A Letter to My College
A response to the Board of Trustees decision to not divest Amherst investment holdings in military contractors which supply the Israeli military effort and are used against civilian populations in Gaza.
June 25, 2024
Michael A. Elliott ’92
President
Andrew J. Nussbaum ’85
Chair, Amherst College Board of Trustees
Chantal E. Kordula ’94
Chair-Elect, Amherst College Board of Trustees
I have received your email (1) and am moved to respond. Thank you for this opportunity.
I understand the impulse to navigate between needs of our institution and aspirations of our mutual community. I am concerned that you offer a narrow interpretation of this dialectic:
“Yet those who seek this divestment action are asking the Board to do something different: in the face of internal disagreement, to instead lend our institutional voice to criticism of a national government on an issue unrelated to our mission — to move from being an institution that creates the space and provides support for criticism to becoming a critic itself.”
Consider that there is an opportunity to change policies that are genocidal, that sustain hegemonies of inequality, that thwart peaceful self-determination, that transcend state-dominance. This is a space to expand, not a condition to control.
Your defense of divestment is accurate but misinformed, eg. that the current conflict and its protest of America’s involvement is different from South African protests. A closer analogy, in my opinion, to the current Hamas-Israeli conflict and America’s involvement would be Ireland and the Troubles and the Good Friday Agreement. Though one hears of talk in this context from the administration, actions do not bear this weight.
You raise the question, how to balance freedom of speech and rights of equal protection. What could be Amherst’s communitarian response? How does the Amherst community better track its involvement and consider alternatives?
Though no stipulations were proposed, there is present, I think, an impulse to “do better.”
Don’t cheat “us” of this directive. Rest not that your response doesn’t become a blanket on the community, rather a light.
Respectfully,
Rodney Clough, Amherst ‘67
Notes
- “Board of Trustees’ Statement Concerning Divestment Resolutions,” amherst.edu
