The Case Against Any Divestment, Ever - Commentary

Bruce A. Kimball, former Guggenheim Fellow and professor emeritus of educational studies at Ohio State University, and Sarah M. Iler, assistant director of academic planning and institutional research at the Uiversity of North Carolina School of the Arts, write:  Divestment is a bad idea: detrimental financially, ineffective as policy and unsound ethically. Here is why. Divestment means excising certain investments from endowments. Arising in the late 1970s, the first demands for divestment in U.S. higher education aimed to force the South African government to end apartheid. By 1988, about 155 colleges, or 4 percent of all colleges and universities, agreed to do so.