Georgetown University Chooses Investment Portfolio Over Human Lives

Let history bear witness that when confronted with genocide, Georgetown chose investment portfolios over human lives.

In the early hours of Wednesday on April 30, members of the Georgetown University community received an email from Interim President, Robert M. Groves, updating them on an undergraduate student referendum that called for Georgetown to disclose all private investments to its community members and divest from companies arming “Israel” as well as end university partnerships with Israeli institutions. Despite receiving a staggering 1,447 votes in support of the referendum out of a total of 2,132 votes altogether, Groves shared that, “Georgetown will not implement this referendum, based on our institutional values and history and existing university resources and processes that address our investments.”

Nearly two years ago, on Oct. 19, 2023, former Georgetown President John DeGioia wrote in a message to the community (the communication in which he does remember to mention the words “Palestine” and “Gaza”), “We grieve each life lost. Is it possible for us to imagine another way?” With its shameful response to the referendum, the university has made it undeniably clear that it grieves not Palestinian lives, but financial opportunities, and that it not only imagines another way, but practices and defends it unapologetically.

It is ironic, as much as it is pathetic, that Groves quoting DeGioia would highlight Georgetown's "longstanding position against academic boycotts," going on to express that they undermine "the academic freedom that is essential to the mission of the Academy…" as justification for Georgetown's decision to ignore the student consensus. The university may hide behind bureaucratic language and "institutional values," but no administrative memo can wash away the blood that “Israel”, with U.S. weapons, has spilled in Palestine. In any case, this certainly isn’t the first, and probably isn’t the last time that Georgetown trades human life in for financial gain and institutional preservation. 

When writing so passionately in defense of academic freedom, is Groves, DeGioia, or any other individual currently or formerly involved in establishing this precedent aware that not a single university remains standing in Gaza today, each having been bombed, when not manually detonated, by “Israel” as part of its ongoing genocide? Does the name Hamdi Baroud, that of a former dean and law professor at Al-Azhar University in Gaza, who was forcibly disappeared on Jan. 27 during Israel’s invasion of Khan Yunis and was found killed by Israeli forces mean anything to these individuals? What of Dean Khitam Al-Wasifi from the Islamic University of Gaza, killed by an Israeli missile along with her husband and children on Dec. 1, 2023, or Professor Refaat Alareer, killed in an Israeli airstrike just five days later? 

Georgetown administrators may also consider that Tel Aviv University, with which Georgetown is proudly partnered, itself stands on the depopulated Palestinian village of Al-Shaykh Muwannis, which Zionist militias violently dispossessed its Palestinian residents of in 1948 as part of the ongoing Nakba. What of the Tel Aviv University president's Oct. 2023 statement declaring that the university had “harnessed all its strength and abilities to support the nationwide efforts” or that its Institute for National Security Studies contributed to the development of the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’—a military strategy that calls for “the destruction of the national [civilian] infrastructure, and intense suffering among the [civilian] population.” When Georgetown administrators cannot even write the word “Palestine” in their communications, one hardly expects them to seriously consider Palestinian realities where at arbitrary Israeli checkpoints Palestinian students and professors are routinely detained, assaulted, and even killed by Israeli forces and settlers as they head to universities and schools across the West Bank and Jerusalem. What more is needed then to understand that Israeli academic institutions are not passive bystanders fostering academic dialogue in times of genocide, but that they are participating proudly in its commission, never mind their complicity in broader injustices against Palestinians prior to Israel’s current iteration of genocide in Gaza.

Perhaps Georgetown’s leadership is well aware of Israel's record of atrocity and its many acts of scholasticide, and that is precisely the point. Such action, or rather lack thereof, is first and foremost an exercise in arrogance—although it is likely also an exercise in ignorance, for in Groves' communication, Israel's live-streamed genocide in Gaza is reduced to “conflict in the Middle East.” By acting in defense of its “institutional values” and thus protecting its investments in the Israeli genocidal machine, the university states quite clearly that it has made a choice. Georgetown has balanced financial gain against the lives of thousands and the future of millions of Palestinians, and frankly, the basic principles of humanity, with little doubt as to which its moral scale has placed greater value on. 

What governs Georgetown and those who serve it (and are served by it) is not a set of Jesuit principles nor commitments to academic freedom or a spirit of social justice that they may shamelessly co-opt, but rather a set of interests: imperial, financial, political, and corrupt, to name a few. These individuals who wish to have the institution continue investing in and partnering with the genocidal state, mind not that their hands become drenched in the blood of Palestinians, including students, professors, and scholars committed likewise to the academic mission Georgetown claims to uphold. Georgetown's refusal to divest is not a noble statement, it is a moral abdication that future generations will study as a testament to how supposedly enlightened institutions became willing accomplices to genocide—that is the best lesson this institution's leadership has to offer. 

At least the 1,447 of us students who demanded divestment have already learned that institutions built on exploitation will always choose profit over principle when confronted with their complicity. We harbor no illusions about Georgetown's moral compass—we know it points only toward where endowment figures and donor spreadsheets may be maximized. Let this referendum be remembered not as a plea for institutional conscience, but a public marking of where power truly resides. When Georgetown University’s hollow prestige is finally recognized for what it is and its administrative memos turn to dust, this record of resistance will remain, not as a disappointment, but as confirmation that expecting moral leadership from such institutions was always a profound misreading of their fundamental nature.