On March 26th, Student Assembly passed The Ceasefire in Palestine Resolution, which called for President Rowe to make a statement demanding for a ceasefire in Palestine, delivery of immediate aid to Gaza, return of Palestinian refugees, and lasting peace for all peoples involved, among other demands. Two days later, on March 28th, the voting student body passed a divestment referendum with 2,036 votes cast in its favor, more than twice the 981 votes against it. The following morning, a mere thirteen hours later, President Rowe released a statement plainly refusing to respect and follow through on the student body’s wish to divest from the genocidal regime of Apartheid Israel.
In her statement, President Rowe claimed that the administration does not have control over the school’s finances, instead deflecting responsibility to the 1693 Partners Fund Board. This is misleading, as the official Bylaws of the Board of Visitors states that its Committee on Financial Affairs “directs and controls the handling of investments by an investment counsel or depository agent at any time employed by the Board.” (Board of Visitors Bylaws, page 8).
The revised Investment and Spending Policy for Endowment, passed on April 20, 2022, contains a Social Responsibility Clause, stating that “the Board may direct its Investment Consultant and University staff to implement certain restrictions, impose constraints [...] that take into consideration [...] specific goals […] of social investing.” Simultaneously, the Board made a statement about the genocide in Darfur and gave “direction to the Investment Consultant…making sure that the underlying securities are not on any known and respected lists of companies that suggest support of the current Sudanese government. Companies that are known to conduct substantive business in Sudan will be prohibited in any Board separately managed account” (Amendment to the Investment and Spending Policy for Endowment, page 10). Though this clause states that “investing in pooled or mutual funds means that the investments will be governed by the fund’s own set of guidelines and restrictions,” the Board of Visitors has full control of separately managed accounts, and therefore is able to divest. Consistent with the message of the Social Responsibility Clause, the Board has a responsibility to do an audit of their separate accounts and divest from companies that operate in or otherwise support the genocidal regime of Israel and to revert institutional endowments from propelling the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
President Rowe’s response to the referendum’s passage is also indicative of a double standard in recognizing worldwide human rights abuses. In 2022, she strongly expressed the school’s solidarity with Ukraine against Russia’s invasion, emphasizing that Ukraine is “worth fighting for.” In her capacity as the University's president, she provided an entire page listing educational events, wellness resources, and the institution’s coverage pertaining to the invasion as subsequently the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies Program terminated its study abroad program in Russia.
No such information, resources, or sentiments have been conveyed in support of Palestinian students and their supporters over these past six months despite what has become an internationally recognized genocide. Likewise, the administration has not expressed public support for a number of faculty who have become local, national and international targets of right-wing smear campaigns, nor have they denounced the clear use of pernicious McCarthyist tactics to intimidate and silence scholars and students who advocate for Palestinian self-determination. The administration’s sustained silence on the genocide in Palestine stands in sharp contrast to their support for the people of Ukraine as they actively and selectively overlook the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. To be clear, we fully support the University’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its war crimes therein. We believe that the institutional solidarity for Ukraine should serve as the standard for responding to all human rights violations, both domestic and abroad, as they inherently connect back to some facet of our institution and our community.
While disappointing, the College’s current continued silence on and complicity in the escalated violence against Palestinians is not surprising. This institution has a long history of affirming, perpetuating, and profiting from racism: housing scholars who passionately defended slavery years after its abolition; accepting gifts from the Ku Klux Klan in 1926; suspending a student after writing an article defending interracial marriage in 1945; memorializing slave owners and white supremacists; and now dedicating 30 million dollars to renaming the site of the original Bray School for free and enslaved Black children after Robert Gates, a man who is implicated in the torture and bombing of civilians in the Middle East and systematic destabilization of entire regions. Through President Rowe and the University’s failure to redress these wrongs in their entirety, it is apparent to us that William & Mary stays committed to reproducing the institutional knowledge that only shores up oppressive structures rather than alleviating or correcting them.
President Rowe also wrote that “collective blame is antithetical to [our] goals.” The administration likens financial divestment from a government that has murdered over 30,000 Palestinian civilians since October 7th to collective punishment, which is a wholly false equivalence. Divesting from companies that support Israel’s brutal and ongoing retaliation against Gaza’s 2.3 million civilians is not a matter of assigning blame, but of upholding collective responsibility and accountability based on multiple unequivocal pronouncements by internationally recognized bodies, including the International Court of Justice, which has unambiguously noted the “plausibility” of Israeli aggression in Gaza as genocide. Nearly half a year into this elevated brutality against Palestinians, she remains silent, failing to even acknowledge the Gazan students, scholars, and educational institutions that Israel has annihilated over the past few months, or condemn the genocidal actions of the Israeli government.
President Rowe must make a statement that aligns with international law, conventions on human rights, and solidarity with the people of Palestine, including those who study, teach and work alongside us on our campus today. In accordance with the overwhelming majority of the student body, we unambiguously demand President Rowe to condemn the genocide of Palestinians; call for a ceasefire in line with the Student Assembly’s Ceasefire Resolution; divest from Israel and its beneficiaries and supporters in line with the student body’s vote on the Apartheid Divest Referendum; and apologize for her inaction thus far. History does not look kindly upon those who are complicit in the genocide of an entire people. We urge President Rowe in the strongest terms to retract her refusal to divest from Israel.
Signed,
The Organizers Collective at William and Mary
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