USF Divests From Defense Companies Tied to Israel After Pressure From Students

The University of San Francisco this week announced plans to divest from four U.S. defense companies that have contracts with the Israeli military, a rare win for pro-Palestinian student activists in the campus divestment movement.

The school’s endowment fund will sell off its direct investments in Palantir, L3Harris, GE Aerospace and RTX Corporation by June 1, the university confirmed. The four companies, which provide weapons technologies and military intelligence tools to Israel, had been specifically targeted by student activists.

“After several months of careful consideration, the University of San Francisco is updating the policies that shape its investment practices and making changes to its endowment holdings,” USF spokesperson Kellie Samson told KQED in an email. “These decisions were reached with input from USF’s Socially Responsible Task Force, made up of a representative group of students, faculty and staff.”

USF’s investments in the four companies account for less than .5% of its total portfolio, Samson said.

Moving forward, the university’s endowment, valued at about $566 million, will be exclusively invested in index funds “or other commingled funds, in which it will not be possible to make individual security selections,” Samson said. She said the school has also revised the social responsibility section of its investment policy statement to include a line stating that “ethical, moral and social considerations will be incorporated as part of the investment process.”

At a press briefing on campus on Thursday, members of Students for Justice in Palestine celebrated their hard-fought victory, one that comes after some 18 months of concerted activism, including campus protests and encampments, and countless meetings with school administrators.

“These companies are those we have highlighted as the most problematic in their portfolio of direct holdings, as they are all complicit in the Israeli occupation’s genocide of Palestinians — supplying Israel with the weapons it uses to slaughter Palestinians,” Alia Sky, a law school student who helped lead the effort, told supporters.

“We welcome these steps as a major … win and as an acknowledgement by the university that these companies were problematic and it does not wish to directly hold shares in companies that engage with these activities,” she said.

In a final push to pressure the university, student activists briefly occupied the atrium of the university’s main library on Tuesday, renaming the space in honor of Hossam Shabat, a young journalist from Gaza who was recently killed by Israeli forces.

Sky said that although the university made its divestment decision in February, it did not relay the news to student activists until the library takeover.

“The university did not share this information until now, after we resorted to escalating our campaign because the university was no longer communicating with us,” Sky said. She called on USF to further divest from all holdings and programs affiliated with Israel, including academic opportunities, trips, scholarships and to make the campus a sanctuary “for all students who are pro-Palestine, immigrants and non-citizens.”

USF said the divestment announcement it sent to students on Tuesday was part of a planned process, and had not been prompted by the library takeover action.

The university’s decision follows a similar move last year by San Francisco State to pull investments from companies that derive more than 5% of their revenue from weapons manufacturing, a move celebrated by student activists whose protests brought campus administrators to the negotiating table.

Despite months of fierce pro-Palestinian student protests at scores of college campuses across the country last year, USF and SF State are among just a handful of schools that have actually agreed to unload certain holdings. Most universities have flat-out rejected students’ divestment demands, while a smaller number, including UC Berkeley and Brown, agreed to consider selling off certain holdings but ultimately declined to do so.

The unusual student win at USF comes 19 months into Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza that has killed more than 52,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza authorities, and leveled much of the enclave. Israel launched the military campaign in response to Hamas’ surprise attack on Oct. 7, 2023, when its militants killed about 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages, Israel said.

Student-led divestment campaigns on university campuses go back decades, including successful efforts in the 1970s and ’80s to push administrators to sell off investments in companies that did business with South Africa because of its apartheid policies. More recently, some schools have also agreed to dump investments in fossil fuel-related industries in response to student demands.

But unlike those campaigns, which focused on causes that had broad consensus, the push to divest from Israel has proven much more divisive, generating staunch opposition among some students and faculty who claim the effort is antisemitic.

In light of that backdrop, USF student activists on Thursday took a moment to acknowledge the significance of their victory, even as many said they were far from satisfied.

“A lot of us organizers are celebrating this win, but we know there is so much more work to be done,” said Ani De Lira Lopez, a USF junior, who said her group will continue to pressure the university to cut ties with Israel.

“There truly is a sense of urgency,” she added. “Gaza is starving.”

KQED’s Juan Carlos Lara contributed reporting to this story.