Last month, campus organizations came together in an echo of the 2024 UC Berkeley Divest coalition to demand that the UC Board of Regents divest from companies enabling the genocide in Gaza. The efforts of that coalition — in particular UC Berkeley STEM4Palestine alongside the offices of ASUC President Abigail Verino, Executive Vice President Isha Chander and senators Abdullah Memon, Somer Alrai, Margaret Solomon and Bella Santos — have yielded fruit. A ballot measure asking students whether the regents ought to disclose and end the UC Berkeley Foundation’s investments in companies implicated in the development of surveillance and military technologies will appear on the April 13-15 ballot for undergraduate students.
The majority needs to vote “yes” for the measure to pass. If it passes, even though it doesn’t legally obligate the regents to take any action — students have no direct control over the use of the endowment — it would be highly impactful nonetheless.
This is because one of the five criteria for divestment put forth by the UC Berkeley Foundation — which is responsible for UC Berkeley’s assets — is that “concern about the company’s behavior is broadly and consistently held within the campus community.” If successful, this measure will quantitatively demonstrate broad student support for an end to the destruction enabled by surveillance and weapons companies’ products, and thus prove harder for the regents to dismiss than, say, a huge encampment that can be tactically ignored.
The UC system is the first to tell us that divesting from warmongering companies will be difficult. But this is not an excuse for its negligence and complicity in mass suffering around the world. We must still fight for divestment — and we will have to fight for even greater systemic change alongside it.
When activists say divestment, we are using shorthand for a demand that the University of California end holdings in companies contributing, directly or indirectly, to war and genocide. We focus especially on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, or BDS, a global campaign to end financial and cultural support for Israeli institutions. This withdrawal of money and power hamstrings Israel’s ability to settle Palestinian territories, which they have continued in flagrant violation of international law. Outcry from the world and repeated United Nations condemnations have not set occupation back materially. What stops occupation is cutting its fuel supply: the river of capital from which spring Israeli factories in the West Bank, Israeli military targeting systems and U.S. fighter jets and bombs.
The UC system has already divested … multiple times. We divested $3 billion from apartheid South Africa in 1986, and in 2006 we divested from nine specific oil, energy, and telecom companies resourcing the systematic crimes against native Africans in Darfur, Sudan. We also used our leverage to send letters of concern to other companies involved in the Darfur genocide. Both of those exits marked the conclusion of intense, prolonged student campaigns.
The University of California also admirably divested from fossil fuel and tobacco companies across all of its holdings, which it acknowledged had an “adverse financial impact.” In 2006, when they unanimously voted to divest from the genocide in Sudan, the regents proudly announced they were taking “a principled stand.” Twenty years later and three years into the live-streamed genocide of Palestinians, the regents contradict their own principles.
The landscape of divestment in 2026 is markedly different than that of the 1980s South African divestment campaign. Asset-holding institutions now hide more of their records and generally invest in more complex financial bodies, such as hedge funds, which obfuscate hundreds of individual financial instruments and change month to month, rather than directly in discrete companies. This allows them to veil themselves in ignorance. But their money still actively supports warmongering companies through indirect investments, even if the financial story is complex.
As of June 30, 2025, the University of California holds $198 billion in assets, on par with Cuba’s entire economy. UC Berkeley’s specific endowment is worth over $3 billion. This capital enables the operation of innumerable — literally, because they won’t, or even can’t, tell us — companies directly fueling and benefiting from war and genocide. When Google and Microsoft help the Israeli military target civilians in Palestine, they are propped up by investments from major institutions like ours, just via intermediary financial institutions.
The UC system opposes today’s calls for boycotts and divestment for the Palestinian cause despite purporting to follow Environmental, Social and Governance factors in its investment strategy and even specifying that divestment is on the table when it will “clearly diminish” a “social injury.” Is genocide not the same social injury that it was in 2006?
Though it may seem otherwise, the University of California’s mind-boggling $198 billion in assets does not mean it’s rolling in Scrooge McDuck money. The actual UC operating budget is $57 billion per year and, according to the institution, is not invested at all. So, the UC system spent $57 billion last year, none of which is apparently relevant to divestment. What’s that $198 billion, then?
Aside from components such as the General Endowment Pool, which holds endowed gift funds, real estate holdings and other assets, at least $110.8 billion of the University of California’s total $198 billion is held in direct benefit plans. These are the UC retirement funds. They provide retirement income, lump cashouts preretirement, disability payouts and survivor benefits. That pension is 90% funded as of last year.
Pension funders promise money based on expected rate of return. Although providing for employees after a long career is admirable, implementing old-age care through individual pensions and not state services pushes institutions not to change existing investment strategies so pensions are guaranteed. That’s why pension risk minimization is one of the “pillars” of the UC Investments Way cited by CIO Jagdeep Singh Baccher to explain its “(fiscal) conservatism.”
Baccher was additionally quoted by the Daily Cal at the March regents’ meeting sardonically pointing out that the UC system might be obligated to divest from all American companies “because, of course, we are initiating wars around the world.” In contrast, the UC investments team currently describe how they have “ended our overweight to China” in light of “geopolitical risks” to profit.
The message is clear: National-level divestment is permissible only when sufficiently financially viable. Divestment also involves stoking political controversy (though divesting from war and genocide shouldn’t be controversial) at a time when the University of California is also currently at war with the federal government. Chancellor Richard Lyons was one of three university heads grilled by Congress this summer over allegations of antisemitism, and there is an active lawsuit by the Department of Justice against UCLA for allegedly fostering a hostile work environment for Jewish and Israeli students and faculty. UC Berkeley also recently settled a high-profile lawsuit with the Brandeis Center regarding allegations of failing to respond to antisemitism, agreeing to pay $1 million in legal fees, and there is a U.S. district court injunction against UCLA pointedly directing it not to exclude Jewish people from campus life, explicitly including on the basis of their beliefs about Israel.
But preserving profit and placidity does not justify supporting the destruction of entire peoples. The regents agreed that divesting from fossil fuels, tobacco and other crimes against humanity weren’t just risk-mitigating policies but sustainable ones. They were moral obligations. The same logic applies here.
It will not be a one-step process to transform our investment portfolios. It will take years to fully execute. If I observed any real commitment to divestment, I would not fault the regents for enacting it slowly. But there has been, after almost three years of genocide, no such commitment. That’s why we continue to be enraged at their indifference, and mobilized even after years, as the rally and ballot resolution illustrate. I can’t present an entire new financial plan within a newspaper article. But we must expect more from our leaders. If all they can do is wring their hands and give up, maybe it’s time for new ones.