The results of a campus-wide divestment referendum survey were nullified Monday due to “security and technological issues,” according to an announcement from Boston University Student Government.
The referendum bill was proposed by BU Students for Justice in Palestine and passed at StuGov’s Feb. 3 meeting, allowing students to vote on three questions about University disclosure, divestment and reinvestment of funds.
Voting on the bill opened Feb. 5 at 11:30 a.m. and closed Monday at 5 p.m. BU SJP administered the referendum survey.
Mary Haddad, a junior and BU SJP member, said SJP did not want to administer the survey. The University gives StuGov one email per month to send to the student body, and Haddad said University administration declined to send one containing the referendum survey.
“Before they said no to the email, and before the vote, we proposed to [StuGov] that they run it,” Haddad said. “They said no, so we had to run it.”
Multiple StuGov members declined to comment.
A now-deleted post on the BU SJP Instagram account wrote that Jake Sullivan, senior vice president of external affairs, denied StuGov’s request to announce the referendum vote “due to its reference to Palestine.”
Haddad noted an open letter sent to the student body by BU Hillel Feb. 3, which criticized the referendum bill and accused StuGov of ignoring the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism for considering it.
“Hillel is also a private organization on campus that has unmitigated access to communication with the student body,” said Haddad. “We, a student organization, couldn’t send out a general student body email on a democratic vote.”
Haddad said the administration’s main problem with the bill was its language, which was heavily debated at the Feb. 3 StuGov meeting.
Though the referendum bill passed with a 36-28 majority, senior Yonatan Manor said he and other Jewish students were “cut off” by the StuGov senate chair when they attempted to voice opposition to the bill.
“But when somebody from SJP would speak, they could go on and on,” Manor said. “It definitely felt like a big double standard in the room.”
Without access to BU-managed Qualtrics surveys, BU SJP created the survey, which was managed by Young Democratic Socialists of America at BU and promoted on SJP’s Instagram.
The survey did not require students to use their BU email, and it did not prevent them from voting multiple times. Due to this, the results were nullified Monday.
The referendum bill, which received more than 2,800 votes in the five days the survey was live, polarized the BU community, and the debate over divestment continues beyond the University’s campus.
Sophomore Zac Segal called the referendum “pretty discriminatory” toward Jewish students. He said getting BU to divest all of its investments is a complex task since the University likely has an external investment team to run its endowment and manage investments.
“BU probably [doesn’t] know what the investments are, and then where do you stop?” Segal said “Let’s say they’re invested in Adobe. They might have contracts with defense companies and things like that who are associated with Israel. So where do you stop?”
Jeff Klein, a board member of Massachusetts Peace Action, a nonprofit working to develop peaceful U.S. foreign policy, said getting American companies to stop financing and arming Israel is “a very good demand.”
“Israel is a rich country, and it has a per capita GDP that’s higher than most European countries,” Klein said. “Tuition is high, right? Somehow we can’t find the money for that, but we can find the money to spend billions of dollars every year for Israel.”
The future of any referendum about BU divesting its investments was made hazier by the executive committee of BU’s Board of Trustees, which voted Tuesday to reject any further requests for divestment.
“The endowment is no longer the vehicle for political debate,” said BU President Melissa Gilliam in a statement shared with BU Today. “Nevertheless, I will continue to seek ways that members of our community engage with each other on political issues of our day, including the conflict in the Middle East.”
In its announcement about the referendum result nullification, StuGov said it would conduct a revote process in late February.
Rabbi Shmuel Posner, of the BU Chabad House, is cynical about what may come of the referendum results if the majority of students vote in favor of disclosure, divestment and reinvestment.
“The University is not going to do a thing regardless,” Posner said. “If you really were serious about it, you sit down with the president, with the deans, and talk to them and see what they have to say.”
