Two months after Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest (PIAD) submitted its divestment petition, the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC) Resources Committee is still continuing to establish a process to consider community input on the proposal, as the University prepares for its first CPUC meeting Monday.
Establishing a process for feedback is necessary to reach the broad campus “consensus” required from any potential divestment proposal. However, obtaining consensus over the issue will likely be an uphill battle for PIAD as opposition groups against divestiture circulate petitions.
In an email obtained by The Daily Princetonian, the Resources Committee Chair John Groves notified PIAD on July 30 that the committee was considering their proposal and working towards establishing a community feedback process.
“[W]e will communicate to the community when that process is established,” the email read.
Where exactly the Resources Committee lies in the process is unknown — Groves did not respond to repeated requests for comment from The Daily Princetonian.
When asked for details about the Resource Committee’s proceedings, a University spokesperson referred the ‘Prince’ to a column Groves’ published last May outlining how the University handles divestment questions, and declined to provide a specific timeline.
“The only way to overcome the strong presumption against divestment and dissociation at Princeton is for a proposal to meet criteria established by the trustees,” Groves wrote in the spring. “[I]t must appear to us possible that the whole University community can reach widespread deliberative agreement — consensus — on a dissociation question.”
PIAD submitted its 66-page proposal to the CPUC Resources Committee on June 18. The document includes specific standards and steps for its campaign to divest the University’s endowment from Israel.
In a statement to the ‘Prince,’ PIAD claimed that communication from the University regarding their proposal has been “confused and contradictory.”
In an email to the student body last May, University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83 announced that the CPUC had received divestment requests from protestors and would meet on May 14. PIAD had previously indicated that their negotiations with the University had been unproductive. PIAD met with CPUC on May 14 and May 23, writing in a statement on X, formerly Twitter, that the meeting indicated that CPUC had “committed to communicating with us in the weeks to come.”
According to PIAD, they have not been notified of a formal process to consider the content of their petition.
“All we have heard from the CPUC Resources Committee is that they have yet to establish a process by which to consider our proposal,” PIAD wrote to the ‘Prince.’
“Ultimately, we know that the President and Board of Trustees, not the CPUC Resources Committee, have power to make the decision about whether to divest, and miring this question in yet-to-be-established bureaucratic processes only serves as a stalling tactic during a time of genocide,” PIAD added.
The greatest issue currently facing the petition is a lack of community consensus. Soon after PIAD submitted the petition in July, a small group of pro-Israel students and faculty began to draft a letter entitled “NO Consensus on Princeton BDS,” referring to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. One of the authors, Maximillian Meyer ’27, emailed the letter to the student body on Aug. 28.
The letter claims that PIAD’s proposal misrepresents the situation in the Middle East by omitting any reference to Hamas and failing to include context about the conflict’s origins on Oct. 7. The authors argue that divestment would not promote peace, but rather “alienate” Jewish and Israeli community members at Princeton.
“It was clear to us from the beginning that there can absolutely be no consensus on this campus on this issue, not when we have Israeli students, not when we have so many Jewish students who feel so passionate in their connection to Israel, and not when we have experienced unprecedented rises of anti-semitism on college campuses,” Meyer told the ‘Prince’ in an interview.
Meyer stated that the letter’s authors intentionally submitted it to the CPUC Resources Committee on the same day as the first PIAD rally of the semester on Sept. 3. Meyer noted that a few days prior, news broke about the deaths of six Israeli hostages at the hands of Hamas.
The CPUC Resources Committee confirmed the receipt of the letter in the following days, Meyer said.
At the time of submission, the letter included nearly 1,300 signatures from students, parents, faculty, and alumni. Center for Jewish Life (CJL) Executive Director Rabbi Gil Steinlauf ’91 and CJL Associate Director Rabbi Ira Dounn both signed the letter.
In an interview with the ‘Prince,’ Steinlauf said that while he cannot speak on behalf of all Jewish students, he can represent a “substantial segment” of the community who “see a direct link between the academic boycott movements and a political goal of delegitimizing Israel’s right to exist.”
“Would a campus academic boycott come to pass, it would create an environment on campus wherein the Jewish community would feel marginalized,” Steinlauf said. “Hostility toward Israel — and maybe even to some Jewish people — would be more normalized, and that is the concern.”
Regarding the NO Consensus on BDS letter, PIAD wrote to the ‘Prince’ that it is “opposed to all forms of racism and discrimination.”
“Divestment — a means of withholding and withdrawing Princeton’s material support for Israel’s campaign of genocide, occupation, and apartheid — is a moral obligation and a widely used means of applying pressure against demonstrably violent regimes,” the statement said.
PIAD also referenced the swiftness of the University’s divestment from genocide in Darfur in 2006.
Previous divestment petitions have been successful in recent history, but all required lengthy processes, and featured issues less hotly contested in the campus community compared to the war in Gaza.
In February 2020, Divest Princeton submitted a petition calling for the University to divest from all fossil fuels and the Resources Committee made its recommendation to divest in May 2021. The Board of Trustees successfully voted for Divestment in September 2022.
“In some cases, it is quickly apparent that divestment and dissociation standards cannot be met, and the question is quickly resolved. In others, a longer deliberative process is needed to ensure careful consideration of input from the broad community,” Groves wrote in the Spring.
“A successful proposal is necessarily lengthy and can take years,” he added.
The CPUC will meet on Monday, Sept. 30 in Frist Campus Center for its first meeting of the academic year..
Elisabeth Stewart is an assistant News editor for the ‘Prince’ who typically covers student groups and religious life on campus.
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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