Today, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) releases its latest trustee guide, Danger in Divestment: The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement and What Trustees Need to Know. It is a companion document to the just-released Equal Space for All: A Trustee Guide to Preventing Encampments and Occupations on Campus. Together, these guides serve as powerful, practical advisories for college trustees as they try to navigate what is widely anticipated to be a volatile fall semester on American campuses.
The anti-Israel protests in spring of 2024 were marked by obstructive encampments, illegal occupations of university buildings, shout-downs and harassment of both students and faculty. Demonstrators made demands that universities divest themselves of any holdings they have in Israel or companies that do business in Israel. Such divestment policy would damage the institution’s ability to deliver financial returns it needs to support the entire campus community and be a breach of the trustees’ fiduciary obligation to the institutions they serve. Calls for severing academic and cultural alliances should likewise be summarily rejected by higher education governing boards, since that would be an egregious violation of long-standing academic ethics.
While the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is an appropriate topic for classroom debate and discussions, it is not a topic that should come before institutional governing boards.ACTA strongly recommends that trustees reject calls by protestors for formal consideration of divestment or boycotts tagged to any political agenda and to protect their institutions from future pressure to do so by officially adopting and enforcing the Kalven Commission’s institutional neutrality principles, which means that the university will not collective adopt policy positions outside its core mission of teaching and research.
With the release of both ACTA’s Danger in Divestment: The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement and What Trustees Need to Know and An Equal Space for All: A Trustee Guide to Preventing Encampments and Occupations on Campus, ACTA builds upon its 29-year legacy of trustee education and training. Both guides have been distributed to 23,000 trustees at 1,600 public and private institutions across America.
“Colleges and universities should be sanctuaries for teaching and learning. That is their unique role. No pressure group should have the right to draw time and resources away for that special, sacred mission,” said ACTA President Michael Poliakoff.
ACTA Chief of Staff & Senior Vice President of Strategy Armand Alacbay stated, “Trustees need to be aware of the dire costs of allowing a college’s or university’s investment decisions to be influenced by political or ideological motives. The sole purpose of an institution’s endowment is to generate financial returns to provide resources that support the institution’s educational mission. Boards must be able to look beyond the narrow interests of any singular community.”
MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org
Higher education has taken a beating lately. The industry has been roiled by seemingly endless crises on topics ranging from affordibility and student debt to free speech and antisemitism. It is hardly surprising that public confidence in higher education has plummeted, as over two-thirds of Americans now believe it is headed in the wrong direction.
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