--:-- Noel King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noel King.
--:-- Josh Moody: Thanks for having me on the show.
--:-- Noel King: Today, we're talking about the push to divest from Israel on college campuses. Josh Moody is a reporter with Inside Higher Ed, where he covers money and management. Josh, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Josh Moody: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Noel King: So, Columbia University just canceled its main commencement ceremony and is instead holding smaller ceremonies for individual schools. What's going on there?
--:-- Josh Moody: Yeah, it's a response to some of the encampments on campus. There are students demanding their universities divest from Israel, and Columbia is trying to figure out how to ensure peace on campus.
--:-- Noel King: And what does that demand mean, exactly?
--:-- Josh Moody: Students want to know what's in the endowment and want to divest from companies that are profiting off the war between Israel and Hamas or providing services to the Israeli government.
--:-- Noel King: That's a big ask. How hard would it be for colleges to divest from Israel?
--:-- Josh Moody: Disclosure is the easy part. Chief financial officers and endowment managers should be able to easily identify direct investments. Indirect investments get a little more murky, though.
--:-- Noel King: And what about the companies that students are targeting? Which ones are they after?
--:-- Josh Moody: They're targeting companies like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin – companies that are weapons manufacturers or have tentacles in that world.
--:-- Noel King: And what about Google and Amazon? They have a contract with the Israeli military and government.
--:-- Josh Moody: Yeah, that's a big one. Amazon and Google share a $1.2 billion contract called Project Nimbus to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government.
--:-- Noel King: Now, let's talk to Charlie Eaton, an associate professor of sociology at UC Merced. Charlie, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Noel King: So, Charlie, you've written a book about the rise of financiers in higher education. Can you explain what a college endowment is and how it works?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Yeah, it's an investment fund that universities often have had for many decades. They used to be invested in pretty conservative things like bonds and savings accounts. But starting in the 70s and especially in the 80s, universities started to invest to try to maximize investment returns.
--:-- Noel King: And what are they used for?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Well, any range of things to support employing faculty, paying salaries on campus, funding research. In recent years, the wealthiest private universities have reduced student loan borrowing among their undergraduates.
--:-- Noel King: That's interesting. And what about the debate about whether schools should invest according to values and principles other than just maximizing returns?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Yeah, there's been increasing debate about that. Some universities have started to divest from fossil fuels, for example.
--:-- Noel King: And what about the idea of divestment from Israel? How hard would it be for colleges to do that?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: It's hard to deal in hypotheticals, but we can say that the University of California investment funds are still pretty healthy four years after divesting from fossil fuels.
--:-- Noel King: Now, let's talk about some of the other divestment campaigns that we've seen in the past. Charlie, you mentioned South Africa and apartheid. Can you walk us through that?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Yeah, well, and I might reach back even farther to the Vietnam War. We have protested the use of the university to support the war in Vietnam by discovering military means to resolve social and political problems.
--:-- Noel King: And what about the divestment campaign from apartheid South Africa in the 1980s?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Hundreds of colleges divested, and that preceded a transition to a democratic government in South Africa in the early 90s.
--:-- Noel King: That's fascinating. And what about the current divestment campaign from Israel? How does that compare to the one from South Africa?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: It's hard to draw straight lines between divestment and the transition to democracy in South Africa and the end of apartheid. But one of the things that happened around that is it really focused debate and attention across society about South Africa.
--:-- Noel King: And what about the current divestment campaign from Israel? How does that compare to the one from South Africa?
--:-- Charlie Eaton: There's a lot more contention on campus across the campus community. There's resistance among some folks on campus. There's not the same level of consensus yet, I think, that we've seen around fossil fuel divestment.
--:-- Noel King: Charlie Eaton is an associate professor of sociology at UC Merced. Thanks for joining us, Charlie.
--:-- Charlie Eaton: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Noel King: And that's it for today's show. Thanks for listening.