The UW System Board of Regents voted Aug. 18 to take away all university funds from companies ""that support or abet acts of genocide"" in Sudan, in response to the three-and-a-half-year conflict between Arab and African Muslims in Darfur.
Most large firms operating in Sudan are foreign companies that hold enormous interests in Darfur's lucrative oil business—including China, Malaysia, India, France and Russia.
This system-wide decision, strongly backed by Regent Charles Pruitt, comes several months after other colleges and universities nationwide divested from companies that remained tolerant to the government-backed genocide in Darfur, including the University of California System, Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Amherst, Brown, Brandeis, Columbia and Emory.
Additionally, other universities and colleges across the country have launched campaigns lobbying for their systems' divestments from Sudan, but the quest for social and political change in Darfur is not only limited to United States' academia.
According to the Sudan Divestment Task Force, the states of Oregon, Illinois, New Jersey and Maine have all passed binding legislation requiring that state funds invested in Sudan be retracted. Ohio, Vermont and Connecticut have nonbinding—or advisory—legislation, and divestment bills are pending in California and Massachusetts. Six other state governments, including Wisconsin and Texas, currently have campaigns to divest.
The SDTF encourages targeted, or strategic, divestment, to help ""maximize impact on the Sudanese government, while minimizing harms to innocent Sudanese citizens and U.S. investment returns,"" according to its website.
Although the prospect of pulling business interests out of a highly profitable oil country may seem rash to institutions, the SDTF proclaims ""that targeted divestment from Sudan would be considerably less risky and costly than two previous, widely adopted divestments (South Africa and tobacco)."" The SDTF continues to argue that divesting from Sudan does not exclude an entire industry sector, like tobacco divestment campaigns, nor does it entail divesting from ""large, blue-chip companies,"" like the South African apartheid-era divestments required.
