What is the Open the Books Coalition!?
Brown University’s investment portfolio is kept completely secret from the Brown community, which means that we have no power to ensure that our investments are just and ethical. The existing bureaucracy that advises the University on responsible investment practices operates without access, information, enforcement power or transparency. The few companies that we know Brown has been invested in—which we had to find out second-hand—are abusive and irresponsible in the extreme.
By luck and word of mouth, we know that Brown is invested in a HEI Hotels and Resorts, a company whose daily operation depends on the appalling mistreatment of workers. What’s more, workers’ attempts to organize a union to protect themselves from HEI’s systematic abuse have been blocked by harassment, intimidation, and illegal anti-union tactics from the company’s management. The Student Labor Alliance has been organizing concerned students for the past two years to demand that the University divest from HEI to relieve Brown’s complicity in the exploitation of hotel workers and take a stand in support of HEI workers’ union-organizing efforts.
Meanwhile, Brown Students for Justice in Palestine is dedicated to ending Brown University’s investments in companies that profit from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories and facilitate or undertake acts of violence against Palestinian and Israeli civilians. As part of a global solidarity movement taking up the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), Brown Students for Justice in Palestine calls on our University to stop funding violations of human rights and international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
As it stands, we have no way of identifying the other companies whose exploitative labor practices are funded by Brown’s endowment. Nor can we identify those companies whose profits depend upon international violations of human rights.
Without an open and transparent endowment with democratic procedures for voicing the ethical concerns of an informed community, we have no way of preventing our tuition and Brown’s endowment from funding companies that contribute to grave injustice on a local and/or global level.
Please join us in demanding an open and just investment!
Open the Books: Coalition for a Responsible Endowment
Students for a Democratic Society
Student Labor Alliance
Students for Justice in Palestine
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