A Johns Hopkins University committee on Thursday rejected calls from a handful of student groups to cut financial ties with Israel.

The Johns Hopkins Public Interest Investment Advisory Committee, whose members include faculty, staff, students, alumni and trustees, decided not to send a community proposal to divest from companies with ties to Israel to the university’s board of trustees for a vote, finding that there was no broad consensus on the issue, that it would hurt the university’s finances and that it would politicize the endowment.

“By divesting, the university would be taking a political stance that compromises the university’s core principles and makes no tangible impact on the targeted firms,” the report reads.

Divestment, or selling investments in companies linked to Israel, was among the demands of the Hopkins Justice Collective, which staged a multiday protest on the campus last spring.

“We cannot expect the university to engage in good faith,” the collective wrote on Instagram after the committee’s decision was released. “The student movement will not be deterred.”

The group supports Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war, which began in October 2023 when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, according to the Associated Press. Since then, Gaza’s Health Ministry has said more 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war. The AP reported this week that Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire agreement that would release dozens of hostages.

Community consensus

Hopkins has seen successful divestment campaigns in the past. The university divested from South Africa in the 1980s, the tobacco industry in the 1990s and the fossil fuel industry in the 2010s.

To do that, there must be “evidence of significant support” and “lack of substantial opposition,” according to the committee.

Of the 30,000 students at Johns Hopkins, 37 wrote to the committee in favor of the proposal. Of the 20,000 employees, the committee only heard from one staff member in favor, and only two of the university’s 260,000 alumni wrote to the committee in favor.

The committee heard from a number of community members who were against the proposal, citing concerns about antisemitic and inflammatory language. The collective repeatedly referred to Israel as an apartheid state and questioned the country’s legitimacy. Some members of the committee, the report states, were also concerned about the language.

The collective’s proposal cited 14 student groups that supported last spring’s pro-Palestinian encampment and calls for divestment. The committee noted that there are over 400 student groups on the university’s campuses.

“While the petitioners did illustrate some level of JHU community interest in the proposed divestment action through their proposal and subsequent presentation, committee members were not persuaded there had been either broad-based, thoughtful and reasoned interest among the university community or substantive, serious dialogue about the issue,” the report states.

A financial risk

Divesting from Israel, the report states, would cost Johns Hopkins millions of dollars annually from the university’s $13.5 billion endowment.

Six percent of the university’s annual operating budget comes from endowment payouts. According to the report, the university’s endowment pays out hundreds of millions of dollars each year for financial aid and faculty research.

In order to divest from Israel, Johns Hopkins would have to sell nearly all of the university’s pooled investments, called exchange-traded funds, because so many include companies with financial ties to Israel.

This means that the university would have to go to significant lengths to change the way it invests its endowment, which the committee states would have a “significant adverse impact on the university’s endowment in the form of lower returns, higher risk levels and higher costs.”

Additionally, divestment from Israel would present a “significant risk” to Johns Hopkins due to the millions of dollars in contracts the university has with the state of Maryland.

That’s because in 2017, Gov. Larry Hogan signed an executive order that forbade state procurement contracts with business entities, including nonprofits like Johns Hopkins, that boycott of Israel.

“Our analysis concluded that the proposed divestment action could cost the university millions of dollars annually in higher investment fees or lower returns,” the committee stated.

Politicizing the endowment

The committee also wrote that the proposal would “politicize the endowment in a way that conflicts with both the university’s core commitment to free inquiry and its obligation to foster a diversity of perspectives within our academic community.”

The report states that divesting from Israel would “embroil the university in a charged and polarizing geopolitical issue that divides global society, in addition to our own community.”

Amherst College, Brown University, Columbia University and other colleges have all refrained from divesting as well, highlighting similar concerns about politicization of their endowments.

“The divisive and political nature of the proposed divestment action would conflict with the purpose of academic institutions such as JHU, which is to provide a space for open inquiry, learning and research for our faculty and students,” the committee concluded.

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