After weeks of relative quiet, University of Virginia students staged another walkout Thursday — easily the largest of the school year to date — protesting the university’s financial ties to Israel amid that country’s ongoing war with Palestinian terror group Hamas.
Their message was clear: UVa must comply with a student referendum passed last year calling on the university to divest from Israel, which the referendum’s proponents say has instituted an “apartheid regime” in the region and unfairly targeted and killed innocent Palestinians. Students on Thursday said they have no intention of backing down, this semester and perhaps even beyond.
A crowd of roughly 200 students marched across UVa Grounds in the early afternoon Thursday, chanting and attracting the attention of onlookers as the long procession made its way to Madison Hall, which houses UVa President Jim Ryan’s office. With a Palestinian flag behind him, a Palestinian student gave a speech from the steps of the building, telling the crowd that their tuition dollars are “funding this genocide.”
The UVa student movement was born after Hamas’ deadly 2023 surprise attack and Israel’s subsequent declaration of war — an attack that claimed the lives of 1,200 people in Israel and a war that has claimed the lives of more than 42,000 people in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. In recent weeks, Israel has expanded its campaign, targeting Hamas ally Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, killing more than 2,000 people, according to the Lebanon Health Ministry. Fears are mounting that the conflict will grow into a much larger regional war.
The Israeli offensive, UVa protesters argue, is aided by their own university. They’ve asked the school to disclose how it invests its $14 billion endowment and divest from any companies with ties to the Israeli government.
The student referendum this past February, in which some 8,000 students voted, echoed that call, passing with 67.87% of the vote. The referendum called for an audit of UVa’s investments to determine the extent to which its endowment funds are “invested in companies engaging in or profiting from the State of Israel’s apartheid regime and acute violence against Palestinians and to immediately divest all funds so identified.”
The referendum, however, had no real power. That was made clear in September when the UVa Investment Management Company, or UVIMCO, a group tasked with generating high returns from the school’s endowment, announced that it would not be “divesting from any investments in response to the student referendum.”
That announcement, made during a meeting of UVa’s governing Board of Visitors, was the most recent denial protesters have faced.
“The university has made all sorts of excuses for why they can’t divest,” yelled the Palestinian student from the steps of Madison Hall. “Really, what they are saying is that the lives of my family, the lives of the Palestinians, the lives of the Lebanese, aren’t worth changing business as usual.”
Divestment efforts have been attempted at other universities across the country in the wake of Oct. 7, 2023. The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, has been criticized as inherently antisemitic and blamed for a rise in antisemitism across college campuses.
While some worry of rampant antisemitism at UVa fueled in part by the protesters, according to an April 3 letter from Hillel, the largest Jewish organization on Grounds, antisemitism is not as widespread as those outside the university community believe.
“It saddens us to see concerted efforts to exploit Jewish students as pawns for political agendas. Such efforts threaten the safety and well-being of Jewish students,” reads the letter authored by Hillel student leaders.
Other universities where students embraced the divestment movement saw much larger protests and received much more national media attention. Perhaps none more so than Columbia University in New York City, which on Wednesday was sent a letter from 25 state attorneys general imploring it to ignore calls for divestment.
One of those signatures was Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares’.
“Columbia University was right not to cave to demands for divestment from Israel, just as the University of Virginia rejected a similar BDS push,” Miyares said in a statement announcing his endorsement of the letter. “Antisemitism has no place on our campuses, and we must stand firm against efforts to delegitimize Israel through coercive and hateful means.”
Miyares and Gov. Glenn Youngkin have been consistent critics of the campus protests in Virginia and beyond; they urged university administrators to break up protest encampments that were erected during the spring semester, which UVa did on May 4 of this year with the assistance of armed state troopers.
Over the summer, also at the insistence of the Youngkin administration, schools across the commonwealth, including UVa, adopted policies that limit the time, place and manner protests are permitted on campus. That includes prohibitions on tents and masks.
At UVa, the new mask policy requires that anyone wearing a face covering must identify themselves if requested by a university official. The policy cites a piece of Virginia Code which says that it is unlawful to conceal one’s identity with a face covering.
The policy, implemented one day before the start of the fall semester, appears to have made an impact. During pro-Palestine protests last year, most of the participants wore face coverings. On Thursday, only a handful of students were masked.
The protesters were instructed not to speak with the media, and the Palestinian student declined to provide his name to The Daily Progress, citing concerns that if identified the Israeli government may prevent him from visiting his family.
Press was instead directed to third-year student Eli Weinger. Speaking on behalf of the protesters and Jewish Voice for Peace, Weinger referenced UVIMCO’s September announcement.
“We’re not blind to that. We understand where they are now,” Weinger said. “Our job is … to move them to a place where they can no longer get away with the murder of innocents overseas.”
UVa students have called for divestment in years past, most famously in the 1980s, urging the university to break ties with apartheid South Africa. For roughly a decade, students fought for the school to divest from South Africa.
Those students faced rejections too. In fact, as Thursday’s organizers said they discovered over the summer, in May of 1987, Carl Smith, then-chairman of UVa’s finance committee, said, “The question of divestment will not be considered further by the Board unless there has been a material change in conditions surrounding this issue.”
UVa divested from South African businesses three years later.
The reason for the change in those three years, Weinger said, was not apartheid itself, but sustained pressure against UVa.
“The change happened here. It happened on these Grounds, where students made it impossible for the university to ignore the injustice in South Africa, and that is exactly our model for how we plan to move forward,” Weinger said.
In the 1980s, that movement included conversations between protesters and university leadership. But today’s protesters, Weinger said, have concerns about whether UVa officials are “willing to engage honestly.”
Part of that distrust is rooted in May 4, when UVa requested Virginia State Police break up a pro-Palestine encampment on Grounds. Armed state troopers arrested 27 people and deployed pepper spray on the crowd of onlookers, supporters, hecklers and the press that had gathered near the chaos.
Not long after the controversial decision, Ryan himself said he was “fully and painfully aware that we lost some of that trust” and that trust would be very difficult to regain.
The Palestinian student on the steps of Madison Hall on Thursday afternoon called out Ryan, who was with other administrators in an undisclosed command post during the events of May 4. The student drew a comparison to Ryan’s “Run with Jim” program, an open invitation to students to jog alongside the university president, an avid runner, and share their thoughts with the administrator.
“They sent state troopers on peaceful protesters,” the student said. “They hope if they put on enough Run with Jim events we will forget how he ran from his own students on May 4.”
Less than a week before Thursday’s walkout, Ryan said during a UVa Faculty Senate meeting that he is working to implement a review of UVa’s decision-making on May 4. Faculty have demanded such a review for months. But faculty demands have been clear the review be external, independent and available for public review, and it is not yet clear if it will meet any of those criteria; the university’s review of the deadly 2022 shooting on Grounds has remained under wraps, and Ryan has said an ongoing review into allegations of overbilling at UVa’s hospital will not be released to the public.
Ryan also told the Faculty Senate on Oct. 18 he was surprised that there had not been large protests this semester like there had been in the spring. It didn’t take long for the first such protest to materialize, and others may be coming.
“Our goal is to make sure that they have no other option but to engage with us honestly, and that involves pressure on the outside to force an honest conversation on the inside,” said Weinger.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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