SEATTLE — University of Washington President Ana Mari Cauce minced no words in February when student protesters demanded that the university cut ties with Boeing.
“Boeing’s support for the UW in time, talent and funding cannot be replaced by other endowment sources, nor would we choose to sever our relationship if they could be,” she wrote in an email to individuals and groups protesting violence against Palestinians.
That was months before dozens of pro-Palestinian protesters pitched tents on the UW Quad last week, as they called on the university to end its century-old relationship with the aerospace and defense manufacturer, among other actions.
Protesters nationwide have also called for universities to distance themselves from Boeing and other companies supporting the Israel Defense Forces, but UW students face a particular challenge: Their school may have the most to lose.
Boeing has donated to the UW since 1917, when William E. Boeing gifted the school a wind tunnel to establish an aeronautics curriculum. It was just a year after he founded the company, and over the past century the two Seattle institutions have formed a symbiotic relationship.
Thousands of UW graduates, especially from engineering programs, have found work at Boeing. The company has funded student scholarships and endowed multiple professorships named after UW grads who became Boeing leaders.
The Boeing name is splashed across the campus: The Boeing Advanced Research Center, The Boeing Auditorium, the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics. In 2022 the company gave $10 million toward a new interdisciplinary engineering building.
But for protesters like undergraduate student Sofia Torres, 19, these close ties ultimately serve Boeing the most. Students are concerned that UW research could help develop Boeing technology that “indiscriminately targets Palestinians,” she said.
“We don’t want our education to be co-opted and sold out to corporations like Boeing who use our labor to research and develop — and manufacture — weapons of war,” she said in a phone interview from the encampment, where chants from loudspeakers blared in the background.
Besides cutting ties with Boeing, UW protesters have called for the administration to “materially divest from Israel,” including ending study-abroad programs there, and to “end the repression of pro-Palestinian students and faculty.”
A university spokesperson on Friday essentially reiterated Cauce’s stance on Boeing.
Over the past decade, thousands of weapons systems and munitions manufactured by Boeing, including aircraft and bombs, have been transferred from the U.S. to Israel, according to an analysis of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s Arms Transfers Database.
Cauce’s email in February was in response to demands by Torres and other students for the university to return the company’s $10 million gift for the new engineering building and “to replace all Boeing-funded scholarships, fellowships, research, investments, and department partnerships.”
“There are opportunities for students outside of war profiteers,” Torres, a political science and history major and member of the UW United Front for Palestinian Liberation, said last week. “This does not mean students will not still have opportunities for research or funding.”
A spokesperson for Boeing highlighted the company’s long ties to the Puget Sound region and the university.
“In support of our commercial business and community, Boeing has supported the University of Washington for almost as long as the company has been in existence,” spokesperson Ted Land said in an email. “We are proud to support UW and other institutions of higher learning here in Washington state and around the globe.”
Students’ demands had more success at other university protests. Portland State University administrators in late April agreed to “pause seeking or accepting any further gifts or grants” from Boeing until the university could debate the issue at a forum this month.
At The Evergreen State College, protesters took down their encampment on Wednesday after administrators agreed to create task forces, including one that will look at “divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian territories.”
Alison Taylor, a clinical professor who studies corporate responsibility and business ethics at the NYU Stern School of Business, said that these sorts of campaigns might damage public opinion about a company, but the effect on corporate behavior in places like Gaza or Israel is less clear.
“It’s about symbolism. It’s about whether people want to work there,” she said of Boeing. “Whether they make a difference on the conflict that everyone is concerned about is a bit more difficult question.”
Taylor compared the protesters’ demands to the recent campaign against the Sackler family, which owned Purdue Pharma, for its role in the opioid epidemic. Activists persuaded museums and arts institutions to remove the Sackler name from their walls and to stop accepting the family’s donations.
There’s a long history of student protesters demanding universities cut ties with controversial companies and causes. Most often, they seek divestment — for the university to withdraw its own endowment funds invested in a company. In the 1970s and 1980s, for instance, students — including at the UW — persuaded universities to sell stock in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
At this time, the UW has no direct investments in Boeing, but some of its investment funds do have “minimal indirect exposure” to the company, university spokesperson Victor Balta said.
Because of this, protesters separately called for divestment from Israel, said Torres, the undergraduate — echoing past movements like the one against South Africa.
Divestment campaigns are unlikely to change corporate behavior, said Jonathan Berk, a professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
If a university sold its investments in a given company, it would have almost no effect on its stock price, he said, because someone else would simply buy those same shares. And without lowering the price, a company wouldn’t be moved to act. His research found it would take close to 85% of a company’s investors selling to change corporate policy.
Instead, Berk said, investors would have a better chance at influencing corporate behavior by buying more stock and voting to change a company’s board.
“If you really want a change, you should invest instead of divest,” he said.
Still, divestment remains a strategy for campus protesters. In 2022, the UW Board of Regents voted to divest from fossil fuels after climate activists submitted a petition. The university’s policies also prohibit investments in tobacco companies, coal mining companies and Sudanese companies supporting “genocidal actions and human rights violations in Darfur.”
Aside from the divestment process, which could only apply to the endowment, “The University will not end its relationship with Boeing, which is a strong supporter of student success and innovation,” Balta said in an email.
Anyone concerned about how Boeing weapons are being used abroad should instead direct their complaints to the federal government, he said — to influence foreign policy.
Sunday evening, the encampment in the Quad had grown to about 130 tents and more than 100 people had gathered while dinner was being served.
