In May 2024, students overwhelmingly voted to request that the College issue a statement on scholasticide, disclose its exposure to arms, divest from a list of arms manufacturers and reconstitute a social responsibility committee that was dissolved in 1998. After ten months passed and thousands of lives lost, the College has decided to officially reject every one of these requests.

The response is disappointing but keeps with Bowdoin’s history. It took a decade to pressure the College to divest from apartheid in South Africa. The refusal to take even a symbolic stance against what numerous experts are calling a genocide in Palestine reminds us that the College has long been at the vanguard of complacency.

But if the decision of the College is unsurprising, the report of the Ad Hoc Committee on Investment Responsibility (ACIR) unintentionally opens the road for divestment. Its aim was to convince us that the demands of the student referendum are impractical, but the ACIR report has done the opposite.

1. The report proves that the College can disclose its investments. The administration has claimed that it cannot know what it is invested in. This willingness to surrender financial oversight would be profoundly disturbing if true. Fortunately, it is not. While the College cannot know exactly what it is invested in at any precise moment, it can know what it has been invested in at semi-regular intervals. The College proved this when the ACIR revealed Bowdoin’s approximate exposure to some arms companies. Disclosure is feasible. And if the College can disclose its exposure to a list of arms manufacturers, why won’t it disclose its investments in other companies that are complicit in genocide, such as Palantir, Caterpillar and Motorola? What about Tesla?

2. The report proves that the College is invested in, and benefiting from, the extermination of an entire people. The ACIR report revealed that approximately 0.08 percent of Bowdoin’s endowment is invested in the ten defense companies named in the referendum. The administration has sought to exonerate itself by insisting that this number is insignificant. But investing 0.08 percent of one’s endowment in genocide is still investing in genocide, just as investing 0.08 percent of one’s endowment in slavery is still investing in slavery. The College has confirmed what many of us long believed: We are complicit in genocide.

3. The report proves that divestment should not substantially harm Bowdoin’s finances. Since the students issued their referendum last year, the administration has opposed divestment on the grounds that it would undermine the College’s ability to function. In a bid to dissuade students from supporting the referendum, they implied that divestment would jeopardize financial aid. Thanks to the report, however, we know that Bowdoin’s exposure to the companies listed in the referendum is so small that divestment would not trigger a financial meltdown. Since divestment should not severely harm financial aid or Bowdoin’s operating budget more generally, why not divest?

4. The report proves that the College has the ability to divest from arms if it so desires. The College does not directly invest in individual companies but hires external fund managers who oversee diversified assets that include arms. The College has taken this to mean that divestment is not possible. The logical conclusion of this interpretation is that the complexities of modern finance have made it impossible to take a moral stance on anything. It might be discovered, for example, that one of our fund managers is invested in slavery, but because capitalism has allegedly become so complex, there’s nothing we can do. All evils are permitted.

Thankfully, this interpretation is also inaccurate. While the College cannot directly divest from individual arms companies, it can demand that its fund managers not invest in genocide. (Safa Zaki admitted in a recent email that the “investment office carefully screens investment managers” and that this “includes interviewing their staffs, probing their ethics, alignment and culture through extensive references.”) If they refuse, the College can choose to work with fund managers who agree not to invest in the extermination of a people. This will mean breaking relations with our existing “best-in-class” fund managers who support genocide and may entail restructuring the College’s investment strategy, but it is not an impossibility.

Despite its assertions to the contrary, Bowdoin’s hands are not tied. Its refusal to divest comes down to a decision. And the College has chosen genocide.

This decision has put the College in a state of hypocrisy. It repeatedly waxes poetic about advocating for the common good, fostering inclusive excellence and, as Scott Perper and Safa Zaki’s email put it, “contributing to positive change in the world.” Let us not forget that the mission of the College calls to “leverage resources to disrupt inequities,” which by definition includes divestment. Yet, the college has chosen to discard those values.

Well aware that the College is contradicting its values, the authors of the ACIR report tried to justify Bowdoin’s actions by arguing that “a primary resource used by the College to disrupt inequities is the income generated by the endowment,” and so the “greater the support received from the endowment, the greater the disruption.” In essence, investing in inequities disrupts inequities. The best way to stop genocide is to invest in genocide.

This kind of argumentation is not only an affront to the kind of critical thinking that this institution purports to foster, it also raises questions about the future of this institution at a time when higher education is under attack.

If the College does not respect its own commitment to uphold the common good for all, how can we trust that it will uphold the common good for its own members when the Trump administration forces us to conform to its political agenda? Will we abandon our values to save our federal grants? Will we abandon our values to appease a politically motivated Title VI investigation? Will we abandon our values when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement shows up to kidnap our students and colleagues?

If the College cannot take a stand against one of the worst crimes humans can commit, then what does the College stand for?

For inquiries, please contact bowdoinfsjp@proton.me.

– The 40+ members of Bowdoin Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP).

FSJP was founded in 2024.