Follow this authorMegan McArdle's opinions

It’s harder still to translate divestment’s small effect on companies into a change in the policies of the countries where those companies are headquartered. Countries such as Russia and Iran have persisted for years in the face of sanctions far more punishing than anything that the Columbia endowment, or all university endowments, could possibly impose.

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This brings us back to our bewildered alien: Why Columbia? Why divestment? The answer is that Columbia is simply where activists are, and the endowment is something the Columbia administration can control, unlike the foreign policy of the United States — or Israel.

By now, this pattern is familiar; on the left, issue after issue has been filtered through the prism of the campuses where so many activists are concentrated. Concerns about sexual assault frequently ended up centered on the campaign against campus rape; concerns about economic insecurity became demands for student loan forgiveness; concerns over the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza have become arguments about elite university endowments.

To some extent, this is natural. Universities have concentrated populations of progressive students whose flexible schedules that can be organized around political action, and of progressive administrators who can be expected to smile on these efforts. But it’s also costly, because 20-year-olds don’t necessarily make the best ambassadors for a cause. The most passionate, possibly, but not the most strategic.

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The best hope that activists have of changing Israel’s behavior isn’t fiddling with university endowments; it’s changing U.S. government policy on weapons sales to Israel. The best hope of doing that lies in convincing ordinary American voters that policy should change. And as political writer Matt Yglesias keeps pointing out, “The median voter is a 50-something White person who didn’t go to college.” Is this protest going to change that person’s mind?

Hardly. It’s difficult to imagine anything less likely to appeal to that voter than an unsanctioned tent city full of........

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