University endowments have come under scrutiny from anti-Israel protesters as they demanded schools across the country cut financial ties with Israel over its war against Hamas terrorists in Gaza.
With protests raging at schools from the University of California, Los Angeles, to Columbia University, the Washington Examiner is explaining what mechanism anti-Israel protesters are attacking at their high education institutions.
An endowment is a set of assets or funds a university or college can pull from when necessary. Endowments are typically invested in various things, such as stocks or real estate, to grow the funds available at the university’s disposal over time.
The largest university endowment in the United States belongs to Harvard University, which had a roughly $50.9 billion endowment for fiscal 2022, according to the U.S. News and World Report.
Andrew Gillen, a senior policy analyst at the nonprofit Texas Public Policy Foundation, told the outlet that endowments are essentially a “super-charged rainy-day fund,” adding that typically, funds are managed by the school or by a group closely tied to the university.
Endowments are in place at private universities, and because of this, they are not subject to the same transparency as public universities. Private schools, like Columbia, tend to keep financial information vague and publish only select financial reports annually.
Typically, specific investments are not known by most, as the endowments are typically run by investment managers and the school’s board of trustees. The investments are typically made with the goal of helping grow the endowment.
“Colleges and universities have fairly limited discretion in the actual specific investments that their endowment funds are going towards because they’ve hired these external experts to make those decisions. And sometimes those decisions are even proprietary,” Todd Ely, associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver, told the Associated Press last month.
Anti-Israel protesters have latched on to the divestment goals of groups opposed to the Jewish state’s treatment of Palestinians. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement is one of the largest groups opposed to Israel and works to pressure companies and groups to shun Israel.
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Several protesters have drawn parallels to student-led movements in the 1980s, which pushed universities to divest from apartheid South Africa. The impact of divestment from South Africa by some universities has been debated, with its effect unclear decades later.
Other recent divestment campaigns have included students demanding universities divest from fossil fuels, but that has been difficult for similar reasons.