The University of Cambridge’s wealthiest constituent college, Trinity College Cambridge, has decided to divest from all arms companies, Middle East Eye can reveal.
MEE has learnt from three well-informed sources close to Trinity’s student union that the college council, responsible for major financial and other decisions, voted to remove Trinity’s investments from arms companies in early March.
According to the sources, the college decided not to announce that it would divest from arms companies after an activist defaced a 1914 portrait of Lord Arthur Balfour - who authored the infamous Balfour Declaration - inside the college on 8 March.
one thing I’ve been learning from these protests is that US colleges are apparently investment bankers? Why would a university be sending money to any arms manufacturer? The ridiculous tuition costs should be more than enough income.
Note that this article has nothing to do with the USA.
whoops
Leaving aside the fact that this is about the UK, I’ll take a crack at this. Many large colleges in the US have what’s called an endowment, which is essentially a massive pot of money that they can’t spend, but can invest. I think they typically can spend the interest that the endowment accrues, so they invest it so it grows. Many of the Ivy League schools have endowments worth multiple billions of dollars. It’s a very strange system.
I could be wrong on some of the finer points, so folks can feel free to correct me.
The endowment management side does actually run like an investment bank, private equity, and asset management firm and is staffed by people who worked on those.
Activist investing is kind of pointless in that an efficient market reallocates funds around it. Like, if an investor chooses not to invest in X for some sort of reason other than the expected value of X, it reduces the value of X, sure – but also creates an incentive for others to invest in X. The actions of other investors are not independent of the actions of the activist investor.
I once heard it described as trying to “bail a hole in a lake.” New water goes right back into the spot where it was taken from.
The point is ideological. The main objective is but to cause financial hurt, but to declare moral bankruptcy on the Israeli institutions.
It’s also financial
Just like Apartheid South Africa got crushed under boycotts so must israel be completely economically isolated until their Apartheid state seizes to exist.
Academic boycotts are important since israel, like the Nazis, relies heavily on technology to make up for its shortcomings in manpower.
Money is very comparable to water. That’s why this is a real thing and not fiction
