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Editorial: UCSA resolution misses point of using divestment as tool for activism

By Editorial Board

Feb. 12, 2015 12:00 a.m.

On a particularly busy Sunday, the University of California Student Association passed two different divestment resolutions.

One resolution recommended divestment from certain companies that profit from alleged human rights violations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in a nod to the larger campaign that has been sweeping across the UC.

But the other resolution, which purports to create a socially responsible investment strategy, reads as a confusing misunderstanding of divestment as a tool for activism.

Rebecca Ora, a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz and the resolution’s sponsor, said she brought the measure up as a way to unify the student body by making divestment for human rights violations more than a contentious Israeli-Palestinian issue.

But the so-called “Resolution Toward Socially Responsible Investment at the University of California” actually takes symbolic weight away from the targeted and specific divestment movement that has steadily gained steam across UC campuses by demanding divestment from entire countries.

Resolutions to divest from American companies that profit from alleged human rights violations in Palestinian territories have been passed by six of nine UC undergraduate student governments. While these resolutions have been met with controversy and conflict at every step along the way, a shift in student opinion is at the root of the movement’s increasing number of successes.

The second measure approved by the UCSA takes this momentum and energy and turns it around by calling for divestment not only from these companies, but also a variety of countries including Mexico, Brazil and the United States.

In all, nine countries get a special mention in the headspinningly broad decree that looks like a laundry list of complaints about the general state of the world.

All this is not to say divestment hasn’t been an effective tool for student political activism at the UC in the past.

In a widely cited example, students at the University during the 1980s spearheaded a divestment movement against apartheid in South Africa that eventually pressured the UC Regents to pull its money out of companies that did business in the country. More recently, the UC divested from tobacco companies and from some companies that have been implicated in profiting from the genocide in Darfur.

What all these cases have in common is that they are a targeted policy toward some specific group or entity meant to make a moral or political point.

The second UCSA resolution fails to take into account this central tenet of divestment as a political tool.

It confuses an already complicated international issue with a whole host of other complicated international issues, suffocating its effectiveness under the guise of inclusiveness.

Effective activism in the form of divestment relies on a group of engaged individuals coming together with a unified and targeted strategy. In this case, the singular issue of the first resolution seems clear; passing another resolution serves only as a diversion.

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