A Brown University advisory committee has recommended that the college divest from “companies identified as facilitating human rights abuses in Palestine”, JTA reported on Tuesday.
Six of the nine members of the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices voted in favor of the motion. The vote took place on Monday, according to the report.
The advisory committee at the university, which is located in Providence, Rhode Island, makes nonbinding recommendations about investment and “issues of ethical and moral responsibility” to the school’s president and governing body. It is made up of members representing the faculty, staff, students and alumni.
In March, undergraduates at Brown voted in favor of a nonbinding measure to boycott Israel by a more than 2-to-1 margin.
However, Brown University President Christina Paxson later said she would not act on the referendum.
“As a university, Brown’s mission is to advance knowledge and understanding through research, analysis and debate. Its role is not to take sides on contested geopolitical issues. I have been steadfast in my view that Brown should not embrace any of the planks of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanctions) movement,” she said at the time.
In recent years there have been attempts to boycott Israel by individual educational institutions.
In early March, the student government at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania voted to approve a resolution calling on the school to divest from companies that do business with Israel related to Judea and Samaria.
Also that month, students and faculty at California's Pitzer College voted in favor of suspending the college’s study abroad partnership with the University of Haifa. Similar to the Brown University incident, Pitzer’s president vetoed the move.
In December of 2018, the Student Government Assembly (SGA) at New York University (NYU) voted in favor of a BDS-type resolution calling for the divestment of companies that do business with the IDF.