Interviews with the Faculty and Staff for Palestine and Students for Justice and Peace on Palestine advocacy on campus, and USask’s policy of non-divestment

All comments made by interviewees are their own and do not represent the views of their entire organization or The Sheaf Publishing Society. Students for Justice and Peace and Faculty and Staff for Palestine would like to make it clear that they are strongly opposed to boycotting individuals based on identity or religion, and are strongly opposed to racism in all forms, including antisemitism, discrimination and Islamophobia.

Nearly two years since the beginning of the 2023 Israel-Palestine conflict, USask has decided not to divest from Israeli companies and institutions despite proposals by both student and faculty-led advocacy groups on campus. Although according to USask, their investments in Israeli institutions are small–being less than 0.2 per cent of pooled holdings–activists are still concerned about the university’s decision to remain engaged with investments that have links to actions that have been defined as genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

Students for Justice and Peace (SJP), a campus group created in early 2024 in response to the human rights violations that Palestinians are suffering during the war, is one of the lead voices in attempting to hold the university accountable for its investment practices regarding companies they believe are committing these violations in the Gaza Strip. SJP has been meeting with USask administration, the Chief Financial Officer, the President and Provosts to discuss USask’s policy of non-divestment and how this applies to Israeli companies.

Nada, Director of Divestment and Outreach for SJP, explains that the group approached USask administration and provided them with a list of researched companies that were flagged as directly complicit in Israeli human rights violations according to the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), recommending that the university divest from companies on that list.

The database provided by the AFSC, a peace and social justice organization, scores companies based on three factors. “The first thing is how severe the human rights violation is. The second thing is the degree of responsibility that [the] company has. The third thing is their willingness to respond to shareholder activism,” Nada says.

“The companies on the list that we provided to the administration have the worst records,” Nada says. It is worth noting that not all companies on that list are explicitly USask investments.

However, USask administration’s attitude toward investment is engagement rather than divestment. Some companies on that list have been accused of being unresponsive to shareholder activism.

As stated under USask’s investment policies, the “university believes that, through engagement rather than divestment, the university can play an important role in supporting change and that ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors have the potential to affect long-term investment performance.”

However, Nada believes that “The best thing that we can do, because we can’t directly undo that harm, is to pull out entirely from these investments. Admin, though, is pushing on engagement, because that’s in our investment policy, and that’s the idea of trying to change these companies from within through the votes we hold as investors.”

“But the question we should really ask ourselves is, are these companies, many of them invested in weapons or are operating on occupied land and directly building settlements – are these companies really going to change, especially when engagement has been tried for many years? Is it even ethical in the first place to be invested in these companies? Will investing in weapons ever be ethical, whether you try to change the company from within or not?”

May, President and Founder of SJP, sees this kind of pushback from administration as a denial of complicity from the university.

“They are firmly set in their beliefs that they’re doing nothing wrong. It’s the business world. And if you want to make money, you have to put in money where the money is, and that’s how you get results.”

Administration’s decision on non-divestment can also be explained by their own definitions of what complicity is, according to Nada and May.

“There’s a fundamental disagreement,” Nada says. “We brought this evidence, this credible research on these companies, and our administration [said], ‘Well, we have a different bar for how we define complicity, and we have a different bar for what a good versus bad company is.’ They say that our investment managers meet with these companies and personally take a look at their stated policies on their websites about sustainability and upholding human rights frameworks. But we’re saying there’s a clear disparity between what’s published on these websites and what the actual harms that these companies are doing on the ground.”

May explains that while university administration is willing to talk to SJP and explain the investments it has with these companies, it has not yet been willing to negotiate divestment.

Dr. Colleen Bell, a professor in the department of political studies at USask and co-organizer of the local chapter of the Faculty and Staff for Palestine (FS4P), has also met with administration about divestment and faced the same response.

Bell says that a potential part of the reason that universities in general are hesitant to divest is due to the difficulty in tracking where exactly funds are. “One of the things that universities have done across Canada, and I think in the U.S. to some extent, is [that] they have investments and fund investment managers, and these people move funds around to maximize returns,” Bell says. “And because there’s so much movement, these universities say that they can’t really direct it.”

In a statement to The Sheaf, USask explains their pooled investments as such: “Rather than owning individual companies, USask invests in diversified pooled products managed by external firms. These pooled structures limit the university’s ability to directly buy or sell specific companies within a product, but USask ensures that each investment manager demonstrates a responsible ESG approach.”

However, Bell says she has concerns about this approach. “[This] struck me as inconsistent with the claim that [the university] has made that they are committed to equity, diversity, inclusion and sustainability, and that they tell their fund managers this, and their fund managers implement these values in their investment management. So I find it very confusing how both these things can be true. How can the university maintain commitment to EDI and sustainability in a genuine way, and invest in military companies or companies that support the apartheid system?” 

May and Nada are committed to their belief that students have a meaningful role to play in acting against Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza.

“We’re not going to give up,” May states. “We see what our fellow students across Canada are doing and the milestones that they’re achieving with their own university administrations… It’s always a ‘no’ to begin with. None of these universities approached students and were like, ‘Hey, we’re willing to compromise, we’re willing to work with you’… It [is always] a very hard battle.” 

May and Nada are glad, however, that university administration has been willing to talk about their investments and have respected activists’ right to organize and push for change, which is not always the case in other universities.

Since administration has made clear that divestment is not in the university’s interest, it is now SJP’s hope to work with their policies to find a way forward while keeping divestment as the group’s longtime goal.

Nada explains, “[Even if] they disagree fundamentally on what we value and what we believe in, our approach is going to be, ‘Okay, we’re going to find ways to work with you.’ We’re looking for avenues to use what we have and what they’re giving us.”

One of the strategies SJP hopes to push in this direction is holding the university to its own standards and identifying contradictions in its messaging.

“We can’t have stated values in reconciliation and stated values in upholding rights [while] investing in companies that are completely opposed to those values,” Nada states.

Parallel to SJP’s efforts, Bell advocates for similar accountability in the university’s contradictions. “What does it mean to say that you are pro-sustainability and pro-EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) and that you implement those principles in your investment practices, and somehow that doesn’t include not funding apartheid and militarism? Militaries produce more greenhouse gas emissions than any other institution or company… and EDI is fundamentally counterposed to war and conflict, because war and conflict create more inequality and gender based violence. That’s well documented.”

“We would like to see statements of principle and the university’s values having tangible meaning in terms of its investment practices. We don’t see that. We don’t see consistency. We don’t see alignment.”

USask’s comments on the concerns about its investment practices in Israeli companies that its holdings are “primarily in sectors like technology and banking, where companies maintain public ESG policies. USask emphasizes that its fiduciary duty requires a measured, policy-driven approach, informed by international standards such as the UN Principles for Responsible Investing and Canada’s sanctions list.”

May and Nada explain that one of the policy avenues they are pursuing is to include a human rights framework in future investments the university makes, alongside the existing ESG policy. “We have our ESG policy,” May continues, “But we are still invested in companies that cause harm.” 

While the policy and human rights framework is still being drafted by SJP, May and Nada explain that it seeks to emphasize the human rights component of responsible investing that they feel the current ESG policy does not fully address.