Georgetown University administrators will not divest from companies nor end its relationships with academic institutions associated with Israel after more than two-thirds of Georgetown students voted in favor of divestment, the interim university president announced on April 29.
Interim President Robert M. Groves wrote that the university would not implement this student referendum, citing Georgetown’s “institutional values and history and existing university resources and processes that address [its] investments.”
He stated that Georgetown has a longstanding opposition to academic boycotts. In 2013, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said that a boycott of Israeli universities “undermines the academic freedom that is essential to the mission of the academy,” adding that it is a university’s obligation to promote dialogue and engagement between scholars and societies.
Groves also cited the university’s policy on speech and expression, which allows students and community members to express their freedom of speech.
Others disagree with this decision, made less than an hour after the Georgetown University Student Association announced the passage of the nonbinding Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions referendum.
Nearly 60 community members gathered to protest the university’s decision on May 1 at a rally organized by Georgetown’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. An SJP media liaison told The Hoya, Georgetown’s student newspaper, that divestment supporters would continue to protest until the university divests.
Georgetown holds more than $55 million in investments in companies such as Amazon and Google’s holding company, Alphabet, both of which have supplied technology to the Israeli military, according to an article by The Hoya.
The referendum read, “I support Georgetown University disclosing all private investments to its community members and upholding its Socially Responsible Investment Policy, through divesting from companies arming Israel and ending university partnerships with Israeli institutions.”
In addition to divestment, the referendum calls for Georgetown to end partnerships with Tel Aviv University and other Israeli institutions with “direct involvement in the occupation and genocide.”
The nonprofit Alums for Campus Fairness said in a statement that the referendum “unfairly targets the only Jewish state and is likely to worsen the campus climate for Jewish, Israeli, and pro-Israel students at Georgetown.”
Jacob Intrator, the president of Students Supporting Israel at Georgetown, claimed that the referendum and GUSA’s endorsement of BDS “threatens Jewish students’ safety,” in an opinion piece he penned in The Jerusalem Post.
Others want Georgetown to fully divest, aligning with the majority student vote.
“The student body must demand that Georgetown divest itself in full from Israel’s crimes and for a transparent account of all the university’s investments to be made public,” an article by The Georgetown Voice read. “Because our tuition dollars are being invested in technology used against Palestinian civilians, we are complicit.”
GUSA drafted the referendum and originally posed the divestment question to the undergraduate student body from April 14 to 16 during Passover, to the dismay of many Jewish students. After receiving hundreds of emails, GUSA rescheduled the voting window to April 26 to 28.
“We made this decision after hearing concerns about the placement of the election during a religious holiday,” GUSA wrote in a statement posted on Instagram.
