La Junta de Trustees: Puerto Rico, Palestine, and the Values of Amherst College

Over the past year, we have watched in horror as Israel’s genocide against the people of Palestine has unfolded. We saw American-made missiles and bombs destroy the Gaza Strip. We saw the number of Palestinians killed climb from hundreds, to thousands, to tens of thousands, and now — counting those missing under rubble, killed by starvation, and killed by illness — hundreds of thousands. The current ceasefire changes nothing in our demand for Amherst College to divest from Israel, as Israel commits genocide and maintains an occupation over Palestine whether under “ceasefire” terms or not.

The Amherst College community came together to fight back against our institution’s complicity in this daily cavalcade of unspeakable horrors, each seemingly more brutal than the last. Last spring, supermajorities of Amherst College students and faculty rallied behind the necessity of divesting the college’s $3.34 billion endowment from Oshkosh, Terex, General Motors, and other companies enabling these atrocities against the people of Palestine.

As alumni and students, we sought to better understand the forces that motivated the Board to summarily dismiss student and faculty calls for divestment. We consider in this article the selection of Chantal Kordula ’94 as the new chair of the Board of Trustees in the spring of 2024. We demonstrate how Kordula’s selection exemplifies Amherst College’s commitment to the accumulation of wealth and maintenance of power for an elite political and economic class, no matter the human consequences — a commitment that is entirely consistent with the college’s ongoing investment in a genocide.

Upon assuming her new role as chair of the Amherst College Board of Trustees last spring, Chantal Kordula celebrated “the role of our students, faculty, staff and alumni in giving light to the world.” But what does the college really mean when it says, “Give light to the world?” What might we presume Kordula herself means by this phrase, given her professional background?

Chantal Kordula joined the law firm Cleary Gottlieb in 1997 and became a partner at the firm in 2007. During Kordula’s tenure at Cleary Gottlieb, the firm has facilitated deals between several Latin American governments and private American, European, and UAE investment groups, namely privatization schemes that undermine the sovereignty and self-determination of targeted countries by inserting foreign capital and oversight into the management of their resources. Kordula and Cleary Gottlieb have also facilitated deals between U.S. and Latin American corporations, including mergers and the implementation of transnational projects, many of which lacked meaningful oversight. These deals have resulted in significant, and in some cases lethal, harm to local working class and indigenous peoples — from ecological crises and exploitation of workers in Chile and Ecuador, to corruption, pollution, train derailments, and dangerous working conditions in Mexico, to name a few.

Many of the actors Kordula and Cleary Gottlieb chose to represent were and are transparently corrupt. The measures of “success” that Cleary Gottlieb cites do not reflect the real consequences of the transactions they brokered on the lives of people around the world. Cleary Gottlieb makes money so long as the transactions are completed, regardless of the lingering impacts that local working class and Indigenous peoples are forced to navigate in the years and decades that follow.

An illustrative example of Cleary Gottlieb’s pattern of exploitation and harm is the firm facilitating the privatization of Puerto Rico’s energy grid, beginning in 2018. Cleary Gottlieb was hired to represent the Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority (P3) in striking a now-infamous 15-year deal between the Puerto Rico Electric and Power Authority (PREPA) and LUMA Energy LLC (a consortium of the Canadian and American companies ATCO and Quanta Services) to “modernize” Puerto Rico’s energy grid.

After Hurricane Maria killed over 3,000 Puerto Rican people and knocked out the island’s grid in 2017, now disgraced former Puerto Rican governor Ricky Roselló quickly declared that Puerto Rico would “sell PREPA’s assets to the companies that will transform the power generation system into a modern, efficient, and less costly system for our people.” Roselló’s salvo was the first in a barrage of proposals to accelerate the contraction and privatization of Puerto Rico’s public sector, which was burdened by massive colonial debt. Reeling from mass death and destruction, and led by a governor intent to sell off its public utilities to the highest bidder, Puerto Rico was ripe for incursions by Western corporations like LUMA, backed by the legal muscle of Western firms like Cleary Gottlieb, both of which are led by graduates of elite Western institutions such as Amherst College.

Independent organizations raised concerns early on that PREPA and LUMA’s project would not be completed at all, or that the project would reach completion only at significant cost to the Puerto Rican people. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a self-described “global team of energy finance analysts, communications experts, and management professionals,” further found that the Puerto Rican government failed to engage in adequate environmental oversight of the deal between PREPA and LUMA, a finding confirmed by an independent investigation by Kobre & Kim LLP. As outrage against PREPA and LUMA mounted on the island, LUMA’s dealings became even more suspect when the Puerto Rican government issued an arrest warrant for LUMA CEO Wayne Stensby.

Then, in August 2024, Puerto Rico was hit by Hurricane Ernesto, which brought significant flooding to the island and left over 700,000 Puerto Ricans without power. The Puerto Rican diaspora group “Juventud Unida por la Independencia USA” (United Youth for Independence USA) highlights that “The direct cause of these outages is not Category 1 Hurricane Ernesto,” given that in the month prior to the hurricane, Puerto Ricans dependent on the LUMA-run grid already “endured a daily average of 10,525 outages, with outages reaching as high as 39,047 on a regular day.” JUPI USA elaborates:

These archipelago-wide outages are avoidable, especially with a [C]ategory 1 storm, so long as there are workers who can do the job and funding to assure its completion. While LUMA has fired many of the original workers who supported the electric grid, thus decreasing its available workforce, they have also used money from their $15 billion contract to line their own pockets.

The privatization of the electric grid system has stripped Puerto Ricans of the ability to manage their own resources due to LUMA’s historic union-busting tactics, the outsourcing of labor, and its for-profit business model. It has also caused young Puerto Ricans much difficulty as their access to sustainable employment diminishes due to the outages, resulting in the difficult decision to migrate out of Puerto Rico. Students suffer as well, as the ability to attend school is taken away from them when there is no electricity to power the wifi and school buildings.

“The role of our students, faculty, staff and alumni” is “giving light to the world,” Kordula tells us. Yet, Kordula’s law firm quite literally left the Puerto Rican people in the dark.

Amherst College’s mission asserts that the college educates students so they may “lead principled lives of consequence.” Through its selection of Chantal Kordula as chair of its Board of Trustees, Amherst College demonstrates that the “consequence” it values most involves the accumulation of wealth by Western firms like Cleary Gottlieb, regardless of the impact of this accumulation on colonized peoples.

LUMA’s footprint in Puerto Rico is characteristic of a broader pattern of exploitation perpetrated by the United States and by Western corporations against the people of Puerto Rico. Decisions about Puerto Rico’s economy and finances are made by the “Financial Oversight and Management Board,” a fiscal control board, appointed by and accountable to U.S. and Western corporate interests. Puerto Ricans often refer to this U.S.-imposed board as La Junta de Control, in reference to the military juntas that the U.S. imposed upon Latin American nations throughout the 20th century to repress popular policies such as land reform.

The Puerto Rican people’s conceptualization of “La Junta de Control” helps us more effectively understand Amherst College and its Board of Trustees. When the people of Puerto Rico call out their island’s fiscal control board, they are not calling for the board to be improved. They are calling for the board to be dismantled. They are insisting that it should be the people of Puerto Rico who make key decisions about the island’s affairs — precisely what the fiscal control board exists to override and subvert.

The Amherst College Board of Trustees is a "Junta de Control" in its own right: imposed to prevent Amherst students, faculty, staff, and the local and global communities impacted by the college from collectively shaping how the college operates.

During a May 2024 meeting about divestment from Israel, then-Chair of the Board of Trustees Andrew Nussbaum reportedly told students: “The endowment is not part of the mission; it allows us to fulfill the mission.”¹ Similarly, in 2022, at a meeting between students and the endowment committee on raising wages for campus workers, Nussbaum literally laughed out loud at the idea of students having influence over the use of the school’s endowment funds. By insisting that Amherst’s $3.34 billion endowment operate outside the scope of any principled oversight — despite supermajorities of students and faculty calling for divestment from genocide — the Board of Trustees is functioning as a “junta” indeed.

The Board is not functioning to carry out the will of the campus community, but to maximize Amherst College’s capital at the expense of working people here and abroad. Choosing Kordula to lead the Board, after she spent the past 27 years representing those responsible for the disenfranchisement of millions of people, is only further evidence of Board’s despotic function.

We are not calling for Kordula to be replaced as chair of the Board of Trustees. If the chair of the Board of Trustees were not Kordula, it would likely be another alum with a similar professional background — and that is exactly the problem. At its core, Amherst College functions to serve capital accumulation by the wealthy and powerful, by reproducing and “diversifying” (albeit less so following the Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in higher education) elite and ruling classes. We see evidence for this in the disproportionate number of Amherst graduates who end up on Wall Street and in management consulting. We see it in Amherst’s self-proclaimed structural dependence on investments in companies that accumulate their wealth through exploitation, colonization, and death. It seems that the pursuit of money, no matter the consequences, is the driving force of Amherst College’s decisions, including its decision to neither disclose its investments nor divest from Israel’s genocide.

Amherst College repeatedly touts its slogan “Terras Irradient,” which translates to “Let them enlighten the lands.” However, the college supports, endorses, and relies upon a model which does the opposite. We call into question Amherst’s audacity to say one thing and do another; yet in doing so, we don’t want to miss a deeper point.

In Amherst’s claim that its graduates “enlighten the lands,” and in Kordula’s assertion that members of the college “give light to the world,” we hear echoes of the Zionist myth that the colonization of Palestine was and is necessary to “make the desert bloom.” In reality, the Indigenous agricultural practices of Palestinians show far superior results to Israeli settler attempts to “make the desert bloom” by planting massive forests of non-native European pine trees across Palestine, which frequently catch fire, due to their complete inappropriateness to the local climate. Even if we imagined that Israel was not bombing the land to bits, and even if all of their agricultural efforts were wildly successful, the fact remains that Palestinians never needed outsiders to help them cultivate their land in the first place. Palestinians already know how best to tend to their land, just as the people of Puerto Rico already know how best to manage their public utilities. Outsider attempts to “enlighten the lands” are not solving any problems — they are the problem.

Perhaps people around the world neither need nor want Amherst College graduates to violate their self-determination in the name of some dubious notion of “enlightenment.” From the people of Puerto Rico to the people of Palestine to racialized and working-class communities on the unceded Nonotuck land that Amherst occupies — what the world really needs is for the college and its graduates to stop building careers and accumulating wealth off the exploitation and theft of their lives and resources.

We do not intend to prescribe how community members should carry out the fight to impel Amherst to divest from Israel’s genocide. Rather, it is our hope that this article inspires new lines of questioning and strategic discussion within the campus community which hone on the root forces driving the college’s investment in this genocide so that those forces can be uprooted through collective action. We do not have to accept this. We do not have to comply. Imagine the possibilities if students, alumni, and faculty realized our agency in shaping the future of this institution. After all, what is Amherst College if not its people?

We invite students and faculty to contact us to share your thoughts about and reactions to this article by emailing us at [email protected], or by messaging us on Instagram: @amherst.sjp or @amherst.afp.

¹ It should be noted that students who participated in this May 2024 meeting with President Elliot and members of the Board of Trustees requested that the meeting be recorded, for the purpose of public transparency. Amherst College admin refused this request, telling students they could instead bring notebooks and take their own notes if they liked. Accordingly, should Andrew Nussbaum deny having made the above-quoted statement, we will have no way to verify whether or not he did so — which may be precisely why Amherst College admin refused to allow the meeting to be recorded.