Dear CAN,

Hi! We are Wesleyan Students for Ending the War in Iraq (SEWI) and we just joined CAN! We have been working hard up here in Middletown, Connecticut, on getting Wesleyan University to divest from weapons contractors. This is a heads up as to what we’ve been doing.

Specifically our campaign has focused on Raytheon and General Dynamics, but we will be expanding it to DynCorp and Halliburton. (When our campaign began, Wesleyan did not hold investments in these companies.)

Our campaign began when we read on our school’s investment website that we were invested in General Dynamics and Raytheon.  Unfortunately, some schools make this information harder to find since schools behave differently in guarding information concerning their investments. The investment office, school website, and student government have been useful resources for us. We have also been consulting with an outside money manager for advice.

We started by circulating a petition among the student body last spring. We tabled at various locations on campus, mostly campus dining areas and the campus center. We then presented a resolution to our student government, which had already passed a resolution condemning the war in Iraq. After two weeks of negotiation and revision, a version passed. Unfortunately, we had to add the condition that Wesleyan divest from these companies only while the war in Iraq continued. Nevertheless, we felt that this compromise was worth getting the official support of the student government.

Last spring we had our first meeting with the investment office on campus. We learned that Wesleyan makes its investments through money managers, as most schools do. The investment office claimed that divestment was complicated by the fact that Wesleyan does not directly invest and is only one of many clients for these big money managers. If we make too many demands on our managers they would ignore us or even drop us, or so the administration fears. A change in the policy of money managers would require a broad consensus among their clients, that is, universities and whomever else.  The administration maintains that this structural issue is the main obstacle for divestment, however, the money manager we have been talking to said that this is “bullshit.” 

To create more awareness about the issue, we held a demonstration in front of the administrative building on campus. We also published articles and the equivalent of “letters to the editors” in the Wesleyan newspaper. This sparked a substantial amount of debate, as other people wrote in with counterarguments. We also contacted local media about our actions which resulted in the publication of an article concerning divestment in the Hartford Courrant. The last article serves to legitimize our campaign in the eyes of the administration, and on the whole our efforts have been successful in making divestment a known issue on campus.

Recent developments in our campaign have been very exciting. We scheduled a meeting with our President through his secretary about a month in advance. This took place a few weeks ago, and at this meeting we presented a well prepared argument for divestment. We devoted about eight hours to preparation for this meeting, during which time we ironed out the moral argument and conceptual complexities, addressed counterarguments, and fashioned the structure of the presentation to mirror our president’s recent inaugural address. We used these preparation meetings as an opportunity to get more people involved in the campaign and iron out any confusion about the argument. Basically, we argued on the basis that divestment fulfills Wesleyan’s commitment to being a “socially responsible institutional citizen.” Literature from the university website, mission statements, and again, the president’s inaugural address were very helpful in bringing this issue home to the administration.  

The president was very responsive at this initial meeting and agreed to bring divestment to the board of trustees. He also set up a meeting for us with the chair of the board of trustees, which took place in mid-November. We spent a week preparing a formal divestment proposal (see attached). We were lucky because our meeting with the chair coincided with a board of trustees meeting on campus, so we printed out a number of our proposals and handed them out to trustees at a meet and greet event. 

This last meeting was also very successful. The president and the chair were both impressed with our proposal and agreed to bring it to the board of trustees. They’re taking us seriously, though they claim that it will take them a few months to formulate their own position. In the meantime, we plan on continuing to fuck shit up on campus. We’re working with an umbrella peace group on campus on demonstrations, we’re planning art installations concerning weapons. We were happy when SDS on brought in “Meeting Resistance.” We’re also working on having a forum on divestment with a student government subcomittee that does proxy voting for Wesleyan.

With the beginning of the spring semester, we are anticipating a meeting with the chair of the board of trustees, other selected trustees, the chief investment officer, and reps from our student government. We have learned that in the “shared government model” in which the president and the board of trustees share equal power but have different responsibilities investment decisions are a board-only decision. The President provided us initial access to the board but he will no longer be involved. The chair of the board has emphasized how “complicated” these investment decisions are. What has become clear is that Wesleyan does not have any credible “socially responsible” investment policy. We anxiously await this meeting and look forward to holding the board accountable to the school’s stated mission.  

In the meantime, we’re planning a die-in at the campus dining center to represent 62 civilians that died when a Raytheon missile hit a Baghdad market place in 2003. We plan to keep the pressure up on our administration and keep our student body updated and active. We hope that other schools will be successful in making divestment a known issue on campuses. It’s clear that the more support there is for divestment across campuses and peer universities, the more administrations will succumb to student pressures, if not for moral reasons than at least to avoid a public relations faux pa.

A final note concerning investment information and proxy voting. For anyone who doesn’t know, proxy voting is the process where shareholders vote on propositions for a corporation. We found out about Wesleyan’s investments in Raytheon, General Dynamics, Dyncorp and Halliburton from a website that lists investments specifically for proxy votes. The purpose of this site is not to make all of Wesleyan’s investment information public- it is a list of the companies Wesleyan is invested in, with a link to decisions up for shareholder vote, and a column where you can suggest yes or no.   If this site exists for your university, it can be helpful, but clearly it doesn’t give all of the information you want- proxy voting history, all of the companies the university invests in, how many shares, who is the money manager, etc. Acquiring this information will most likely involve some amount of research, depending on how your university guards its investment information, but websites like this might be a good place to start.