Black Faculty for UPP Divestment
As concerned Black faculty at the University of Toronto, we voice our strongest support in urging UTFA members to take part in the newly launched Workers Campaign for Divestment, which calls on the University Pension Plan (UPP) to divest from military industries.
As Audre Lorde cautions us, “every day that you sit back silent, refusing to use your power, terrible things are being done in our name.” Our University pension fund is a stark example of our complicity, financial and moral, with unjustifiable acts of violence: Proxy voting records from May 2024 suggest that the University Pension Plan holds an undisclosed amount in Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturing companies. These companies manufacture 2,000lb bombs, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and Hellfire missiles (all of which have been used by the Israeli Defense Forces). General Dynamics also produces the metal casings for white phosphorus munitions dropped onto densely populated civilian areas in Gaza – a crime under international law.
Both Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics are key suppliers of weapons including missile launchers, automatic cannons, Black Hawk helicopters and rocket systems to the United Arab Emirates which is fueling the ongoing genocide in Darfur and the war in Sudan more broadly, by supplying weapons to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces currently fighting the Sudanese army. The war has displaced over 14 million people and triggered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. The ongoing war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is similarly fueled by external actors like Rwanda, which benefit from extracting Congolese minerals (cobalt, coltan and tin) that are used to produce weapons and military equipment. The UPP holds an undisclosed amount in the company Textron which supplies the Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) with aircraft. The RDF are in turn widely known to support the M23 rebels as they besiege several towns in the mineral rich North Kivu region of the DRC. Nearly 3000 Congolese have been killed and 500,000 displaced since the M23 siege began in January of 2025. The campaign to divest from military industries therefore extends beyond the social and ecological disaster of genocide in Gaza to include divesting from ongoing genocides and displacement crises everywhere; among them the DRC and Sudan.
Generations of Black feminists, including those who took part in the freedom struggle in South Africa, have joined in struggles against militarism, apartheid and violence, and following their example, we unequivocally call for divestment from militarism, including instruments of war, death, and apartheid. As senseless wars and occupations with roots in imperial extractivism have caused mass displacement in the DRC, Sudan and elsewhere in Africa and the Caribbean, a divestment from weapons manufacturing and military industries is directly relevant to the safety of the global Black diaspora, which also includes our students, staff, faculty and their families.
There is a long and powerful history of divestment campaigns at the University of Toronto since the 1980s that we are proud to join: In 1988, after initially rejecting student and faculty demands for divestment, the University pledged to completely divest endowment funds from companies operating in South Africa during apartheid. The Faculty Association approved divestment of the pension funds in 1990. In 1992, the University rejected a call for divestment from tobacco industries, and in 2007 eventually committed to divesting from them. Most recently, in 2021, the University announced that it would divest its $4 billion endowment fund from fossil fuel companies.
As Black faculty we now call on the University Pension Plan to end its complicity in genocide, war and war profiteering by divesting from military industries, including but not limited to Israel’s military; divest from illegal occupation and siege, including but not limited to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine; and to implement a ban on new investments of this kind.
Signed,
Professor, Constituency 110
Professor, Constituency 120
Professor, Constituency 102
Professor, Constituency 108
Professor, Constituency 601
Professor, Constituency 302
Professor, Constituency 301
Professor, Constituency 302
Associate Professor, Constituency 601
Associate Professor, Constituency 114
Assistant Professor, Constituency 201
Associate Professor, Constituency 120
Assistant Professor, Constituency 301
Assistant Professor, Constituency 101
Assistant Professor, Constituency 110
Assistant Professor, Constituency 704
Associate Professor, Constituency 101
Assistant Professor, Constituency 502
Professor, Constituency 108
Assistant Professor, Constituency 101
Associate Professor, Constituency 110
Assistant Professor, Constituency 302
Associate Professor, Constituency 601
Associate Professor, Constituency 112
Associate Professor, Constituency 101
Professor, Constituency 101
Associate Professor, Constituency 301
Associate Professor, Constituency 110
Assistant Professor, Constituency 101
Assistant Professor, Constituency 702
Assistant Professor, Constituency 301
Professor, Constituency 110
Associate Professor, Constituency 201
Assistant Professor, Constituency 302
Assistant Professor, Constituency 302
Assistant Professor, Constituency 102
Assistant Professor, Constituency 108
Professor, Constituency 502
Assistant Professor, Constituency 201
Professor, Constituency 114
Assistant Professor, Constituency 108
Assistant Professor, Constituency 203
Associate Professor, Constituency 101
Assistant Professor, Constituency 109
Assistant Professor, Constituency 110
Assistant Professor, Constituency 103
Indigenous Faculty for UPP Divestment
As Indigenous faculty at the University of Toronto, we strongly urge UTFA members to vote in favour of the motion for UPP divestment from military industries. Our university must no longer be complicit in war, profiteering, genocide, and militarized conflict. Divestment is not only a moral imperative, it is a political necessity.
We remind our colleagues of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s express commitment to “remember and enact the tenets of the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant,” specifically the principles of peace, friendship, and respect. The treaty, which symbolically stands at the entrance of the OISE campus, represents an agreement grounded in Indigenous legal traditions and reminds us of our obligation to care for the land, the waters, the people, and to ensure ongoing sustenance and life for all relations. Militarism, occupation, and genocide anywhere threatens these sacred relations.
We call on the University of Toronto’s senior administration to go beyond the performance of Land Acknowledgements and fulfill the responsibilities they invoke–not only to Indigenous nations on these lands, but to all people resisting colonial violence worldwide. This includes listening to and working in principled relationships with faculty, staff, and students who are organizing for justice in the face of institutional silence, repression, and complicity. The University’s financial entanglements and institutional silences align it with systems of militarism, occupation, and extraction–from the ongoing siege, occupation, apartheid, and genocide perpetrated by the Israeli state against Palestinians, to wars fueled by resource plunder and militarized imperialism around the world, in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and beyond. We call on this university–and to all Canadian universities–to reject their role in the architecture of war, militarized violence, displacement, and ecological devastation that threatens life across the planet. At this moment, neutrality is complicity. It is time to act in solidarity, not silence.
Our university pension fund is a stark example of our financial and immoral complicity with unjustifiable acts of violence. Proxy voting records from May 2024 suggest that the University Pension Plan holds an undisclosed amount in Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, two of the world’s largest weapons manufacturing companies. These companies produce 2,000lb bombs, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and Hellfire missiles (all of which have been deployed by the Israeli military in Gaza). General Dynamics also produces the metal casings for white phosphorus munitions–dropped onto densely populated civilian areas in Gaza–in violation of international law.
Beyond Palestine, both companies supply missile launchers, automatic cannons, Black Hawk helicopters and rocket systems to the United Arab Emirates, which in turn arms the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) responsible for the ongoing genocide in Darfur and the broader war in Sudan. This conflict has displaced over 14 million people and created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
The UPP’s complicity also extends to the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where conflict is similarly fueled by external actors–notably Rwanda–whose military and economic interests are deeply tied to the extraction of minerals in the DRC such as cobalt, coltan and tin. These are essential to the global production of weapons and military equipment. The UPP holds an undisclosed amount in the company Textron which supplies the Rwandan Defence Forces (RDF) with military aircraft. The RDF, in turn, are widely reported to support the M23 rebels currently besieging towns in the mineral-rich North Kivu region of the DRC. Nearly 3000 Congolese have been killed and 500,000 displaced since the M23 siege began in January of 2025. The call to divest from military industries therefore extends beyond the social and ecological disaster of genocide in Gaza. It must also include a rejection of the global infrastructures of militarism, displacement, and genocide–in the DRC, in Sudan, and beyond.
Generations of Black and Indigenous feminists, including those who took part in the freedom struggle in South Africa, have long joined in struggles against militarism, apartheid and colonial violence, and following their example, we unequivocally call for divestment from militarism, including the institutions, industries, and instruments of war, death, and apartheid. As senseless imperial wars and occupations with roots in extractivism continue to displace millions across the DRC, Sudan, the Caribbean, and in other regions of the world, divestment from weapons manufacturing is not only a matter of global justice–it is directly relevant to the safety and dignity of the global Black diaspora, which includes many of our students, staff, faculty, and their families.
There is a long and powerful history of divestment campaigns at the University of Toronto since the 1980s that we are proud to join: In 1988, after initially rejecting student and faculty demands for divestment, the University pledged to completely divest endowment funds from companies operating in South Africa during apartheid. The Faculty Association approved divestment of the pension funds in 1990. In 1992, the University rejected a call for divestment from tobacco industries, and in 2007 eventually committed to divesting from them. Most recently, in 2021, the University announced that it would divest its $4 billion endowment fund from fossil fuel companies.
We recall the University’s October 2021 pledge to “divest from all direct investments in fossil fuel companies within the next 12 months, and divest from indirect investments, typically held through pooled and commingled investment vehicles, by no later than 2030, and sooner if possible.” Yet, in July, 2022, despite these express commitments, the University announced an alliance with the Royal Bank of Canada–the largest financier of fossil fuels in Canada. Such investments are not neutral. They are complicit in the genocidal, colonial invasion of Indigenous territories in the interests of corporate capital. RBC and the fossil fuel companies it finances are responsible for daily acts of violence towards Indigenous land and peoples, from the expansion of invasive “man camps” that endanger Indigenous women and girls, to the criminalization and surveillance of land defenders resisting ecocide.
Across the world, we have witnessed repressive, racist, and horrifying responses from both university administrators and politicians who have called, or threatened to call for militarized police actions against students, and who have weaponized administrative procedures and policies to suppress student organizing, despite the care and safety at the heart of these encampments. We urge the administration of the University of Toronto to bring a good mind to their decision making in this time, and to meet the students’ demands for disclosure and divestment.
As Indigenous faculty we now call on the University Pension Plan to end its complicity in genocide, war and war profiteering. We demand immediate divestment from all military industries, including–but not limited to–those tied to Israel’s military apparatus; divestment from all forms of illegal occupation and siege, including Israel’s ongoing occupation of Palestine; and the implementation of a permanent ban on future investments in companies complicit in militarized and colonial violence.
We call for a full divestment because no university that profits, directly or indirectly from war, occupation, ecocide, and genocide, can claim a commitment to justice. Neutrality is a fiction. Complicity is a choice. And the time to return to relations rooted in care, accountability, and the refusal of harm is now. Let us be a university that upholds life, not enables the destruction of it.
Signed,
Indigenous Faculty Caucus
Jewish Faculty for UPP Divestment
“Investors have a responsibility to not only respond to evolving environmental, social and governance issues, but also to promote a just, sustainable economy and society. We do not, and will not, take that responsibility lightly.” – University Pension Plan
The Jewish Faculty Network is an organization of more than 220 Jewish scholars across Canada who share a strong commitment to social justice in support of an ethical life, whether defined through religious observance or secular action. Jewish faculty at the University of Toronto were founding members of the JFN, and our institution is home to one of its largest chapters.
The University Pension Plan (UPP) manages the pensions of those of us who are members of the University of Toronto Faculty Association (UTFA). In recent months, we have learned that our pensions are invested in the social and ecological disaster that is the consequence of Israeli state violence in Gaza. The UPP was founded upon fundamental commitments to “promote a just, sustainable economy and society.” Despite its insistence that “there are no exceptions” to these commitments, our pensions are currently invested in genocide, scholasticide and ecocide.
At least $790 million of UPP’s published investments are in companies linked to the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. This includes companies such as Howmet Aerospace and Safran, which produce weapons components here in Ontario that are being used in the Israeli military’s assault on Gaza. Proxy voting records from May 2024 further suggests that the UPP also has holdings of an undisclosed amount in some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, whose products include 2,000lb bombs, F-16 and F-35 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, and Hellfire missiles, all of which have been used by the IDF; metal casings for white phosphorus munitions dropped onto densely populated civilian areas in Gaza – a crime under international law – were also manufactured by General Dynamics
These holdings are clearly in violation of the UPP’s responsible investment strategy and are fundamentally unacceptable to us as Jewish faculty.
In 2024, UTFA passed a motion calling on the UPP to divest from oil and gas industries as part of its commitments to environmental and social governance principles. This initiative to demand responsible investing is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, which built global pressure to make apartheid ethically indefensible and economically unworkable.
In fact, in 2022, the UPP voluntarily divested from Russian holdings, which confirms that it is technically and politically feasible for the UPP to consider and implement targeted divestment campaigns. One month after the invasion of Ukraine, UPP CEO Barbara Zvan and UPP Trustee Alan Jette were among those Canadian business leaders who signed an open letter calling upon the government to implement stricter sanctions against Russia and its leaders, stating that “breaches of international law have no place in UPP’s portfolio.” Over one year into the assault on Gaza, when the ICC has issued arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for crimes against humanity and war crimes, we ask: Why is the same respect for international law not being applied in the case of Israel?
Significantly, other labour groups at UofT, including the United Steelworkers (USW) local 1998, and Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) 3902 and 1230 have passed divestment motions. UTFA is the largest remaining labour group not to have adopted such a motion.
Nationally, eighteen faculty associations have adopted general divestment motions, including the Trent University Faculty Association, York University Faculty Association, Windsor University Faculty Association, Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty Association, Toronto Metropolitan University Faculty Association, Ontario College of Art and Design Faculty Association, McMaster University Faculty Association, and Carleton University Academic Staff Association.
These divestment efforts are often demonized as antisemitic. As Jewish people, we condemn this weaponization of the charge of antisemitism and refuse claims that equate Jewishness with support to the policies and actions of the State of Israel. The JFN affirms that Judaism and Jewish traditions are practiced by a global, multi-ethnic, and diverse group of peoples and follows a long history of Jewish ethics which encourages justice, dissent and self-reflection.
It is from this Jewish ethical tradition that we must call on the University Pension Plan (UPP) to align its investment practices with its own policies on responsible investing, and end its complicity in violations of international law.
For these reasons, the Jewish Faculty Network at UofT calls on our fellow UTFA members to join us in the Workers Campaign for Divestment. As part of this movement, we call on the UPP to: divest from military industries, including but not limited to Israel’s military; divest from illegal occupation, including but not limited to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine; and to implement a ban on new investments of this kind.
Signed,
Professor, Constituency 106
Professor, Constituency 102
Associate Professor, Constituency 203
Professor, Constituency 302
Associate Professor, Constituency 203
Professor, Constituency 601
Professor, Constituency 301
Associate Professor, Constituency 301
Associate Professor, Constituency 201
Professor, Constituency 112
Assistant Professor, Constituency 113
Professor, Constituency 109
Professor Emerita, Constituency 901
Assistant Professor, Constituency 702
Professor, Constituency 110
Associate Professor, Constituency 704
Professor, Constituency 108
Associate Professor, Constituency 110
Assistant Professor, Constituency 120
Assistant Professor, Constituency 110
Professor Emeritus, Constituency 901