Dartmouth College’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility (ACIR) has unanimously rejected a proposal which urged the school to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and explained the decision in a lengthy report, dealing the anti-Zionist campus movement another major setback.

“By a vote of nine to zero, the [ACIR] at Dartmouth College finds that the divestment proposal submitted by Dartmouth Divest for Palestine and dated Feb. 18, 2025, does not meet criteria, laid out in the Dartmouth Board of Trustees’ Statement on Investment and Social Responsibility and in ACIR’s charge, that must be satisfied for the proposal to undergo further review,” the report said. “ACIR recommends not to advance the proposal.”

A copy of the document reviewed by The Algemeiner shows that the committee evaluated the BDS proposal, submitted by a group which calls itself Dartmouth Divest for Palestine (DDP), based on five criteria regarding the college’s divestment history, capacity to address controversial issues through discourse and learning, and campus unity. It concluded that DDP “partially” met one of them by demonstrating that Dartmouth has divested from a country or industry in the past to establish its moral credibility on pressing cultural and geopolitical issues but noted that its analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lacks nuance, betraying the group’s “lack of engagement with counter arguments.”

ACIR added that DDP also does not account for the sheer divisiveness of BDS — which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — and its potential to “degrade” rather than facilitate “additional dialogue on campus.”

It continued, “The proposal includes no compelling evidence on the level of support for divestment among students, among faculty, among staff, and among alumni. Moreover, the [roposal is silent on the matter of how divestment can be treated as a consensus position in the face of what is almost certainly deep opposition to it among some members of the Dartmouth community.”

Writing to The Dartmouth, DDP reiterated an argument that — in addition to echoing the propaganda of neo-Nazi groups and jihadist terrorist organizations — has been deemed as fallacious by Dartmouth and other colleges and universities across the US.

“Our coalition of students, alumni, faculty, and staff remain committed to the basic principle behind our proposal: institutions of higher learning should not be invested in weapons companies and other corporations complicit in genocide, scholasticide, and violations of international law,” the group’s statement said. “Such investments are not in keeping with Dartmouth’s academic mission and its responsibility to its community and the broader world.”

Dartmouth College is not the first higher education institution to foreclose divestment from Israel.

Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine did so in March when its Board of Trustees voted to accept the counsel of a committee that recommended maintaining investment practices which safeguard the institution’s financial health and educational mission.

“The endowment exists solely to provide financial support of the college across generations,” said a report submitted to trustees in February and, according to The Bowdoin Orient, subsequently ratified by them. “It should not be used as a tool for the advocacy of public policy.”

The reported, authored by the college’s Ad Hoc Committee on Investments and Responsibility, continued, “Interventions in the management of the endowment that are rooted in moral or political considerations should be exceedingly rare and restricted to those cases where there is near-universal consensus among Bowdoin’s community of stakeholders … if such actions are pursued, they should be taken only where the financial trade-offs are identifiable, measurable, and limited.”

Boston University rejected BDS in February, with its president, Melissa Gilliam, saying, “the endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate; nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community can engage with each other on political issues of our day including the conflict in the Middle East.”

Trinity College turned away BDS advocates in November, citing its “fiduciary responsibilities” and “primary objective of maintaining the endowment’s intergeneration equity.” It also noted that acceding to demands for divestment for the sake of “utilizing the endowment to exert political influence” would injure the college financially, stressing that doing so would “compromise our access to fund managers, in turn undermining the board’s ability to perform its fiduciary obligation.”

The University of Minnesota in August pointed to the same reason for spurning divestment while stressing the extent to which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict polarizes its campus community. It coupled its pronouncement with a new investment policy, a so-called “position of neutrality” which, it says, will be a guardrail protecting university business from the caprices of political opinion.

Colleges and universities will squander tens of billions of dollars in endowment returns if they capitulate to demands to divest from Israel, according to a report published in September 2024 by JLens, a Jewish investor network that is part of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Titled “The Impact of Israel Divestment on Equity Portfolios: Forecasting BDS’s Financial Toll on University Endowments,” the report presented the potential financial impact of universities adopting the BDS movement, which is widely condemned for being antisemitic.

The losses JLens projected are catastrophic. Adopting BDS, it said, would incinerate $33.21 billion of future returns for the 100 largest university endowments over the next 10 years, with Harvard University losing $2.5 billion and the University of Texas losing $2.2 billion. Other schools would forfeit over $1 billion in growth, including the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and Princeton University. For others, such as the University of Michigan and Dartmouth College, the damages would total in the hundreds of millions.

Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.

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