On the morning of Saturday, February 10th, Dalton Hall on Bryn Mawr’s campus was unusually active for a weekend morning. Upstairs, on the third floor, Bryn Mawr College’s Board of Trustees was in their semesterly on-campus meeting. Downstairs, members of the student body gathered as part of a sit-in to protest Bryn Mawr College’s investments in organizations connected to Israel. Although the sit-in participants’ access was restricted to the ground floor of the building by campus safety, they were doing everything they could to make their presence noticeable. Palestinian wedding blasted in Dalton’s glass encased stairwell and cardboard protest signs lined the halls.
Dounya Ramadan, a 2022 Bryn Mawr graduate and former Board of Trustees student representative, returned to campus for the sit-in. She recounted her time working with the board, saying:
“When I was back at Bryn Mawr we were trying to continue the movement to divest from fossil fuels, and that movement was interrupted during the height of COVID. Throughout that movement we were able to have conversations with the CFO, with the investment committee, etc. So they made time for us to have meetings with those on the inside, with those who work with the investment portfolio. However, most of it I felt was performative, in the way that they wanted to show that they were meeting with students and at the end of the day students like myself, instead of doing our other homework had to focus on educating ourselves on investment portfolios while trying to quite literally come up with a solution for the college to get rid of these commingled funds, demand full transparency while engaging in dialogue with those who were hired to deal with these investments on a daily basis”
The numbers of people in attendance slowly climbed as noon approached and at half past 12, a rally was held in the stairway of the building. Sit-in participants stood, lining the walls of the downstairs hallways and stairwell, leaving space to walk and move through the building.
The looming question of the day was, “why don’t Bryn Mawr students know where their money is going?” Many people in attendance at the rally, who had met with school admin for various reasons over their Bryn Mawr careers, have said that admin often say they don’t know exactly where the colleges investments are placed. In a speech at the rally, Ramadan posited that commingled funds are the reason the college reportedly can’t pinpoint exactly what it invests in. She reported that her and her peers would be told that commingled funds made information too complicated to divest from specific companies.
The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute defines commingled funds as a broad term that refers to “the mixing of funds belonging to one party with funds belonging to another party”. All investments of the Bryn Mawr College endowment are coordinated under the office of Brooke Jones, who began work in October of 2020 as the colleges first Chief Investment Officer. Jones’ office then hires external investment managers, who actually invest the money. These managers are not just investing Bryn Mawr’s money, but rather pooling together money from multiple institutions in order to make investments. Per Pitchbook, this is a common strategy used by colleges to manage their endowments. According to the Office of College Communications, Jones’ office chooses which investment managers to work with based on whether their values align with Bryn Mawr’s.
Although a few members of the Board trickled through Dalton throughout the day, the majority of them were never seen by the sit-in participants. The members of the Board of Trustees, as well as college admin such as President Cassidy, reportedly left through a side door, avoiding the demonstration completely.
