Texas
Pro-Palestinian protesters in Texas are calling for universities to divest. Here's what that means
When Jumana Fakhreddine took part in last week’s anti-war protests at the University of Texas at Austin, she said organizers had set up a peaceful teach-in with speakers and pizza. Their purpose was to pressure the university’s leadership to divest in entities tied to the Israeli war effort in Gaza, she said.
But the moment instead devolved into chaos where dozens of students were arrested by riot-gear clad state and local police officers who used force to quell the demonstration and stop students from venting their frustrations.
“The whole reason we were there was just to simply ask for divestment and to stop supporting the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians,” Fakhreddine, a 21-year-old biology and pre-med student, said. “I think that we just all want the occupation to stop.”
The ongoing protests at UT Austin come in response to the Israeli-led effort against Hamas after the Oct. 7 attack that left more than 1,200 Israelis dead and dozens held captive. Since then, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Israel-Hamas war.
What is divestment?
These protests aren’t confined to the UT Austin campus. Similar demonstrations have erupted on other public and private campuses across the state and the country. While reports and photos of a heavy-handed police response to the protests have dominated headlines, some students say the message about divestment hasn’t resonated as much as it should.
So what exactly is divestment, and why are protesters calling for it? It all starts with university endowments – basically, donated money and assets that are invested to generate income.
Caleb Silver, the editor-in-chief of Investopedia, told the Texas Newsroom that the UT System has one of the largest endowments in the world. As of the 2023 fiscal year, it was worth about $44.9 billion.
Silver said “divestment” is a broad term, but in terms of what protesters are demanding, it includes three key elements.
“What you see through these protests is students … asking for the university and their endowments to stop investing in companies that either do business directly with Israel, or do business with companies in Israel, or that invest in companies that are domiciled in Israel,” he said. “So, it’s a broad request for the UT [System] endowment or some of these campuses.”
Last Wednesday’s protest at UT Austin was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Committee in Austin, a student organization, and specifically “called for a cease-fire in Gaza and for UT to divest from weapons manufacturers that provide supplies to Israel,” reported KUT.
Some students have also said they don’t want their tuition to go toward funding what they call a genocide of Palestinians. That’s not too far-fetched, as Silver noted some university endowments are partially funded by tuition.
“Endowments, generally speaking, are built from tuition payments made by students. They’re also made from gifts from former students and alumni who are influential people connected to the university,” he said. “So oftentimes you will see wealthy donors giving millions – if not billions – of dollars to a university’s endowment.”
Calls for divestment aren’t a new strategy. They actually date back to at least the 1960s, when colleges and universities were in the grips of protests calling for an end to the war in Vietnam. Those were followed by calls for divestment in protest of South African apartheid and later, the fossil fuel industry in Texas.
That history aside, predicting the actual impact of divestment is somewhat complicated.
Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor of educational studies and public policy at Davidson College in North Carolina, told NPR the anti-fossil fuel movement didn’t make a significant difference. And it’s unclear whether the current campaign will yield results the protest movement deems significant.
“When universities have divested from fossil fuels, that hasn’t made much of a dent in terms of the stock prices of those fossil fuel companies, and it doesn’t seem to affect the university endowments,” he said. “It also has some parallels to South Africa in the ’80s. But even then, the research shows that most of the divestment efforts mainly led to a global political movement. And I don’t know that we’re there yet with divestment from Israel due to the Gaza conflict.”
The calls for divestment aren’t confined to the UT Austin campus. Students at the University of Texas at Dallas held sit-in demonstrations last week and eventually met with university president Richard Benson, KERA reported.
“Our demand is for divestment. Our demand is for our university to end its complicity in the genocide,” said Fatima Tulkarem, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at UTD.
Demonstrators, however, didn’t make any headway toward their demands and said the meeting didn’t lead to meaningful discussions.
The flip side of divestment
Nationally, at least one student protest movement has provided some sense of progress. Brown University in Rhode Island announced Tuesday that an agreement was reached where protesters would dismantle their encampment and a university advisory committee would meet to discuss the students’ divestment demands.
“The University agreed that five students will be invited to meet with five members of the Corporation of Brown University in May to present their arguments to divest Brown’s endowment from ‘companies enabling and profiting from the genocide in Gaza,’” the school said in a statement. Brown President Christina H. Paxson will also “ask the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management to provide a recommendation on the matter of divestment by Sept. 30, and this will be brought to the Corporation for a vote at its October 2024 meeting.”
But Investopedia’s Caleb Silver said there is a flip side to divestment: If universities ultimately agree to divest from a certain company or entity – whether in Texas or elsewhere – they surrender any say in how it acts afterwards.
“You lose your voice in what that company is able to do going forward. And if you’re a large shareholder – like a lot of these big university endowments are – you have a pretty big voice in how these companies operate,” Silver said.
“Well, you’ve taken your money out, you’ve walked away, you’ve let your money do the walking. But you’ve lost your ability to affect strategy, to affect change within that company.”
The NHL took the first step toward expansion in Texas earlier this week, agreeing to terms with billionaire Dan Friedkin and his family to explore the feasibility of putting a franchise in Houston or Austin.
Far enough from the Dallas Stars, who relocated from Minnesota in 1993, a new team would not interfere with their territorial rights. And the league has shown no fear of adding one team at a time, so No. 33 does not have to come with No. 34.
“Symmetry I don’t think should necessarily govern expansion,” Commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday. “You expand if you think it makes sense and enhances what the league has.”
What is behind the NHL’s interest in Texas
Money is the obvious answer. Bettman said the total investment of the project would be some $3.5 billion, which would include expansion fees paid to established owners along with the cost of building a new arena.
The Houston Rockets’ arena downtown is publicly owned but controlled by team owner Tilman Fertitta’s Clutch City Sports and Entertainment group. The home of the American Hockey League’s Texas Stars, in the Austin suburb of Cedar Park, has a capacity of 8,000 that is a little over half the size of the NHL’s smallest current rink (Winnipeg).
“I would be surprised if the NHL would be OK with an expansion team that does not have a new arena,” said Brian Mills, an associate professor at the University of Texas who teaches courses on sports economics and strategy. “The revenue potential with the luxury boxes and the way that they set those up and the money that they like to extract from the local cities is way too large to pass up.”
They are also huge markets. Houston at nearly 2.4 million is the fourth-most-populated U.S. city; Austin at just over 1 million is in the top 12.
“Obviously it makes sense if you’re a sports league to have a franchise in the nation’s fifth-largest metro area and one that is growing rapidly,” said Holy Cross professor Victor Matheson, an expert in sports economics. “Houston obviously makes sense in general as a destination for any league.”
Austin is smaller but has doubled its population since the mid-1990s and has seen an infusion of people over the past five years. Only eight of the NHL’s existing markets are bigger.
“It’s becoming more and more of a tech city, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s more hockey fans here than there used to be,” Mills said. “I would imagine there’s some market for the NHL here in Austin, particularly more than when it was a sleepy, small town capital of Texas 30 years ago.”
History of hockey in Houston and Austin
When hockey was picking up in popularity in the 1960s and ‘70s and the NHL went from six teams to 18, the rival World Hockey Association was founded and Houston got a franchise when the one in Dayton, Ohio, failed to get off the ground.
The Aeros’ inaugural season was in 1972-78, and they were best known for “Mr. Hockey” Gordie Howe playing for them along with sons Mark and Marty. They won four Avco World Trophies as WHA champions before folding.
An AHL team using the same name existed in Houston from 1994-2013. The Texas Stars have played in Austin since ’09.
“There’s some interest of hockey,” University of Houston economics professor Steven G. Craig said. “Houston is full of immigrants from around the country and around the world. And Austin is sort of similar in the sense of a pretty heterogeneous population.”
Pros and cons of a Houston or Austin NHL franchise
Growing the sport in another so-called non-traditional spot is a big benefit. Smashing successes in places like Las Vegas and Tampa, Florida, show what hockey can do across the Sun Belt when strong ownership is involved.
“Southern cities have been doing pretty well now these days in the NHL: the Lightning and the Panthers,” Mills said of the two teams in Florida. “You’ve got some pretty good hockey teams after some pretty miserable failures with some earlier expansion to the South.”
Abandoning the second try in Atlanta (the Thrashers from 2000-11) was more a failure of ownership than the market. The same could be said in Arizona, where a revolving door of owners led to arena miscues and eventually the Coyotes being sold and moved to Salt Lake City in 2024 to become the Utah Mammoth.
A 33rd team also means 20-23 more NHL players and hopefuls in the minors. The changing landscape of hockey development at the junior and college levels has the potential to churn more talent through the pipeline in North America than ever before, along with players coming from Europe.
“You do have a pretty big pool of players,” Matheson said. “I’m not particularly worried about diluting the talent there because I think there’s a lot of skill.”
What’s next and where the 34th team may be
After this six-month exploratory phase is complete, recent history suggests a season-ticket drive would be one of the subsequent steps. Ticket drives validated interest that led to the Vegas Golden Knights and Seattle Kraken.
The Board of Governors would need to approve moving forward in the process. No vote has yet been held, though the executive committee supported exploring Houston and Austin.
And while the NHL is comfortable with unbalanced Eastern and Western conferences, getting to 34 teams seems inevitable if it goes to 33. Bettman said the board on Tuesday was updated on situations in Atlanta and Arizona, and it would be no surprise if one of those places got another crack at it.
ere’s everything you need to know about one of the most recognizable trophies in North American sports — The Stanley Cup.
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Texas lawmakers on Tuesday asked the Texas Secretary of State’s Office for assurances that issues with the state’s voter registration and election management system would be fixed before the November midterm election.
“Those fixes have to be done, because if we go into a November election and we don’t, we can’t claim that we have integrity in the voter roll,” said state Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from Harris County, during a Senate State Affairs Committee hearing that addressed voter registration and voter list maintenance issues.
Bettencourt said he’s heard complaints about the system, known as TEAM, from election officials in Travis, Austin, and Jackson counties, among others.
Christina Adkins, the elections division director at the secretary of state’s office, said the agency is “dedicating every possible resource that we have within our office to resolving these issues.”
“There is nothing more important in our office than this project,” Adkins said.
TEAM was redesigned and redeveloped by the state and relaunched last summer. Election officials say they have struggled with it since then, and though some functionality issues have been resolved, others continue to come up.
For example, election officials have reported that processes such as voter registration status lookups and precinct assignments frequently don’t work properly. In addition, the system often malfunctions when attempting to produce reports of registered voters and voters who have requested a mail ballot, forcing some election officials to produce their own spreadsheets to keep track.
The problems, election officials say, have added financial and staffing strains on counties already strapped for resources.
The system was developed by Civix, a Louisiana-based vendor. The majority of the state’s 254 counties rely on TEAM to plan elections and maintain their voter rolls. Even counties that instead use software from a state-approved private vendor to manage their voter rolls are required by state law to sync their data with TEAM daily, and are required to use TEAM to verify a voter’s identity and their eligibility to cast a ballot.
Groups representing election officials across Texas have asked the agency to halt the TEAM update rollout and address issues that they said “directly impact key parts of the election and jury process.” The groups first outlined their complaints in a letter to Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson in October, and sent another one in February.
Earlier this month, Nelson announced she’d be stepping down as of July 17. Gov. Greg Abbott has yet to appoint her successor.
Secretary of state, vendor working together on fixes
According to public records, the state’s contract with Civix is for $17 million. The secretary of state’s office told Votebeat last year that the money for it came from a mix of state dollars and federal funds allocated under the 2002 Help America Vote Act, earmarked for improving election administration.
Bettencourt raised questions about Civix’s work during the hearing. “When I get half a dozen counties with their hair on fire, and some counties are small, and some of them are big, that means that the vendor is behind on actually delivering fixes to the system,” Bettencourt said.
He directly asked Adkins whether Civix was up for the task. “Yes, sir,” she responded, adding her office is working with the vendor on fixes. Civix did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Civix, Adkins said, also manages voter registration systems for other states, including Louisiana and Iowa, but Texas is the vendor’s biggest election management and voter registration software customer.
The Texas Secretary of State’s Office has said it anticipated technical issues with this “once-in-a-decade upgrade,” though it pointed to some unexpected challenges that have exacerbated the issues.
The agency specified that it didn’t anticipate the updated system having to handle significant amounts of data from large counties that abruptly stopped using a vendor that had financial problems. It also noted that redrawn boundaries following last year’s unexpected midcycle redistricting created additional complications that prevented counties from mailing out voter registration certificates on time.
Disclosure: Texas Secretary of State has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.
Natalia Contreras is a reporter for Votebeat in partnership with the Texas Tribune. She is based in Corpus Christi. Contact Natalia at ncontreras@votebeat.org.
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