Introduction: Who are the Regents?

The Board of Regents is the University of Michigan’s highest governing body. The Regents, by controlling many major University decisions including the governance of UM’s $20 billion endowment, are the primary targets of the TAHRIR Coalition’s against U-M's material complicity. The TAHRIR Coalition combats systems of oppression, chief among which has been the investments into israel’s apartheid regime and campaign of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza; the Regents decide whether our claims are legitimate and have refused to answer for their crimes. To put it simply, the Regents stand between activist demands and divestment.

Why is this the case? Why have the Regents upheld for decades a mantra that the endowment should be “shielded from political pressures?” Why would they choose to uphold violence, death, and the highly political appearance of neutrality instead of standing for human rights, justice, and peace? And how can we, activists and organizers from across the University and Southeast Michigan, fight to change this?

This post is the first in a series of articles answering these questions, brought to you by the TAHRIR Coalition’s Research Team. We answered earlier in the year what the endowment is invested in and outlined the structures of governance around the Investments Office that made this possible. This set of articles extends that analysis of the University’s complicity to understand who is responsible for these connections and how we might be able to force their hand. These come from hundreds of hours filing FOIA requests, searching through election donation records, poring over meeting minutes of the Regents, digging up old campaign websites from the Internet Archive, and more.

With our research, we don’t seek to answer how we can appeal to the Regents’ sense of sympathy, if it exists, or to explore argumentative frameworks that can lend us legitimacy. We’ve seen through our research and interactions with the Regents over the past year that they stand for little except what personally benefits them. The Regents don’t stand for the people.

So what do the Regents stand for? For the rest of this article, we’ll think through that question by recovering how the Regents behaved during the fight for divestment from South African apartheid.¹ Legacies of activism are not only informative here because we seek to divest from a similar regime today, but because the Regents attempted many of the same tactics in the 1970s as they do now.

Despite the unequivocal human rights violations committed by the South African apartheid regime and activist demands to divest since the Black Action Movement of 1975 (“BAM II”), the Regents were reluctant to divest. They attempted to appeal these demands through a resolution on March 16, 1978 that simply asked corporations to adhere to the “Sullivan Principles” of ethical and sustainable business practices. Rather than move their money away from corporations complicit in the apartheid regime, the Regents instead adopted a non-binding resolution to ask corporations politely if they could try being ethical. Of course, the corporations did not; business as usual with South Africa continued without anti-segregationist stances that the Sullivan Principles proclaimed.

This maneuver angered many students, who continued to mobilize over the next several years to push the University to divest. To students, adoption of the Principles was counterproductive and a liberal distraction; even the apartheid South African government approved of them. U-M students were not alone, as anti-apartheid activism swept the United States. Led by Ann Arbor State Rep. Perry Bullard, the Michigan Legislature passed Public Act 512 into law on December 31st, 1982. Public Act 512, the first act of its kind in the United States, compelled all public universities in the State of Michigan to stop investing in companies doing business in South Africa and the Soviet Union.

Rather than immediately adhere to this mandate, the Regents engaged in a lengthy debate on April 14, 1983 on whether or not to comply with the state law. Paradoxically, the Regents voted on the same day both to divest 90% of its holdings associated with South Africa and to fight Public Act 512 in court. The Regents of the University of Michigan v. the State of Michigan was resolved over two years later, in August 1985, when the Ingham County Circuit Court ruled in favor of the State of Michigan. The Regents would then appeal for an additional two years, and divest only after the Regents won the resulting case in 1987 — their effort to demonstrate that the Regents, not the State, activist demands, nor any body — would compel investment decisions.

The fight for divestment from the South African apartheid regime is instructive. It demonstrates that despite a mandate to uphold U-M's mission to “developing [students as] leaders and citizens” who will challenge the present and enrich the future, the Regents stand against activist demands for a better future. They use procedural measures to delay and leave in place material harm. They clamor for “independence” over listening to staff, faculty, and students.

The case of South African divestment established an important precedent for when divestment should be enacted. With its 1983 decision to divest 90% of its holdings from South Africa, the University resolved to establish a committee of students, university administrators, members of the university senate and alumni to advise the body on issues that “involve serious moral or ethical questions which are of concern to many members of the University community.” At the same time, the resolution placed important limits on when divestment decisions should occur: the Regents declared that the “University should not seek out controversy” and avoid “making commitments to political positions” thereby creating an ostensibly apolitical policy in theory, but not in practice.

Forty years have changed little.² The University claims today that divestment is impossible and goes against standard practice, but this ignores the several instances of divestment the University has taken since 1983. In 2000, President Lee Bollinger created an ad-hoc committee and commissioned them with writing a report on divestment from the tobacco industry, and the University divested from the industry in the same year.³ Five years later, when commenting on divestment from tobacco, then-Vice President Slottow noted that “the Faculty Senate Assembly, Michigan Student Assembly and a number of other University leadership groups passed formal resolutions or in other ways expressed the view that the University's ownership of tobacco stocks was of widespread concern.”

The Faculty Senate passed a resolution in January of this year to compel the University to divest from Israel, and the Central Student Government passed divestment resolutions in 2017 as well as in 2024.⁴ The Shut It Down slate of candidates that ran on a pro-Palestine platform won many of their elections including the positions of President and Vice President, and of course the TAHRIR Coalition is composed today of over one hundred student groups that echo the broad support of the campus community for divestment. If Slottow’s recognition of the significance of campus opinion for considering divestment is any meaningful precedent, the Regents have even more grounds to divest than they did in 2000.

The Regents would contradict their policy to “shield the endowment from political pressures” two more times after the process to divest from tobacco, once in 2021 to divest from the fossil fuel industry and most recently in 2022 to divest from Russia. In the recent “Endowment 101” post, the administration argued that “[n]either was a divestment, which is defined as a decision to dispose of and fully exit investments for political or non-financial reasons. Instead, these decisions were made for financial reasons and to protect the value of the endowment.” Of course, this insistence is a lie; the Regents announced their intent to divest from Russia at the same time that they announced they intended to light Burton Tower in the colors of the Ukrainian flag in a show of solidarity, and a week after Interim President Mary Sue Coleman condemning the attack on Ukraine as a “ruthless attack on freedom.” Fossil fuel divestment was similarly championed as a victory for humanity rather than simply for financial profit — Regent Mark Bernstein argued that given the challenges of climate change, “we have to do things differently and that includes the way we invest our money;” Regent Jordan Acker would address students about fossil fuel divestment saying that “your activism matters, your voice matters, your passion matters and, yes, your viewpoint matters.” The Regents insist that they cannot be swayed by “political pressures” to avoid standing for human rights, while at other times — in some cases at the same time — proclaiming their values and how they drive investment decisions.

Of course, the main way the Regents blatantly contradict their policy of maintaining an endowment free of “political pressures” is by engaging in expressly political investments. As we detailed in our report earlier this year, the University has funded, through investments managers in venture capital and private equity, companies producing surveillance tech, bombs, unmanned drones, and fighter planes for the Zionist entity. Some, like israeli hacking corporation NSO Group, have been widely criticized for their role in death; others, like Shield AI and Toka, escape public scrutiny as they power the genocide. Through all of these, the Regents engage in politics as they claim to be free of it: Zionist, colonial politics attempting to erase Palestinian people from their own land.

Over the next several weeks, we will analyze the work and governance of the eight Regents that made these horrific investments possible — Denise Ilitch, Ron Weiser, Paul Brown, Sarah Hubbard, Mark Bernstein, Michael Behm, Jordan Acker, and Katherine White. As the broad history told in this introduction and the individual biographies elaborated in these posts will illustrate, the Regents are not representatives of the University community and definitely not beholden to upholding human rights worldwide. Accordingly, the mission of the TAHRIR Coalition and the community that has mobilized to support our encampment is thus not to debate the merits of divestment but to end the university’s complicity in the genocide by giving the Regents no choice but to divest.