Yale Students Voted to Divest, but What’s Next is Unclear

A student referendum asking Yale University to disclose and divest its investments in military weapons manufacturing and reinvest in programs to support Palestinian studies and scholars passed resoundingly last Sunday. 

The Yale College Council, which administered the referendum, will now send Yale president Maurie McInnis a letter regarding the results. Yet beyond this symbolic action, the ramifications of the student referendum are unclear. The power to disclose and divest Yale’s endowment holdings lies entirely in the hands of just 16 individuals: the Yale Board of Trustees, or the Yale Corporation.

More than 83 percent of student voters answered “yes” on the first question, which asked if Yale should disclose investments in military weapons manufacturers and suppliers, including those arming Israel. The second question asked if Yale should divest from such companies, passing with 76 percent of the vote. The third question asked if Yale should invest in Palestinian scholars and students to fulfill its “commitment to education,” with 79 percent of voters in favor. 

Well over one-third of the student body voted “yes” on all three resolutions, clearing the threshold needed for the referendum to pass. Almost 3,400 students—nearly 50 percent of the Yale undergraduate student body—voted over the span of four days. 

“The effort to pursue a referendum was about showing what we’ve known to be true this entire time, which is that disclosure, divestment, and investment in Palestinian studies aren’t fringe positions, the way that a lot of the media discourse has tried to put it,” said Karsten Rynearson, an organizer with the Sumud Coalition, a group of Yale students that organizes in support of Palestinian liberation and proposed the referendum. “They’re incredibly popular positions on this campus.” 

The results align with similar referendums at other universities. At Columbia, students voted overwhelmingly last April to divest from Israel. At Princeton, a referendum calling for the university to disclose and divest from weapons manufacturing passed late November.

Yale University’s endowment totals over $41 billion—the largest source of revenue in the university’s budget. Less than 1 percent of this money is publicly traceable through the school’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The vast majority of the endowment is distributed to private asset managers, and is not bound by the same public disclosure requirements as the university. 

The Endowment Justice Coalition, a member organization of Sumud, identified several of the university’s asset managers with ties to weapons manufacturers using filings from the Internal Revenue Service. The asset managers include JLL Partners, a private equity firm connected to General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, and Farallon Capital, a hedge fund with ties to HowMet Aerospace, which manufactures several key parts of Israel’s F-35 fighter aircraft. EJC argues that Yale’s undisclosed endowment holdings likely conceal additional connections to the weapons manufacturing industry. 

“As the genocide in Gaza continues, our institution of learning should not be committed to mass death,” said Caroline Huber, a junior at Yale and a a member of Yale Jews for Ceasefire, which organizes with the Sumud Coalition. In social media posts, organizers supported the referendum with the slogan: “Books, Not Bombs.” 

Sumud, formed earlier this academic year, includes several organizations that organized the three-day encampment on Yale’s central Beinecke Plaza last spring, which ended when Yale Police dispersed the encampment and arrested at least 47 protesters. “Sumud,” an Arabic word that can be translated as “steadfastness,” is a term associated with the 1967 Six-Day War and broader Palestinian liberation struggle.