Brian Moynihan has his hands full running Bank of America, the nation’s second largest lender, which is why he raised some eyebrows in July when he took on the volunteer position as chancellor of the Corporation of Brown University, the governing body of his alma mater.
Those eyebrows got even wider when Brown took idiotic wokeness to new levels.
We all know universities have become a hotbed of left-wing, Marxist activism, with a heavy dose of antisemitism as war rages in Gaza and Israel rightly protects its citizens following the Oct. 7 massacre. Leaders at Penn and Harvard have lost their jobs for failing to crack down on Jew haters on campus, which makes what’s going down at Brown so odd.
The Brown Corporation will soon vote on whether Brown’s $6 billion-plus endowment should divest from companies that do business not with dictatorships like Iran or Venezuela, but the one true democracy in the Middle East, Israel.
That the vote to economically harm an ally of this country and a multi-ethnic democracy is taking place in mid-October, nearly a year to the day since the slaughter of innocent Israelis — and Americans — near Gaza only adds to the lack of common sense and plain old decency of this spectacle. That a major bank CEO is part of a move to appease campus radicals who apparently believe the killing of innocents is justified makes it all the more bizarre.
Defenders of Moynihan say his involvement in the mess is more nuanced, which I will address in a moment. That said, I’m not totally surprised that he’s involved even tangentially in this travesty given his history of caving to woke forces.
As I point out in my book “Go Woke Go Broke; The Inside Story of the Radicalization of Corporate America,” some of Moynihan’s greatest woke hits as CEO include rationalizing the social-justice riots following the killing of George Floyd as a byproduct of a country that is systematically racist, or in his muddled verbiage: “The protests are about not having the equivalent opportunity, criminal justice treatment by authorities, and the serious [COVID] infections of communities of color,” he said.
BofA’s Carolina roots
BofA is headquartered these days in New York but traces its roots to Charlotte, NC, and the state’s regional banking powerhouse, North Carolina National Bank. It remains a presence in the city and the mostly conservative-leaning state.
Moynihan didn’t care when in 2016, he publicly opposed a state law that banned trans women from using the ladies’ room despite justified concerns that such accommodations lead to sexual assaults.
Also in 2021, BofA teamed up with the Charlotte United Way to encourage some employees to partake in “A Racial Equity 21-Day Challenge” — so they can come to terms with what the event called their “white privilege, white fragility, and systemic racism.”
Not sure how Moynihan fared during the challenge or whether he even took the test, but you can see why I’m hardly gobsmacked that he’s part of an entity that made a deal with the devil, in this case the campus leftist radicals.
The Brown Corporation will vote on divestiture, scheduled for Oct. 17 and 18, after university President Christina Paxson caved to the demands of campus extremists.
The students said they would stop their disruptive “encampments” and protesting with their decidedly antisemitic overtones in exchange for an Israel-divestiture vote.
Whatever happened to refusing to negotiate with terrorists? Yes, I know universities aren’t banks, where the CEO and board call all the shots. Left-wing faculties have significant input beyond indoctrinating their ideology on students.
The flack for the school told me as much in an email, stating the vote “is part of a long-established process” that “allows any University community member to submit a divestment proposal for examination.”
Maybe, but the gentle souls who run Brown and caved to the radicals may have forgotten who’s paying most of the bills — the vast majority of the student body and alumni who fund its endowment — and they are sick of the protests and indoctrination by faculty.
Just ask the ousted presidents of Harvard and Penn.
Again, people who know Moynihan describe his role in the mess as something close to an innocent bystander. He took the job as chancellor as a volunteer.
The deal with the student radicals was largely cut by Paxson, who then foisted it upon the corporation for an up-or-down vote.
But that doesn’t mean he has to play along with the idiocy. I asked a flack for BofA why Moynihan doesn’t just follow the lead of a man named Joseph Edelman, a hedge-funder who also a Brown Corporation trustee but quit when the vote was allowed.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Edelman wrote: “I find it morally reprehensible that holding a divestment vote was even considered.”
Moynihan could have done the same. It would have been a pretty strong statement that adults are either going to run the show or they won’t play the role of useful idiots in a campus revolt.
It might have sparked a useful conversation that forces Brown to move away from a leftist orthodoxy that appeases those who celebrate murder.
The BofA flack’s response: “Since universities were founded in the United States, corporate executives have served as volunteers on their boards to provide them guidance. It is a great tradition.”
Yeah, really great.
