Hey, David. It's 10:07 AM on Wednesday morning. This is Julia Vargas Jones. She's a freelance reporter for CNN. She's also been trying to finish up her master's degree in journalism and politics at Columbia University in New York City. For the last few weeks, Julia and her fellow grad student, Kareen Katabayan, have been watching as protests against Israel's war in Gaza took over campus. Students had set up shop on the lawn and said they weren't leaving until their demands were met. Outside of Hamilton Hall. But the night before Julia sent me this voice note, university officials sent in the NYPD to clear out a building which had been barricaded by protesters 56 years to the day after police stormed in to arrest over 700 people who were protesting the Vietnam War and gentrification in Harlem back in 1968. It just looks battered. The windows are broken, the doors. By morning, hundreds had been arrested, and the tent encampment, which inspired dozens of other protests at other schools around the country, was just gone. It's really striking because this is where all the tents were, and they were here for so long that they've left marks on And the grass.

The grass that was covered by tents is this pale green, and all the grass around it is- Yeah, what we're seeing here is a cleared-out West lawn Right now, there are two NYPD officers on the West lawn to make sure that nobody comes in. It's weird, and I wonder if this is what it's going to feel like for the next few days.

I think we got used to seeing the protesters and seeing the tents, and I just assumed that this would go through graduation.

So going forward, I think we're going to need a bit of an adjustment to instead of seeing the tents and hearing the chants, just seeing NYPD on campus. These dramatic, occasionally violent protests around the country have raised a lot of serious, thorny questions. When should you call the cops on your own students? When does free speech become hate speech? Where is the line between criticizing Israel and anti-Semitism? All talk of anti-Semitism, I think, is a tactic meant to keep people afraid and try to ignore what we're saying. And what we're saying is that there's a genocide going on in Gaza being funded by our government that our university is profiting off of.

When these people are chanting, excuse my language, in unison, Fuck Zionist, on the quad lawn of Emory University, and I have to stand by and hear that.

We're told that we don't belong on campus because we don't identify with their movement.

To me, that says that they don't want to have a dialog.

Remember, two, the vast majority of students at these colleges are not involved in these demonstrations. There have also been accusations of outside agitators infiltrating campus groups. There are no easy answers to any of this, but I do think it's worth listening to what exactly these protesters are demanding.

Disclose, divest. We will not stop.

We will not rest. Disclose, divest. Those are the big ones. But what do they mean? And would they have any teeth? My guest this week is CNN business reporter Matt Egan. We're going to talk about what past divestment protests on campus can tell us about the chances of this one succeeding. From CNN, This is One Thing. I'm David Ryan. So Matt, you've been covering how Israel's war in Gaza has been playing out on American College campuses ever since October seventh. But this really got kicked up about two weeks ago on the campus of Columbia University, just uptown from where we're sitting now in New York City. And the tent encampment there has become a model for other colleges across the country. But I do really want to get at what is exactly driving these protests. Like, beyond just calling out the atrocities in Gaza, which is obviously a big factor here, what exactly are these students looking for?

Well, David, you're right. The initial focus really was on the anti-Semitic incidents involved in some of these protests and how the colleges and law enforcement were responding, but not as much on the demands. When it comes to the demands, it really runs the gamut. Some of it is actually quite local. For example, at Columbia, they're demanding support for low-income Harlem residents, and they want the university to sever ties with the NYPD. But there are some common themes. One of them is that they want the universities to call for a ceasefire. They also want to end academic relationships between their universities and Israeli ones. But the most common theme by far, the one we hear first and foremost, is around divestment.

Yeah, this is the word I've heard a lot, but can you explain what it is and how these students actually want this to happen? Yes.

We often don't think about it, but colleges, they actually manage a lot of money, and they have to invest that money. Some of these endowments are very very large. At Columbia, for example, we're talking about over $13 billion, the size of their endowment. At Harvard, over $50 billion.

This is money coming in from donors.

That's right. Money coming in from donors, and that money gets invested in various places, including some of it going into the stock market.

Divesting means that there are institutions and companies that Columbia profits from that is funding directly refunding the genocide that is happening in Palestine. The schools hold some of these stocks and companies, and the students are like, Hey, some of these companies are linked back to Israel in some way? How does that connection work?

Exactly. An example of that would be there's a group called Shut Down Ghost Robotics. In Pennovations, there's this project that makes these robot dogs that are sent to Israel to be used as soldiers, and they kill people. Obviously, that is not all-encompassing divestment, but that's a way that the university could start to divest from Israeliapartheid by cutting off and closing down that program. Some of the students, they want the universities to sell off their ownership stakes in companies that either enable Israel's military, or in some cases, they want the schools to divest completely from Israeli companies or companies that even do business in Israel. Of course, that's easier said than done. I spoke to Mark Yudoff. He leads a group that opposes anti-Semitism on campus, and he was the former President of the University of California. He told me, Sometimes it's pretty murky to really figure out which companies are doing, how much business in Israel, and what that relationship is to the war. There's also the problem of the fact that universities, they really invest a lot of their money, most of it, not directly in the stock market, but indirectly through private equity firms.

When they do that, they're They're really agreeing to have the private equity manager put their money wherever the private equity manager thinks it's going to grow the most.

It's not like it's always a conscious choice from the university to say, Hey, we like this business, and they just happen to be related to Israel, but they put the money with this private equity, and it goes wherever it may go.

That's right, exactly. Then there's also the problem that even though endowments are big, these public corporations, they're even bigger. If a university divest, many companies, they probably wouldn't even notice it. There's this stunning stat that I heard from a Yale lecture, Cary Krasinski. He told me that endowments, they only own 0.1% of public companies. 0.1%. That's not going to move the needle if they sell. Another issue with divestment is that if you sell, someone else is going to buy. And there's no guarantee that whoever that buyer is is going to care about whatever it is that is causing this divestment push in the first place.

So like that moral stand that you may be taking somebody else. They don't care about that.

Absolutely. Right. And again, that's on top of the fact that there's really no guarantee that there'd be any impact on the stock price.

Today's threats come after days of fruitless negotiations in which the university refuse to seriously consider our demands for divestment, financial transparency, and- I've heard these students, they say divest, they also say disclose. Are schools even willing to make clear what investments they have?

Schools don't need to. They're not required to be nearly as transparent as, say, hedge fund managers are, where they have to report quarterly what it is that they own. They offered us limited financial disclosure by giving only their direct holdings, yet not the indirect holdings which account for the vast majority of this university's endowment. University endowments, they don't need to do that. There is a good It's a good case for endowments to be more transparent, in part because it might actually improve some of their performance, which in some cases has been lacking. The fact that they want endowments to be more transparent, it makes some sense there. Whether or not they're going to do that is another question.

That was my next question. Are any of these schools actually willing to divest in the way the students are asking for?

We've heard from a number of different universities flat out rejecting that, most notably, Columbia is President saying, We are not going to divest from Israel. Most of the experts that I talk to, they said that that's not going to happen, that it would set a negative precedent, that it would be practically very challenging. What we did hear from one university, Brown University, reaching a deal with pro-Palestinian protesters, and Brown University has agreed to vote on divestment. That is a significant milestone. That's really not something that we've seen at any time in recent history. That is notable there.

Have protests calling for divestment? Have they ever worked? Have they ever actually affected any change?

They have, even Colombia, specifically.

Can you speak to your perspective on how many people will have drawn between Colombia's current investment in mass incarceration and its former investment in the formal institution of slavery? And what would accountability for our complicity in the system look like at a place like Columbia?

Columbia recently has agreed to divest from fossil fuels, from private prisons. Then you go back to the '80s.

No business with no business. No business with no business.

No business. Pressure is mounting for US companies to get out of South Africa. These demonstrators are demanding that mobile oil get rid of its South African refineries, and as the demonstrators say, stop exploiting non-white workers. There was a movement to get Columbia to divest from companies that were connected to apart that in South Africa. And Columbia eventually did do just that. They sold most of their stock in some companies that were linked to South Africa, including some major American brands like Coca-Cola and Ford. What's interesting, though, is there was some research by the academics at the University of California. They studied the impact from that divestment movement, and they found almost no impact on the stock price in South Africa. And that's because they found that really what happened was the stock just got transferred from socially responsible investors to ones who were more indifferent. And so I think that is just another reminder that if there's no mismatch between the buyers and the sellers, then there may not be an impact to the stock price.

Interesting. But I guess, say any of these schools do go ahead, they do divest. What I'm hearing you say is it may not impact the company's stock price, at least not in the short term. I guess in theory, there could be fewer willing buyers, and that could drag down the price over time. But is pure association more the thing here? Is the symbolism that comes with the school saying, We don't want anything to do with Company X, really the thing protesters are after here.

I do think that the protesters, they do see significant value in two things. One is making that moral stance, saying, We don't agree with, in this instance, how Israel is conducting the war, and we don't want our university money to be associated. That's one point. The other point, though, is raising greater awareness, that maybe it's not going to impact the stock price. Maybe it won't change what the companies do. Maybe it won't change how Israel conducts the war, but that it's raising awareness. To some extent, the fact that you and I are talking about it right now does mean that there is some more awareness.

I was going to say, I don't think a lot of people quite realize that universities have investments in weapons manufacturers, and some are like, Why the heck is that the case?

I would stress, though, that oftentimes the universities are investing broadly, and they're not necessarily saying, Listen, we want to throw $4 billion after the makers of drones. They're saying, Listen, these are broad companies These are broad investment vehicles, and they're going to grow, and we want our money.

Maybe in the same way that a regular person has a stock account, and they don't know where the heck that money is going.

Absolutely. A lot of people have 401(k)s, and a lot of those 401(k)s are invested in major diversified companies. They may have a presence internationally, and they maybe have a presence in Israel. They may have companies that make weapons as well.

This encampment is a minor inconvenience compared to the generational shaping events taking place now in Gaza. That awareness, too, is its own interesting thing with these protests, maybe drowning out some of the actual coverage of the war, which some of these protesters say they won in the first place. Matt, thank you.

Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

One thing is a production of CNN This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producer is Fez Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manisari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, Jamis Andres, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namerau. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. Just a reminder, we love reviews, ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It helps other people discover the show. If you like the show, don't you want other people to listen to? Seems like a no-braider to me. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week. Talk to you then.