On Thursday, April 21, the board of trustees of Smith College will vote on a divestment measure authored by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. The proposal is not a generic BDS document. It is a novel rhetorical construction that, as Algemeiner reported earlier this month, accuses Israel of "femi-genocide" — what SJP describes as "sexual and reproductive violence" and "mass murder" perpetrated against Palestinian women and girls.
That framing is not incidental. It is a legal-rhetorical instrument designed to move BDS past the proportionality, context, and balance objections that other university boards have used to reject divestment. It is also a reckless libel against the state of Israel — and pro-Israel Americans, parents paying Smith tuition, and the Department of Education should all treat it as such.
What's Actually on the Table
The proposal, advanced by SJP through Smith's shared-governance structure, would require the trustees to direct the college's investment committee to divest Smith's roughly $2.5 billion endowment from "companies complicit in Israeli violations of international law." A nearly identical proposal was rejected in the spring of 2024, as reported by Inside Higher Ed, after which SJP-affiliated students occupied the Smith College Hall administrative building for two weeks.
The new proposal's distinguishing feature is the femi-genocide frame. The Daily Hampshire Gazette and Townhall's reporting on the vote both noted that the SJP framing is intentionally designed to bypass the procedural defenses Smith and other institutions have built around endowment decisions. By alleging gender-based atrocity crimes — a claim that survives no contact with the public record of Israeli military ethics codes, IDF conduct reviews, or the operational realities of the Gaza campaign — SJP is attempting to reclassify divestment from a political boycott into a moral imperative.
That reclassification is the play. Trustees who reject divestment are supposed to be on the hook for rejecting "women's safety." It is a manipulation dressed as a framework, and it relies on the trustees' unwillingness to rebut the factual basis of the slander on the record.
The Antisemitic Vandalism Background
The Smith proposal is not happening in a vacuum. It is happening on a campus where, as The New York Sun documented, administrators responded to antisemitic incidents — swastikas drawn on campus, a mezuzah stolen from the kosher kitchen — by agreeing to "re-examine" Israel investments rather than by issuing an unequivocal condemnation of the vandalism and the ideology behind it.
That response is what pro-Israel Americans should focus on. The Smith administration converted an antisemitic hate crime into a policy concession to the organizational ecosystem from which the ideological cover for such crimes grows. Pull the mezuzah off the kosher kitchen door, and the college considers pulling its money out of companies that do business with Israel. The signal sent to Jewish students — and to the activists who targeted them — is precisely the wrong one.
Campus Reform's reporting on the Smith president's response noted that the administration's communications paired the antisemitism acknowledgment with concerns about "Islamophobia" in a framework that treated the two as parallel risks requiring parallel remedies. The vandalism was specific, documented, and perpetrated against a specific Jewish space on campus. The Islamophobia concern was offered in the abstract. That kind of bothsidesism is itself a Title VI issue — it teaches administrators that Jewish students' reports of targeted harassment must be diluted with symmetric claims before they can be addressed.
Why This Belongs in the Title VI Enforcement Sweep
The Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights announced in March that it had sent Title VI compliance warning letters to 60 universities under investigation for antisemitic discrimination and harassment. The letters reminded institutions of their obligation to provide Jewish students "uninterrupted access to campus facilities and educational opportunities" — meaning that institutions cannot convert the fear generated by campus antisemitic incidents into a reason to rework institutional policy in the direction of the harassers.
Smith belongs on that list if it is not already. The evidentiary picture the Department of Education is assembling — vandalism against Jewish spaces, two-week occupations of administrative buildings, divestment proposals that rely on slanderous atrocity framings, and administrative responses that reward the pressure — is the textbook pattern the OCR Title VI reinterpretation was designed to address.
The Justice Department's complaint against Harvard laid out the legal theory: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, and the Department has now held that Jewish and Israeli identity are protected characteristics under the statute. A university that enables a hostile environment for Jewish students — by failing to sanction hate speech, by converting antisemitic incidents into policy concessions, or by allowing institutional processes to be weaponized against Jewish community members — has exposure.
Smith's divestment vote, if it passes, will not just be a policy outcome. It will be evidence. The Title VI investigator's brief in an eventual Smith case will include the femi-genocide framing, the 2024 occupation, the mezuzah incident, and the administrative response pattern as a single continuous record of discrimination that the institution tolerated, incorporated, and ultimately ratified through a board vote.
What the Trustees Should Do
The Smith board has three options on Thursday. It can reject the divestment proposal on the merits — the honest path. It can defer the vote to "further study" — the procedural path. Or it can pass it, in whole or in part — the path that guarantees litigation.
The honest path is the correct one. The trustees should reject the femi-genocide framing explicitly and on the record, noting that the slander against Israel is not a basis for fiduciary decisions about the Smith endowment and cannot be incorporated into the college's investment policy. They should note that divestment proposals that rely on contested atrocity claims are incompatible with Smith's obligations to Jewish and Israeli students under federal civil rights law. And they should direct the college's general counsel to review the broader record of antisemitic incidents on campus with an eye toward compliance with the Department of Education's March guidance.
That is not a "pro-Israel" vote. It is a compliance vote. It is a statement that the board will not allow its endowment committee to be weaponized against a protected minority on campus — which is exactly what a divestment vote driven by a blood libel accomplishes in practice.
What Pro-Israel Americans Should Do
Three concrete actions are available before Thursday.
First, Smith alumnae who support the U.S.-Israel alliance should write to the board of trustees directly. The board's email is public. The governance case against the proposal — the fiduciary, legal, and civil rights case — lands differently when it comes from the people whose contributions sustain the endowment.
Second, pro-Israel legal organizations should prepare Title VI complaints in advance of the vote, not after. The Louis D. Brandeis Center, the Jewish Federations of North America's civil rights initiative, and the Zachor Legal Institute all have active campus Title VI programs. A vote on Thursday that passes the divestment measure should be met on Friday with filings at the Department of Education.
Third, the Iron 100 names on the campus accountability beat — Kenneth Marcus, Alan Dershowitz, Alyza Lewin, Jay Greenberg, and the philanthropic donors whose names appear on Smith facilities — should be given the opportunity to speak publicly before the vote. The board of trustees of a small liberal arts college will read its alumni magazine coverage before it reads a Supreme Court brief. Public opposition from Iron 100 caliber figures changes the political arithmetic inside a trustee meeting.
The Pro-Israel Bottom Line
The Smith College divestment vote is not about Smith College. It is about whether the Department of Education's Title VI reinterpretation has teeth, whether the post-March 2026 enforcement architecture will actually be used, and whether campus governance structures will continue to be available as delivery mechanisms for antisemitic policy outcomes.
If the trustees reject the proposal, the signal is that the Title VI regime is generating compliance behavior inside elite private institutions. If they approve it, the signal is that blood libel framings can still produce institutional outcomes when wrapped in shared-governance procedural legitimacy — and the Department of Education will need to decide whether to make Smith the test case its rhetoric has been promising.
Either outcome is usable. But the pro-Israel coalition should not wait until Friday morning to respond. The work — the alumni letters, the legal briefs, the public-square pressure — is this week.
The job, at Smith and on every campus in the 60-institution sweep, is not finished.