In September, Bowdoin finally responded to the results of last year’s referendum. After months of purported deliberation, the Trustees announced the creation of the “Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility” (ACIR). Rather than a true concession, the ACIR is simply a bad-faith attempt to placate us and silence our collective voice. And this week’s disappointing “listening sessions” with the committee have only made that clearer.

The ACIR amounts to a rejection of the Referendum. We, as members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), crafted the demands of the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum to provide an urgent actionable path forward in the face of genocide. Despite its passage with overwhelming student support, Bowdoin rejected our first demand outright, tabled the second and third and watered down the fourth into irrelevance.

The ACIR is redundant. After the Referendum passed last spring, both SJP representatives and students opposed to the Referendum presented their views directly to the Board on May 11. Months after this meeting, the Trustees created the ACIR to collect student opinions on the referendum for the Board to take under advisement. But they had already heard directly from students who both supported and opposed the referendum. The administration does not need to create a committee to learn what students want—the referendum and direct conversations with the Board have already established that.

The ACIR is undemocratic. Fewer than 100 students attended this week’s eight ACIR “Coffee Listening Sessions.” In contrast, over 1,300 students voted on the Bowdoin Solidarity Referendum. These meetings cannot recreate the quality nor scale of student input achieved in last spring’s democratic, secret ballot referendum. While the administration may not have liked the outcome of a democratic process with overwhelming student participation, their attempt to relitigate the Referendum is both ineffective and undemocratic.

The ACIR sidesteps the real issue. Instead of investigating our complicity in Israel’s genocide of Palestinians, the Committee has been redirected to focus on “investment strategies”—a vague focus that omits the word “Palestine,” ignores the very reasons students called forth this referendum and makes no commitments.

The ACIR lacks transparency. The administration unilaterally selected the members of the Committee without making its criteria known and without consulting students, staff or faculty.

Board members who led this week’s “listening sessions” repeatedly refused to answer questions about the Committee’s role, power, motivations and selection process. This committee cannot act as an effective liaison between students and the board without earning our trust. The ACIR has continued to model a pattern of evasive behavior that resembles the administration’s continued refusal to meaningfully engage with overwhelming student support for our demands.

The Committee is powerless. In meetings this week, members of the ACIR openly admitted to students that their recommendations, informed by “listening sessions” with students, faculty and staff, would be entirely non-binding. The power to implement any changes to investment practices regarding the endowment lies solely with the Board of Trustees. The ACIR’s role is solely to make recommendations that the board can choose to ignore.

While we were opposed to the Committee on principle, we still went into this week’s meetings with the hope of engaging in constructive dialogue.

It seems our expectations were too high.

When we arrived at the ACIR meeting, students, faculty, untenured faculty and staff were all split up and taken to separate rooms without prior notice. At one meeting, a Trustee refused to hear more from a student, calling her questions “unproductive” after growing visibly frustrated with the student. Students were told at multiple meetings by the Trustees on the Committee that we just have to “trust them.” But we have been given no reason to.

This committee is not just ineffective—it is insulting. It assumes that students are not intelligent enough to understand the mechanisms of power at Bowdoin—that we will be content with no material concessions so long as we are given a platform to voice our opinions. But the administration forgets why this referendum was created in the first place. Amid a genocide of Palestinians funded by our tax dollars—and for all we know, Bowdoin’s endowment—students at Bowdoin made it resoundingly clear that we stand with our peers in Gaza.

We did not write, campaign for and overwhelmingly pass this referendum just to be heard. We did so to swiftly and decisively remove ourselves from complicity in atrocities that have killed tens of thousands, displaced millions and destroyed the infrastructure necessary to sustain life for Palestinians in Gaza.

The Committee claims to be evidence that our voices matter to the administration. But the creation of the ACIR in response to the referendum indicates the opposite. It is clear to us that the administration has listened—they just don’t like what they’ve heard. They have created this committee to stall, to dilute student opinion, to create the semblance of acting in good faith. But we know better.

We will not be satisfied with measures to indefinitely delay action amidst a genocide. The College will continue to delay, stall and evade until our voices become too loud for them to ignore. As this week of “listening sessions” concludes, let us direct our attention not to a distraction, but to those with the power to act: the Board of Trustees.

Eisa Rifat ’25, Eli Bundy ’27, Shira Cooper ’24, & Olivia Kenney ’25 are members of Bowdoin Students for Justice in Palestine.