This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Activists at a growing number of elite US universities hope their institutions will follow the lead of the Ivy League’s Columbia University by divesting from the private-sector prison industry and enshrining policies to avoid buying into the business in future.



Campaigners at Columbia, in New York, have called upon other colleges across the US and beyond to heed its example as it became the first university in the US to adopt an official policy to divest permanently from the for-profit prison business, in a trustee vote on Monday.

Students, faculty and alumni of neighboring New York University, and at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, hailed Columbia’s move and vowed to follow suit.

City University of New York (Cuny) also has a strong divestment campaign that is principally aimed at persuading the college to take its money out of fossil fuels in response to climate change, but additionally wants Cuny to shun the incarceration industry.

NYU and Wesleyan’s campaigns are also aimed at fossil fuel divestment.

The Facebook page of the group NYU Divest, formed by students, academic staff and alumni of the elite, private New York institution, hailed the decision made at Columbia.

“This is a HISTORIC victory,” the campaign group wrote on its page on Tuesday.

It praised the Columbia campaign group Columbia Prison Divest.

“Columbia is the first major university to divest from private prisons, thanks to the incredible student leaders of Columbia Prison Divest. From fossil fuels to private prisons, injustice is NOT an investment,” the message said.

The similar campaign group “Wes, Divest!” at Wesleyan also posted ecstatically to its Facebook page after the result from Columbia.

“So proud of/excited for our allies at Columbia Prison Divest! Let’s look to bring this momentum to Wes for the upcoming year,” said the statement.

The board of trustees at Columbia on Monday voted to adopt an official policy of disposing of shares in commercial prison companies anywhere in the world and refusing to invest in the lucrative industry in future.

The move followed a concerted campaign by students and faculty, which was ultimately supported by the college president, Lee Bollinger.

The parallel campaigns urging the universities to divest from fossil fuels have not yet achieved their goals at Columbia, NYU, Wesleyan or Cuny.

But activists are celebrating the decision on Monday to block any of Columbia’s $8bn endowment from being spent on shares in companies dealing in for-profit prisons.

“This action occurs within the larger, ongoing discussion of the issue of mass incarceration that concerns citizens from across the ideological spectrum,” Columbia’s trustees said in a statement.

Columbia had held investments in Corrections Corporation of America, a company specializing in contracts to run private prisons and detention centers in the US. And the institution had also held shares in the British security giant G4S, which runs private prisons in Britain and other countries and until recently had a contract via a US subsidiary to run the Guantánamo Bay facility in Cuba where terrorism suspects are held offshore without trial by the US government.

Campaigners objected to mass incarceration in the US, which is becoming a political hot topic in the 2016 presidential contest, and conditions behind bars. G4S has come in for repeated criticism about violence and drug abuse at its facilities.

Columbia had disposed of those holdings in advance of Monday’s meeting and the trustees then enshrined the decision in official policy that vowed not to invest in any part of that industry in future.

Other colleges should now follow suit, Dunni Oduyemi, an undergraduate organizer of the student campaign Columbia Prison Divest, told the Guardian on Tuesday. She pointed out that included in Columbia’s decision was the pledge to promote the policy more widely, and campaigners were awaiting details from the college on how it planned to do that.

She praised activists at Cuny, NYU and Wesleyan and said she was extremely happy they were taking heart from Columbia’s success.

“We are really pleased and we hope this will encourage other institutions to do the same. There needs to be a lot more transparency about where universities invest their money,” she said.

She warned that most academic institutions offer very little transparency into how they invest their vast endowments.

“We only know what about 10% of Columbia’s investment is spent on,” she said.