The University of San Francisco will divest from four defense technology companies and weapons manufacturers, the school announced this week, following a review by a board of trustees investment committee with input from pro-Palestinian student protesters.
Campus activists celebrated the announcement as a major win and held a celebratory press conference on Thursday.
“As a result of over a year of demanding our university cut ties with Israel, the University of San Francisco has committed to divest from four companies fueling the genocide in Gaza,” a leader of the campus protest movement said in a statement.
The university administration rejected the students’ claim.
“The decision was not made due to students’ argument that these [companies] had ties to Israel,” Kellie Samson, a USF spokesperson, wrote in an email to J.
Effective June 1, USF will sell its stock holdings in Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace and RTX, according to Samson.
All four are among the many companies targeted by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for doing business with or in Israel.
Samson did not explain why the four companies were earmarked for divestment, only noting that the decision was reached “with input from USF’s Socially Responsible Task Force” and was part of a new policy to divest from stocks in favor of funds.
“Moving forward, USF’s endowment will be invested in index funds or other commingled funds, in which it will not be possible to make individual security selections,” according to USF’s announcement sent this week in a campuswide email.
After June 1, USF’s portfolio of mutual funds and index funds still “may have these exact same companies,” Samson noted.
The Socially Responsible Task Force, assembled in September, was made up of students, faculty and staff (some representing the student protesters and others with no stated position). It formed after university leaders had announced in July that they would take into consideration the demands of student activists who protested Israel’s war in Gaza throughout spring 2024.
“This group will work with the USF Office of Business and Finance and the USF Board of Trustees Investment Committee regarding investment practices and alignment of the investments with the university’s mission and values,” read a July 1, 2024 statement cosigned by USF Provost Eileen Fung, Vice President of Student Life Julie Orio and Dean of Students Shanno Gary.
Like universities across the country, the private Jesuit institution with about 9,200 students has witnessed strident pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protests during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war that began on Oct. 7, 2023.
Protesters at USF set up a tent encampment and held a rally on the school’s central lawn in April 2024, during which speakers called for the end of the “financial, political and cultural support for the Israeli genocide.”
Then-President Rev. Paul J. Fitzgerald briefly met with the protesters, who called on him to acknowledge a “genocide” in Gaza and call for a “free Palestine.” A protester pointed a finger at Fitzgerald and told him, “check yourself,” before Fitzgerald walked away, according to a video of the exchange posted on social media.
The demands of USF’s student protest movement are broad.
Alia Sky, a USF law student and media liaison for USF’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, said during Thursday’s press conference that while the group sees this divestment decision as a win, it will make more demands of the university.
Beyond calling on USF to divest from “all Israeli occupation affiliated endowments and investments,” the group wants the university to end all “academic opportunities, trips, scholarships, and relationships with the Israeli occupation.”
This includes the Center for Transformative Education’s Beyond Bridges program, which has partnered with USF since 2010 to facilitate student trips to Israel. According to the program’s website, the trips are intended to give participants the “opportunity to meet with individuals and organizations working to end, and even transform, this decades-old conflict.”
Sky told J. her group opposes any program that takes place within Israel, as the group sees the entire country as occupying Palestinian land.