I’ve reproduced a comment of mine below the fold from the website of Princeton Alumni Weekly, responding to critics of the student divestment campaign described in my previous post. One critic had said: “I fail to see why students on campus should vote on how the University invests its funds.” Another had said: “Students shouldn’t be ‘running’ the University any more than alumnae/alumni should. Leave investing to the experts hired by the University to manage the endowment funds.”

There’s never a shortage of Friedman-esque arguments for self-abnegation and the abdication of responsibility in these matters. I’ve previously discussed this same issue here. It’s worth noting, since our subsequent discussion of that topic (which at the time focused heavily on China), that Volkswagen has, just a week ago, decided to pull out of Xinjiang Province in China, in part due to pressure from human rights groups over its complicity in Chinese repression. About time. I made an unheard plea for Princeton’s pulling out of China back in 2000, and one for a boycott of Saudi Arabia in 2016 (among many I’ve made). It’s time to use the only real power we have here: even if we can’t literally put a stop to evil, we can pull the plug on our involvement in it. The anti-divestment naysayers need to figure out whether they prefer morally clean hands to hands soaked in innocent blood. But their naysaying isn’t going to stop us.

My comment:
All members of the University community, including students, faculty, and alumni, have an interest in avoiding complicity in injustice, and working to ensure that the University itself avoids this complicity. We’re not Eichmann-like robots bound to defer to amoral “experts” conspicuously indifferent to considerations of justice, and conspicuously lacking expertise in it. Whether we’re members of the University community or not, we all have an interest in knowing how the University invests its endowment, and in calling out the destructive consequences of those investments. The University unapologetically invests in a military-industrial complex dedicated to militarism and does its best to conceal what it does. All of that affects all of us. So all of it is fair game. I congratulate the undergrads on having passed Referendum 5. It’s an important first step. Keep it up. Many of us are with you and will be until the end.