Divestment and moral education

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On Sept. 30, the Board of Trustees of Princeton University released a statement clarifying their guidance on responding to divestment petitions. Petitions are first sent to the Resources Committee of the Council of the Princeton University Community, which will recommend divestment if the issue at hand has “sustained campus interest,” if “core university values” are at stake, and if there can be “community consensus” (emphasis in original).

The Trustees’ statement primarily concerned the third of these guidelines: They write that “consensus should be understood to mean near unanimity of agreement about how the University should respond to a particular dissociation petition.” When this near-unanimous support is not likely, they ask the Committee “to quickly dispose of” and not “otherwise extend consideration of the petition.”

Yet this call for near unanimity is inconsistent both with the University’s previous divestment decisions and the University’s role as a liberal arts institution. To be a liberal arts institution, as then-President Harold Shapiro GS ’64 wrote in a 1999 article to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, the University “needs to prepare us for an independent and responsible life of choice,” give us “a capacity to make moral and political choices,” and provide us a moral education. Equating consensus with near unanimity and disposing of politically contentious petitions abandons the University’s commitment to this moral education.

The University must resolve this contradiction: Either turn away from moral education and cease to divest at all, or make divestment a component of that moral education, letting go of the notion of complete consensus.

The University has divested its holdings five times before: over apartheid in South Africa for select companies in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s; over the Darfur genocide in Sudan in 2006; and over climate change in 2022.

In 1978, the Committee gauged the community’s support regarding divestment from companies tied to South Africa by holding only one open meeting with a “small number of students present.” The Trustees discussed consensus explicitly later that year, writing, “We recognize that this statement goes further than some believe … we recognize that it does not go far enough to satisfy others.” In 2022, the Committee applied a standard of “broad support on campus for further action,” gauged via meetings with the community, which included reluctant professors, and a USG referendum.

I struggle to believe that, had the Trustees’ most recent standards been in effect, the University would have divested in either situation. The Trustees openly recognized that the community was not in full agreement over how to resolve the University’s ties to companies involved in South Africa. There was clearly not “near unanimity” surrounding climate change, either: 18 percent voted against the divestment referendum in 2020, and 48 percent of the undergraduate body did not cast a ballot. The underlying political issues were also controversial: Selective divestment in South Africa was still being nationally debated in the 1980s, and even the existence of climate change is contested today.

Yet in both of these cases, the Committee recommended further action, and the Trustees agreed.

The Trustees did not mince their words, either. In their 1978 statement, they wrote that apartheid in South Africa “contradicts our most fundamental beliefs concerning relationships among people of different races; it offends our sense of human rights.” In their 1987 statement, they referred to apartheid as an “evil of racial injustice in South Africa.” To imagine a world where the University would have taken no action is frightening; our moral standards should prevent that possibility.

Our current Board of Trustees would surely caution us that, no matter how grave the moral injustice, we cannot let the Committee “becom[e] a tool for intensifying division.” For them, moral education is important, but the responsibility for that education lies with the student, not the institution. As they conclude their recent statement, “Intellectual debate and disputation are healthy and necessary in a university community, but they are the province of the faculty and the students, not administrative process.”

This is inconsistent with the University’s historical view of a moral education, in which the administrative process is as much a part as the classroom and the common room. As Shapiro wrote, our moral education “lies not [just] in the curriculum but in the behavior of the faculty, staff, and administration and in the policies of the institution.” 

We must then ask ourselves: Should the University be a place of moral education?

If not, then many of the University’s policies and traditions must change. The University should end the Honor Code, stop funding service opportunities through the Pace Center, abolish our unofficial motto, and retreat from its public role in defense of the morality of higher education. If not, then the University shouldn’t consider divestment under any circumstances, regardless of its level of support in our community. The Resources Committee should be disbanded and these decisions should return to be solely the purview of PRINCO.

If so, then the process of divestment should look different. Rather than waiting for the campus community to form consensus, the Committee should use divestment as another aspect of our moral education, interrogating students with the difficult moral questions which underpin these decisions. On investments where moral questions exist, the Committee can take a proactive role, hosting discussions about the issues at hand and prompting our community to challenge their moral beliefs and assumptions.

Shapiro put it best: “Universities are not necessarily places to come for answers, but they are places that have an obligation to be sure that important questions are being addressed honestly, thoughtfully, and with full respect for the worth and dignity of all people.”

Not every petition will result in divestment. Many have already failed. Nonetheless, it is our responsibility to explore them anyway, to “wrestle with the great questions of human existence.” The division of opinions which comes from our school’s diversity is not a vice from which we should run, but rather something that induces “the inevitable anxiety that characterizes any moral and pluralistic society committed to democracy and change.”

The state of moral education at the University is a pressing issue. Divestment should not remain halfway between restraint and morality. After all, “students will be smart enough to discern if the university remains a symbol of enlightenment or an institution whose defining ambition is to sustain the status quo and its own special privileges.”

Ian Mann is a junior from Chicago majoring in math. He serves as a U-Councilor on the Council of the Princeton University Community and is a member of Sunrise Princeton. He can be reached at im3070[at]princeton.edu.

Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.