This summer, Columbia University became the first U.S. university to divest its stocks from the private prison industry. The decision was largely motivated by student campaigns to Columbia’s board of trustees — making the decision a prime example of the way in which boards can and should respond to the will of the students they serve.
According to The Columbia Spectator, the student group Columbia Prison Divest has been campaigning for the university to divest its endowment from G4S and the Corrections Corporations of America since February 2014. The CPD hosted two awareness weeks, rallies, a sit-in and a teach-in during its campaign, ultimately pressuring Columbia President Lee Bollinger to email the Columbia community last May stating his support of divestment from private prisons.
The board’s decision to divest — and to refrain from investing in private prison companies in the future — serves as a reminder of the varied impacts universities can have. While this past year we became consumed with issues over which our University has more direct control, the impacts of a given school can extend far beyond its physical campus or student body.
In this case, Columbia was investing in an industry well-known for its questionable practices: a recent lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union alleges prisoners at the privately-run East Mississippi Correctional Facility were repeatedly raped, placed in solitary confinement for weeks, months or years at a time, surrounded by rat infestations and being denied treatment for infections and even cancer. Investing can be treated as a market-based, amoral activity, but investing can also imply acceptance of a company’s practices — and prisons such as these maintain practices no entity should support.
In this case, Columbia students maintained a high level of activism for over a year, seemingly refraining from plateauing in their engagement with this issue. In fact, even after Columbia’s board announced its decision, Dunni Oduyemi, a Columbia student and the core organizer of CPD, focused on the future of CPD in working toward prison abolition and continued anti-carceral activism on campus. Students’ long-term efforts were so adamant that their board responded to them, and even after this victory they are still determined to continue onto the next challenge.
Here at the University, we have a variety of organized, well-functioning activism groups and a Board of Visitors that seems to selectively respond to students’ concerns. The lessons of Columbia students’ success in this instance are twofold: first, that it is a mistake to lose momentum on an issue, and second, that universities’ board members can and should be responsive to the desires of their student bodies. This particular success speaks volumes to the importance of continued student activism and the need for a more open-minded attitude from university board members toward such activism.
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