(Illustration: Laura Padilla Castellanos/Washington Post; Sophie Park for The Washington Post; iStock)
Pro-Palestinian groups target school investments even if the ties aren’t always clear. ‘The simple slogans of protest are running headlong into the intricacies of modern finance.’ – Washington Post
By Todd C. Frankel | The Washington Post
As some universities strike deals with pro-Palestinian student groups to discuss calls for school endowments to stop investing in Israel and defense stocks, an examination of available public documents by The Washington Post finds few direct holdings in either by the largest public school endowments, underscoring the difficulty in any potential attempt to ultimately satisfy protesters’ divestment demands.
The simple slogans of protest are running headlong into the intricacies of modern finance.
At the University of California at Los Angeles, the recent pro-Palestinian protests have echoed with a rallying cry heard at campus protests nationwide in the wake of the Israel-Gaza war: They want the university to cut financial ties with Israel. “Divest NOW” was how one sign near the protesters’ encampment this week put it.
Those demands came despite the students having little information about where U.S. college endowments actually put their money. The schools — which sit on holdings worth a staggering $850 billion combined — must disclose some of their largest public stakes in annual regulatory filings but are not required to fully disclose their holdings.
They generally refuse to divulge precise details behind their investments. Even public universities’ annual reports and regulatory filings are light on specifics.
“The big endowments want to protect their secret sauce,” said Charlie Eaton, a University of California at Merced associate professor who studies the topic. They fear that competitors could learn their moneymaking strategies or that the complexity of their holdings could make full disclosure impossible.
The Post’s examination of annual reports, Securities and Exchange Commission and IRS filings, and financial databases found some signs of what student protesters have tried calling attention to, such as Michigan State’s endowment holding $480,000 in bonds for Lockheed Martin, a leader in the defense industry.
The endowment for Texas schools held several millions in Israeli Shekel investments but sold them last year. It appears to still have about $750,000 in Qatari Riyal investments.
Most endowment funds’ direct holdings often appeared more curious than controversial, however: Ohio State’s endowment invested in a direct-to-consumer cat food firm.
The University of California Regents System, which controls $17.7 billion in endowments for several state schools including about half of UCLA’s $7.7 billion endowment, appears to hold only a few clear divestment targets.
The fund is the nation’s third-largest public school endowment and No. 10 among all universities, according to a National Association of College and University Business Officers survey.
It holds stock in companies with defense contracts mixed among their other lines of business, including about $890,000 in Honeywell International, $640,000 in General Electric and $2.8 million in Air Products Chemicals, according to SEC filings. Air Products, which supplies bulk gases such as helium, has an office in Israel.
The California Regents endowment also reported a $258 million stake in Blue Owl Capital Corp., which holds aerospace and defense contractors that are not household names, such as cybersecurity and data firm Peraton, filings show.
University of California leadership has opposed the push to divest and boycott Israel, issuing a statement from the school president last month, saying it “impinges on the academic freedom of our students and faculty and the unfettered exchange of ideas on our campuses.”
The statement also noted that school tuition funds are not invested — blunting protester claims that tuition money needed to be divested from Israel, as well.
School endowments are generally made up of donations and investment gains, with a small cut — typically less than 5 percent — withdrawn each year to help payprofessor salaries, provide tuition assistance to students and build new buildings.
Endowment managers don’t like these pressure campaigns because the funds have a narrow mandate: Make money, experts say.
“They’re legally required to focus on endowment returns,” said Chris Marsicano, a Davidson College assistant professor who has studied divestment campaigns.
The bulk of the largest funds’ assets are held in complex investment funds. Cutting off funding for any company that does business in Israel — which would include Google parent Alphabet and McDonald’s, among hundreds of other blue-chip firms — would be difficult, Marsicano said. It would eliminate entire mainstream investment sectors, probably lowering returns and result in funding cuts on campus.
“It becomes very hard to fiduciarily justify,” Marsicano said.
The current crop of protesters are following a long tradition of activists targeting endowments — huge sums of money that they feel they can have influence over.
“You get these students who have a lot of time on their hands and they’re bright and they get obsessed,” Eaton said.
In the 1980s, students pushed colleges to cut off South Africa to boycott its apartheid policies. About 150 colleges and universities divested, to varying degrees. Then some schools adopted policies banning fossil fuel investments, followed by investments in private prison companies.
Avoiding any investments with Israel would be much more difficult, regardless of how investment managers feel about the protesters’ demands.
“We’re not seeing a lot of movement so far from these universities because of the complexity or their fiduciary duties,” Marsicano said.
One of the most transparent endowments is at Michigan State, which reported a few small direct investments in defense stocks. Its endowment was worth $4 billion last year, records show. That included $1.4 billion in broad stock index funds, $1.3 billion in private equity funds and $880 million in hedge funds.
In addition to its Lockheed Martin bonds, it also held about $256,000 in bonds in another defense contractor, Northrup Grumman. Butthat was significantly less than the $376,000 in securitized bonds it held backed by Delta’s SkyMiles program.
Michigan State’s investment office did not respond to a request for comment.
If Michigan State was ordered to fully divest, it could result in the endowment being forced to sell off its $433 million stakes in the wide-ranging BlackRock Emerging Companies Hedge Fund and GMO U.S. Quality Equity Fund Class VI funds.
The limited disclosures for those investments show they hold such common stocks such as Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet — all of which would be forbidden under some of the divestment plans pushed by protesters.
Private school endowments tend to provide less disclosure. Yale’s $40.7 billion endowment gave specifics related to less than 0.5 percent of its holdings, according to the Yale Daily News.
One of the few signs of protester pressure so far came at Brown University, which had a $6.2 billion endowment. Brown’s president agreed to allow the school’s leadership to vote in October on a divestment plan for companies tied to Israel.
The University of Minnesota also agreed to allow protesters to discuss divestment with school leaders.
One of the biggest endowments in the country — No. 1 or No. 2 behind Harvard, depending on the accounting — is controlled by UTIMCO, investment manager for the University of Texas and Texas A&M school systems.
It controlled $55 billion. Its reports go into some extensive detail, showing how the endowment appeared to step away from Israeli Shekel investments between August 2022 and August 2023 — before the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that ignited the wider war that is now the focus of protesters.
It reported no Shekel-denominated stocks in 2023, down from about $360,000 a year earlier. It also held no Israeli foreign government and provincial investments in 2023, down from approximately $7.3 million.
UTIMCO officials did not respond to a request for comment.
But even for a fund of its size, UTIMCO showed little direct exposure to Israel — except for an investment of $4 million to $8 million in a venture capital fund run by TLV Partners, based in Tel Aviv, according to a 2023 year-end SEC filing. The firm’s managing partner declined to comment.
The power of a divestment campaign is not so much about the economic impact, said Marsicano, the Davidson professor.
“It’s the symbolism of pushing for a cease-fire and drawing attention to the conduct of the Israeli government,” he said.
But student protesters could try a different tactic, one that doesn’t seem to have been found any traction amid the volley of demands. They could become investors in the U.S. defense contractors or other companies they want to influence.
That would allow them to become activist investors and push for the changes they want to see from the inside as investors, Marsicano said.
“I would love to see that, as a public policy professor,” he said. “I would be fascinated by any student group that did that.” ##
By Todd FrankelTodd C. Frankel is an enterprise reporter on The Washington Post’s Financial desk. He joined The Washington Post in 2014 and previously worked as a reporter at newspapers in St. Louis; Everett, Wash.; and Charleston, W.Va. Twitter