On Being An “Implicated Subject”

When I was a senator during my freshman year on the Association of Amherst Students (AAS), the student organizations Amherst For Palestine and Jews for Ceasefire came to us to propose a divestment resolution from “companies complicit in violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” To divest would have meant that Amherst College would need to sell any financial holdings that had ties to the Israel Defense Force (IDF). This resolution was a part of the then-ongoing divestment movement sweeping college campuses across the nation. Within the divestment resolution, which we in AAS voted in favor of, we also called for the college to create a “broader socially responsible investment committee.”

Unfortunately, our calls for divestment and transparency went nowhere. The board of trustees unanimously chose not to divest, citing, in part, the trustees' practical concerns that divesting would have a significant negative impact “on financial aid, faculty and staff salaries and benefits, and operations.” Along with choosing not to divest, the board of trustees has also not divulged any specific information about the endowment’s holdings that might bolster this claim.

I had not put much thought into the issue of endowment transparency after that debate until this year, when I began to wrap my head around how common exploitative prison labor practices are in the American economy, with everybody from McDonalds to the State of California being complicit in these practices. I recently became curious about whether Amherst College might also be complicit in this practice. Unfortunately, I came across a problem that dogged us on AAS when we were considering the divestment resolution: There are next to no legitimate methods by which we students might find out what financial holdings are part of the college’s endowment. A quick glance at the college’s most recent annual investment report does not give us much useful information. The report details facts such as the college’s revenue sources over time and the endowment’s asset allocation, but it lacks any substantial information on what actual investments the college holds.

Even more unfortunately, endowment transparency is an extremely difficult goal for us students to achieve through activism. This is true because, in part, around 35% of Amherst College’s endowment assets are invested in private equity funds with strict confidentiality agreements. These confidentiality agreements are widespread across global private equity markets, which are worth an estimated $11 trillion. These agreements make it illegal for the college, other institutional investors, or anybody privy to the knowledge of what investments a private equity firm holds from releasing this information to the public.

When AAS called for divestment, we briefly included a short list of companies that the Amherst College Endowment held that we  believed to be supporting the IDF, which we then had to remove from the finalized resolution because it violated confidentiality. If hypothetically, every student, staff, and faculty suddenly agreed that the college should make all of its investments public knowledge, the most likely result would be that the college would face — and lose — a barrage of lawsuits from corporations.

Furthermore, the board of trustees is unlikely to take up any divestment or endowment related action that could have any negative impact on the college’s financial standing, due to its  stated purpose of being the legal fiduciary of Amherst College to exclusively look after the college’s best interests. In the town hall held by the board of trustees, several trustees articulated this purpose to mean Amherst’s continued financial stability over time — regardless of the sacrifices. Therefore, unless the board was to change its guiding principles —  a tall order considering that the board’s fiduciary duty is enshrined in the law — any proposed divestment action is essentially dead on arrival unless we students can prove, with limited public information, that divestment will not hurt the college financially.

A lack of publicly available information is not just a problem with the Amherst College endowment; there are substantial and systematic deficits in publicly available information about many important parts of society, such as the prison system that would allow socially-conscious consumers to make informed decisions and for activists to construct proposals to improve the public good. Big Oil and Big Tobacco’s decades-long campaigns to keep from public knowledge the negative social effects of their business practices epitomize the fact that large, self-interested organizations will fight to keep information from the public that would force them to grapple with their complicity in social issues. 

So then, where does this leave us students? We have to live with the possibility that we are “implicated subjects” by attending Amherst College. Implicated subjects “occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm.” What this means in the context of Amherst College is that there is a possibility that our education is being financed, directly or indirectly, by corporations that support a myriad of nefarious practices like exploitative prison labor practices or the War in Gaza. Of course, there is no possible way for us students to confirm our suspicions around the college’s financial holdings as of now. However, we should be aware of the possibility that we are “implicated subjects” and keep it in the back of our minds. 

I initially tried to grapple with this possibility by becoming emotionally obsessed by the idea that my Amherst education might be financed by exploitative practices, particularly exploitative prison labor practices, despite not having direct evidence to prove this.

After a class conversation about the prison-industrial complex, I told one of my professors about these concerns, to which they asked me “what are we willing to put up with?” I want to be able to answer this question and know whether I am an “implicated subject” in the issues I care about by attending Amherst College. Unfortunately, because of how little publicly available data there is about the college’s investment, I cannot answer this question.

We should be off-put by the lack of knowledge we can enjoy, as laymen, about the financial networks that dominate the world and that allow for the direct exploitation of many different types of vulnerable people. It is not necessarily Amherst College’s fault that it cannot be transparent with what it invests in its endowment, but we should be tremendously alarmed by the idea that today’s financial order profits off of other people’s suffering and hides it through legal confidentiality. And if we’re not “implicated subjects” in other people’s exploitation by attending Amherst, we are most certainly “implicated subjects” via the phones we use, the clothes we wear, and many other facets of our daily lives. Saying that “the world is an unfair place” is merely an excuse to construct a mental wall between us and those we deem as “not like us.” Rather, we as people need to empathize with those our lifestyles might cause suffering to, and then use that empathy as a starting point to push for positive political change.

The follow-up might be: How do we move forward? Firstly, we should acknowledge this kind of empathy for other people’s suffering is extremely difficult to realize  in practice, especially when the people we might be trying to empathize with might be half a world away, in sweatshops in Bangladesh, for instance. We are able to make sense of the world from the incredibly privileged porch of Amherst College, which also blunts our ability to empathize with people who do not exist in similarly privileged spaces, and instead, might cause us to objectify other people’s suffering.

However, to make the impossible task of empathizing with others slightly easier, I want to borrow an idea from literary critic Saidiya Hartman called “critical fabulation.” “Critical fabulation” refers storytelling as a way to reimagine marginalized people's lives beyond just narratives of suffering, even when suffering might be the only emotion captured on the historical record. Hartman used this concept to try to imagine the lives of the enslaved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade beyond just the details of their immense suffering in slavery that are written in the archives.

We as students can borrow from “critical fabulation” to try and imagine the full humanity of the people whose suffering we might be complicit in, such as the victims of the War in Gaza or exploited prison workers, just to name a few. Fully appreciating these people’s humanity is an impossible task from a privileged place like Amherst College, but trying to engage in this act can be a useful starting point to make tangible the notion that we might be “implicated subjects,” which is a useful starting point for political change.

Secondly, we students should keep on protesting to push Amherst to be more socially responsible with its investments. Despite the failure of the divestment movement in the spring of 2024, student protests on campus can still yield tangible actions from Amherst College and similar institutions. Just ask any of the students who were involved in Amherst’s divestments from Apartheid South Africa, fossil fuels, or the Amherst Uprising in 2015. I do not want the primary takeaway from this article for you to be that cynicism should be the order of the day.

Thirdly, we Amherst students should use the connections and privileges that going to Amherst grants us to make a positive social impact. A quick glance at the alumni directory reveals that Amherst alumni exist in all sorts of prominent positions, from leading corporations and law firms to doctors at major hospitals. Even if it’s impossible for us to convince the board of trustees to defy their fiduciary duties, what we can do, hypothetically, is use our Amherst educations to get into positions of public office where we could, say, require all fiduciaries to be socially responsible.

Finally, anybody reading this article with the power to make substantial change at Amherst, such as administrators who have access to confidential information, should open up investigations into what nefarious practices the college might be benefiting from, such as exploitative prison labor practices, and if so, how we might reduce the college's involvement. Considering the difficulty of creating change in the global financial system, it’s clearly an uphill battle to try and make a positive impact. But it’s still worth our time and effort, if solely to help others answer the question of “what are we willing to put up with?” 

Ultimately, it’s easy to despair at the idea that you and I are “implicated subjects” in other people’s suffering, and it is easy to follow this train of thought into rabid speculation and despair. I certainly have done so. However, by attending Amherst, we have the unique opportunity to do something and become slightly less “implicated subjects,” both by engaging in on-campus activism and by using our education to foster positive change in the world.