Divestment Ad Absurdum

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

While watching the halftime show during one of the Dartmouth football team's few winning performances on Homecoming, I noticed a strange sighe. Not the onslaught of freshmen rushing the field—I had expected them—rather, a "Divest Sudan" sign plastered to the front of one of the marching band's drums.

Whatever the marching band was doing to promote divestment from the Sudan, it seems to have worked. After petition drives, bake sales, ribbon campaigns, and enough films and lectures to make even the most confirmed activist doze off, the Darfur Action Group finally got its wish. At this past weekend's Trustee meeting, the board voted to direct the College's investment office to avoid investment in six companies that are "directly complicit in…genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan." Of course, Dartmouth does not actually have any investments in any of the companies. But that is not what matters to the activists—it's all about the sizzle, not the steak.

If the Dartmouth Darfur divestment do-gooders were to take their ideas about "responsible investment" to their logical conclusion, the College would have trouble putting its money just about anywhere, with the possible exception of underneath James Wright's mattress. If the brutal military government in the Sudan is too tyrannical for Dartmouth's investing tastes, then the College should not have money in companies that do business with North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria, or Zimbabwe. Communist China represses the Falun Gong and Tibetan nationalists; Israel oppresses the Palestinians—strike them off the list too. And, when you come to think about it, between ignoring the Geneva Convention, starting an "illegal" war in Iraq, and holding prisoners indefinitely outside of international law in Guantanamo Bay, Dartmouth probably should not invest in any companies that do business in America either. We hope James Wright has plenty of room under his mattress.

The problem with divestment, then, is not that it makes student activists bloated with self-contentedness, but that the logical conclusion of introducing moral considerations into the College's investment policy quickly becomes impractical ad infinitum. From a Kantian perspective, any capitalism itself is immoral: investment in any company is fundamentally treating people as a means to an end.

Instead of looking to change the world through the power of the purse, then, Dartmouth might be more effective in improving the world through its role as, well, a college. Traditionally, academia was the preserve of those who wanted to change the world indirectly; they used the pen's might rather than the sword's to influence others. Like so many other academic traditions, though, this notion was swept away in the tumult of the 1960s. Today, even the marching band cannot take the field without making a political statement.

The university should not be pushed back from political discourse—it is too late for that, and politicization has its benefits, for instance, increasing student awareness of current affairs. Those alarmed by events in Darfur, or any other hellish locale that most Dartmouth students would be hard-pressed to find on a map, can and should take action: writing letters to congressmen, working through non-governmental organizations, or, like Rebecca Heller '05 in Zimbabwe, head overseas and throw themselves into the fray. But when it comes to the investment of the College's endowment, a little bit of politics can indeed be a very bad thing.

Divestment Ad Absurdum

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