The iconic columns of the University of Missouri-Columbia campus (University of Missouri photo).
Students at the University of Missouri have called on the UM System to divest money in its endowment pool now invested in Israel and weapons manufacturers.
The UM System’s total investments into companies within Israel is just under $500,000, making up just over 0.02% of the endowment. Sadia Moumita, one of the students demanding divestment, said it doesn’t matter how big the investment is, students still want the university to divest its holdings.
University spokesperson Christian Basi said the school’s policy is not to respond to demands to divest. The UM System prioritizes fiscal responsibility regarding how the endowment is invested, Basi said, because endowed funds are essential to the operations of the campus.
“What we believe is that any company that’s operating out of the state of Israel is doing so on stolen land,” Moumita said. “They’re doing so after the aggressive displacement of people, and now at the cost of 34,000 people.”
That figure is an estimate of the people who have died in the region since the Oct. 7 attacks.
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Moumita said multinational companies that happen to have locations in Israel are not the group’s concern.
“What individual companies will do is a little bit more difficult for us, we can’t really police that. We can only police what we’re doing with (UM System) money,” Moumita said.
Moumita said a partial list of weapons manufacturers they would like MU to divest from includes Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The UM System’s endowment pool is not directly invested in any of those companies. However, the system frequently invests in funds, or groups of stocks, that may include the companies.
Basi said in an email that “based on market index averages, roughly 0.7% is allocated to Aerospace/Defense sectors,” which would roughly equate to over $16 million.
The UM System does receive money from Boeing in the form of the Boeing Company Rolla Rising Endowed Scholarship. Moumita said she believes that no amount of money invested in these companies is acceptable.
“There’s really no number that we can put on the amount of lives that we’ve lost and the amount of lives we will continue to use to lose if these companies continue to get money from institutions like ours,” Moumita said.
Basi said that if the UM System opened the door to responding to divestiture demands, it would be difficult to decide when to accept the demands — and it would still leave people upset. He also said it would be hard to maintain a strong endowment.
“Some people say ‘we’ve only asked for these one or two things.’ If you open that door, you wind up with many more people coming in and saying ‘well, you should divest from this because I don’t like that company or this because I don’t like that sector,’” Basi said.
If a particular company or sector makes decisions that impact its fiscal value, Basi said, then it would not be financially wise for the UM System to invest in those areas.
Moumita said protesters are not deterred by the UM System’s policies and they will keep advocating for divestment.
“Even if it feels futile to us sometimes or to people in the media or people who read the stories of what’s going on,” Moumita said. “It’s really not something that we’re not going to waver on.”
The university has provided clear guidelines and a safe environment for the community to protest, Basi said, and investment authority is granted by the UM System Board of Curators, who are appointed by the governor. So if students want their voices heard on this issue, they can lobby elected officials or the Board of Curators.
Basi said the university would only comment on issues or events that directly impact the operations of MU or the UM System. Because it is a public university, he said, it must remain politically neutral and officials typically prefer to address those personally impacted.
“We have reached out both to students who are Jewish as well as students who have specific ties to Palestine,” Basi said. “We have met with them separately, and we have been in contact with them regularly.”
Moumita said protests aren’t going to end when students leave campus.
“We have a lot of students who will be staying here. There’s a pretty good chunk of like community members who are taking part in this,” Moumita said. “And with our weekly demonstrations, those aren’t going anywhere.”
This story originally appeared in the Columbia Missourian. It can be republished in print or online.
The post Students call on University of Missouri to divest from Israeli companies, weapons manufacturers appeared first on Missouri Independent.
