Brown University trustees, known as the Brown Corporation, voted on Tuesday night against divesting from nearly a dozen companies with ties to Israel, in a rebuke to students who have been pushing for boycott measures in protest of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

The vote, which was held during a special convening ahead of the regularly scheduled meeting slated for Oct. 17, made Brown one of the first major research universities to vote on a proposal to boycott companies with ties to the Jewish state. (At most other universities, the resolutions have been voted on only by student governments.) It did so as part of an April agreement between Brown University President Christina Paxson and members of the Brown Divest Coalition to take down an anti-Israel encampment that was set up on the campus’ Main Green for six days. One of the students’ central demands was a divestment vote. 

The Brown Corporation held the vote by secret ballot “so that no members felt pressure to conform to a majority view,” a spokesperson told Jewish Insider. Results were not made public until Wednesday. 

The vote totals are not known by members of the Corporation or the chancellor, president or University administration in general — only that a majority of the Corporation as a body voted to support Brown’s Advisory Committee on University Resources Management’s recommendation on the question of divestment, the spokesperson said, adding that Brown “always releases only final decisions regarding votes on Corporation business, not vote totals, regardless of the item of business.” The spokesperson said that “the timing of the vote was guided by a number of factors, including the very high interest from members of our community to both see the advisory committee report and learn the Corporation’s decision.” 

The resolution called for Brown to divest from 10 companies with ties to Israel: Northrop Grumman, RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), Airbus, Volvo Group, Boeing, General Dynamics, General Electric, Motorola Solutions, Textron Corporation and Safariland.

In a letter on Wednesday, Paxson and Brown University Chancellor Brian Moynihan wrote to the campus that “Brown’s exposure to the 10 companies identified in the divestment proposal is de minimis, that Brown has no direct investments in any of the companies targeted for divestment and that any indirect exposure for Brown in these companies is so small that it could not be directly responsible for social harm … These findings alone are sufficient reason to support ACURM’s recommendation” against divestment.

“ACURM’s analysis shows that, based on data from June 30, 2023, Brown’s indirect investments in the 10 companies represent only 0.009% (i.e., nine-thousandths of one percent) of their aggregate market value,” Paxson and Moynihan wrote. 

Leading up to the vote, Brown University leaders faced significant pushback — including the resignation of one Brown trustee, Joseph Edelman, the CEO of the hedge fund Perceptive Advisors, who condemned the Corporation’s “stunning failure of moral leadership.” 

Rabbi Josh Bolton, executive director of Brown Hillel, told JI ahead of the vote that “even if divestment is voted down,” the fact that it reached the university’s board “is still a win to some certain extent” for anti-Israel groups and “makes being Jewish and Zionist a liability in terms of full participation in campus life, freedom of expression in the classroom and social relationships between students.”