Univ. of Chicago Will Not Divest From Sudan

The University of Chicago will not divest from companies linked to the Sudanese government, the office of University President Robert Zimmer announced in a written statement last Friday.

The decision follows a string of announcements by peer institutions-among them Columbia University, Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and Stanford University-that they would sever financial ties to the Sudanese regime because of its complicity with the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

The statement invokes the principles of a document referred to as the Kalven Report. Authored by a University of Chicago faculty committee in 1967 in response to the Vietnam War, it stipulates that the University should remain independent from all social and political conflicts in order to better permit its students and faculty to "sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry."

But some University of Chicago students said they felt that the university's refusal to divest would have a severe negative effect on global efforts to boycott the Sudanese economy.

Growing campus protests have been spearheaded by the Students Taking Action Now: Darfur movement, which assembled a petition in support of divestment signed by over 1500 students and 110 faculty members.

"What makes it particularly terrible at our university is that through their decision they have become complicit," STAND Co-Chair Michael Pareles said. "The University has issued a statement that it's okay to financially support genocidal regimes."

But University of Chicago's Vice President for Strategic Initiatives David Greene disagreed about the implications of the school's decision.

"There was quite a bit of discussion here about the importance of symbolism in this process and whether a symbolic act-even if it had no practical effect-would be an appropriate thing to do," he said. "There's still the potential from some loss ... in the freedom in this community to have divergent views and still be able to pursue those views even if they're unpopular."

Columbia faced a similar debate over symbolism during the process of its own divestment from Sudan last May. Though the university pledged to divest from a list of 18 firms that conduct business with the Sudanese government, Columbia has never actually had holdings in those corporations. But the University of Chicago's dispute is far more fundamental, according to one of the co-authors of the Proposal for Divestment from Sudan that several students presented to Columbia's Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing over a year ago. "When financial interests and moral values conflict, it should be moral values that trump," said Joe Esposito, Business '07.

In fact, the University of Chicago's Kalven Report does include a clause that states, "From time to time instances will ... threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values."

Moreover, the Kalven Report's last surviving drafter, Professor Emeritus at Duke University John Hope Franklin, issued his own statement last November in support of STAND and its backers, saying that "the desperate situation in Darfur is so tragic that it qualifies as the exceptional instance where I have no difficulty in concluding that divestment is consistent with the core values of our report and the mission of the University."

The Kalven Report was also cited in the 1980s when the university was the only educational institution to reject divestment of South African apartheid.

Though the document's namesake, Harry Kalven Jr., died in 1974, his son Jamie Kalven continues to write about his father's motivation for authoring the report, and the finer points of the document's exceptional clause.

"The Darfur activists have embraced the premises of the Kalven Report," reads a post on his Web site. "They have ... made a narrow, well-researched argument that 'paramount social values' are implicated in the University's investment in companies doing business in the Sudan. This argument ... does not hinge on the efficacy of divestment. It is, rather, that we have a moral obligation to do whatever is within our capacity to resist crimes against humanity."