As protests against Israel’s offensive in Gaza are spreading throughout American campuses, one demand made by students across schools keeps coming up: divestment from Israel.
Universities rely on endowments to fund things like research and scholarships, and those endowments are typically invested in companies and alternative asset classes, such as private equity and hedge funds.
Broadly speaking, calls for divestment are demands to sell investments in companies that students say are complicit in the war. But what specifically are students asking for?