We’re closing out the year with an episode from our friends at Making Contact:

As graduation approached this year, students around the country began protests after calls for divestment from Israel were initially ignored by university leadership. The campus encampments were met with physical violence and the mainstream press dismissed the students’ demands as naive and immature. But, it turns out that there’s a lot we should be asking about college endowments.

We take a look at what an endowment is and how they’re invested. Then we learn why transparency around the endowment (and divestment!) might actually benefit the entire college community.

We talk to Kelly Grotke, a financial researcher from Pattern Recognition, a research collective focused on financialized higher education. And, with Andrea Pritchett, we look at the links between the encampments today, and those from the 80s, when students protested South African Apartheid.

Episode Credits:

Host: Salima Hamirani
Producers: Anita Johnson, Salima Hamirani, Amy Gastelum, and Lucy Kang
Executive Director: Jina Chung
Editor: Adwoa Gyimah-Brempong
Engineer: Jeff Emtman
Digital Media Marketing: Anubhuti Kumar

Learn more about Making Contact at https://focmedia.org/