire is needed. I don't know that that's the majority of them. We have good polling data to suggest that the majority of students do believe a ceasefire is warranted, but it's not universal.

Kai Wright: One of the things that you've noted in talking about this story is that some state schools cannot divest in the way that students are asking them to because of laws that are already in place in those states. Can you just quickly tell us about those laws and why they complicate this conversation for public institutions?

Chris Marsicano: In 35 states, there are laws that prohibit universities from contracting with private companies that have been a part of the BDS movement, the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement, which has been an umbrella term for anti-Israeli settlement. Since October, anti-Israel engagement in Gaza, those laws could be interpreted to also affecting endowment managers and the different kind of funds they can be in.

For public universities in those 35 states, it's extraordinarily difficult to comply with the laws, not just to comply with their fiduciary duties to get some good returns, but also to comply with these state laws. They could be found liable as institutions for investing in companies that have a BDS motive and certainly with companies that choose to divest from Israel writ large.

Kai Wright: Because of the preexisting politics around this debate.

Chris Marsicano: Because of the preexisting politics around this debate. Absolutely.

Kai Wright: Do you hear a similar dynamic in the conversation around speech on campus?

Chris Marsicano: Yes.

Kai Wright: This debate over who feels safe, who doesn't, whether Jewish students feel physically threatened because of pro-Palestinian speech. Is that also caught up in some way in previous debates over this?

Chris Marsicano: I think questions of free speech are very difficult on college campuses. I've been known to say repeatedly that the greatest gifts of the United States to the world are Beyonce and our university system. I mean that sincerely because Beyonce is a great example of our cultural exports. Our movies are films are music are known throughout the world, but also our university system is the envy of the world.

We get a million students from countries all over the world coming to our universities every year. One of the major reasons why our universities have such a massive advantage over universities abroad, most universities abroad, Oxford's pretty good, is that our universities have historically been a bastion of free speech. It is alarming when students talk about how they feel like they can't express themselves in class or feel like they are threatened by speech.

It's a very difficult thing for a professor to do, to basically talk with students and say, "Look, being uncomfortable is part of the college experience, being pushed in different ways and being pushed in terms of your views and the way you think about things, that's why you come to college. You don't come to college to be in an echo chamber and sometimes that is so uncomfortable that you feel unsafe. That doesn't mean that you are unsafe.

That doesn't mean that colleges and universities are going to try to allow anything to happen to you physically and will certainly provide you with supports emotionally and spiritually. Dealing with these tough subjects and dealing with anger and hatred is a part of human life." It becomes very, very hard for a college that believes in free speech for the purposes of research, believes in free speech for the purposes of a robust class discussion to curtail that speech.

That's why I'm alarmed. As colleges have taken apart these encampments. The students exercising free speech, that's an important aspect of the college experience. In terms of the politics of all of this and how it may affect the classroom, we have seen historically across the country, good polling data that shows that students are not as worried about their professors or administration shutting them down and more worried about each other, shutting them down.

They're worried that they'll say something in class and then be held accountable for it in social ways. They'll go to a party and be ostracized from a friend group. They'll lose friends over things that they might say in class. That fear is very real for them, which makes it all the more reason that when students stand up and speak loudly over a controversial issue, we should listen because they're doing so in a state where they're not sure that they're going to have the same group of friends afterwards. Politics affects us all.

It certainly affects colleges and universities, but if we don't have free speech, even uncomfortable speech on colleges and universities, we can no longer claim to have the moral high ground and freedom of speech across the country.

Kai Wright: As a college professor with all of that in mind, what have you learned from this class of graduates as you've watched them grapple with this political moment? What have you taken from them?

Chris Marsicano: We have to be in the business of building ethical moral leaders. I have to tell you, this group of graduates, the class of 2024 is extraordinarily resilient. They graduated from high school in COVID. They came to college in a time when many of their courses were online and not in person where they had to wear masks throughout the classroom due to COVID-19.

Here they are taking a massive leadership role in the world when it comes to pushing for peace in the Middle East. Y'all, if the goal of universities is to make good civic leaders, I don't know that we did that so much as they were built different, this class of 2024. This class of 2024 certainly is destined to take up that mantle of leadership. I'm excited about the possibility of this group graduating. I'm thrilled that our futures are sound. These students care about the world and they want to make a difference, a disproportional difference in the world.

Kai Wright: Chris Marsicano is an Assistant Professor of Educational Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina. Chris, thanks so much for this time.

Chris Marsicano: Thank you so much, Kai. It's been an honor to be here, and Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there.

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Kai Wright: A reminder, if you are a member of the Class of 2024, we are giving you the floor of this show very soon. We want to hear how you have been shaped by world events since leaving high school and what you intend to do with that experience after graduation. Leave us a message or send us a text at 844-745-8255, or you can DM us on Instagram. We are @NotesWithKai.

Notes From America is a production of WNYC Studios. This episode was produced by Suzanne Gaber. Theme music and sound design by Jared Paul. Our team also includes Katerina Barton, Karen Frillmann, Regina de Heer, Matthew Marando, Siona Peterous, and Lindsay Foster Thomas. I am Kai Wright. Thanks for spending time.

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