The referendum calls for the school to refuse to give its $41 billion endowment to arms companies, but the authority to do so rests in the hands of the board of trustees.
A student referendum asking Yale University to disclose information about its investments in the production of military weapons and to reinvest in programs supporting Palestinian research and academics passed last Sunday.
The Yale College Board, which oversaw the referendum, will now send a letter to Yale President Maury McInnis about the results. However, beyond this symbolic action, the consequences of the student referendum are unclear. The authority to disclose and dispose of Yale University funds rests entirely in the hands of only 16 people: the Yale Board of Trustees or the Yale Corporation.
More than 83 percent of students who voted said yes to the first question, which asked whether Yale should disclose investments in military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those that arm Israel. A second question about whether Yale should divest itself of such campaigns passed with 76 percent of the vote. A third question asked whether Yale should invest in Palestinian scholars and students to meet its “educational obligations,” which 79 percent of voters said they did.
Well over a third of the student body voted yes on all three resolutions, exceeding the threshold needed for the referendum to pass. Nearly 3,400 students — nearly 50 percent of Yale’s undergraduate student body — voted over four days.
“The referendum effort was aimed at showing what we’ve known to be true all along, namely that disclosure, divestment and investment in Palestinian cities are not the fringe positions that most media have made them out to be. . was trying to express that,” said Karsten Rinerson, an organizer with the Sumud Coalition, a group of Yale students that organizes in support of the liberation of Palestine and proposed the referendum. “These are incredibly popular positions on this campus.”
The results are consistent with similar referendums at other universities. U Colombialast April, students overwhelmingly voted to leave Israel. U Princetonat the end of November, a referendum was held that called on the university to disclose information and abandon the production of weapons.
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Yale University’s general endowment is more than $41 billion—the largest source of revenue in the university’s budget. Less than 1 percent of that money is publicly traced through the school’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The vast majority of endowments are distributed among private asset managers and are not bound by the same disclosure requirements as a university.
The Endowment Justice Coalition, a member organization of Sumud, identified several university asset managers with ties to gun manufacturers using Internal Revenue Service documents. Asset managers include JLL Partners, a private equity firm with ties to General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, and Farallon Capital, a hedge fund with ties to HowMet Aerospace, which makes several key parts of Israel’s F-35 fighter jets. The EJC alleges that Yale University’s undisclosed endowment funds likely hide additional ties to the arms industry.
“As the genocide in Gaza continues, our institution of learning should not be in favor of mass death,” said Caroline Huber, a junior at Yale University and a member of Yale Jews for a Ceasefire, which organizes the Sumud Coalition. In social networks, the organizers supported the referendum with the slogan “Books, not bombs.”
Sumud, formed earlier this school year, includes several organizations that organized a three-day encampment in Yale’s central Beineke Plaza last spring that ended when Yale police dispersed the encampment and arrested at least 47 protesters. “Sumud,” an Arabic word that can be translated as “perseverance,” is a term associated with the 1967 Six-Day War and the broader struggle for the liberation of Palestine.
To initiate the student-wide referendum, hosted by the Yale College Council, Sumud launched a social media campaign to collect signatures from 20 percent of the student body and more than half of the YCC Senate. Voting for the referendum was open for four days last week, during which organizers put up posters around campus, set up tables near dining halls and hosted an event with performances by student groups to increase engagement. More than 50 student organizations — from dance groups to publications and cultural associations — supported the referendum.
Sumud argued that divestment would be particularly significant from Yale, given the influence of the “Yale Model” for institutional investment. The model, developed in the 1980s, emphasizes investments in private markets, hedge funds, and real estate—a giving strategy that has been adopted by Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and many other universities.
Socially motivated divestment has precedents at Yale. In 2018, the Yale Corporation announced it was banning investments in assault weapons retailers, citing the “severe social trauma” caused by mass shootings. Between 1978 and 1994, in response to apartheid, the university divested about $23 million from 17 companies that did business in South Africa (Yale Corporation lifted restrictions on South African-related investments in 1994). In 2006, the corporation withdrew from oil and gas companies operating in Sudan. In the past decade, the corporation has also limited investments in individual private prison operators and fossil fuel companies.
Last spring, the Advisory Commission on Investor Responsibility, a body that advises corporations on policies related to ethical investing, ruled that weapons investments did not meet the threshold of “serious social harm” necessary to justify a waiver.
Divestment organizers at other universities have seen significant movement on the issue of disclosure. Last April, Northwest agreed to respond to questions about specific current holdings within 30 days. Last May, the University of California at Riverside signed the agreement the agreement work on “full disclosure” of companies and the size of investments in their portfolios.
Opponents of the referendum last week argued that divestment would be legally and financially risky, as well as geopolitically wrong. The “Statement Against” the referendum — a compilation of statements written by students and aggregated using an artificial intelligence tool — argued that divestment ignores the “complexity of global defense needs” and that weapons from American defense manufacturers are used to protect democracy and fight authoritarian regimes.
In a post on Instagram, Yale Friends of Israel wrote that the referendum was “a call to divest companies that help US allies, including but not limited to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, defend themselves against those who want to destroy them and their democracies.” . Friends of Israel did not respond to a request for comment.
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In his statement in support of the referendum, Sumud argued that “companies that sell bombs and fighter jets to ‘good nations’ do not justify persistent sales to nations that violate international law.”
For organizers, the results confirmed broad support for divestment among students. “Our movement is definitely a people’s movement, and I think the Yale student body definitely demonstrated its values with this referendum,” Huber said. “So the trustees really have to listen to the students whose institution they’re running.”
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