Delegates of one of the largest educators’ unions in New York City voted on Feb. 20 to rescind a resolution passed less than a month earlier to divest the union’s holdings from Israeli companies. 

The vote to rescind happened on the recommendation of union leadership, who wrote to members of the Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York (PSC-CUNY) in a Feb. 13 email that they had discovered irregularities in votes cast for the divestment resolution. 

After an overwhelming majority of delegates decided to rescind the divestment resolution, it was put to a revote. “The divestment resolution failed with a vote of 113 opposed, 63 in favor,” a PSC-CUNY spokesperson wrote in a statement to Prism regarding the revote. 

An amended resolution to create a committee to recommend additional avenues for divestment was also introduced, but failed to pass at the same meeting. 

“We knew that it was unlikely to be upheld, given the way that the leadership had activated and organized around this,” said Chris Harding, a Ph.D. history student at the CUNY Graduate Center and PSC-CUNY rank-and-file member. 

Still, Harding and other PSC-CUNY members were disappointed by the revote outcome.

“It was three weeks of thinking that we had actually made a change and then being crushed,” said an assistant professor in English at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC) and PSC-CUNY delegate.

On Jan. 23, the Delegate Assembly, PSC-CUNY’s representative body, narrowly passed the divestment resolution, 73-70, during its monthly meeting after two months of debate. The resolution called for PSC-CUNY to divest its investment holdings, including bond funds, from Israeli companies and government bonds by January 2026. 

It also called for the PSC-CUNY to send a letter to the board of the Teachers’ Retirement System of New York City (TRS-NYC), the pension fund for the city’s public educators, to divest from Israeli companies within 10 business days of its passage. 

A working group of NYC educators, including Harding, found that the TRS-NYC has $135 million invested in Israeli securities, a number the group had previously estimated to be $100 million.

The passage of the resolution drew immediate condemnation from several politicians and groups, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and the CUNY administration.

In the Feb. 13 email viewed by Prism, PSC-CUNY President James Davis wrote to members that following the Jan. 23 passage of the resolution, the PSC’s executive council had found that one delegation chapter had cast two more votes than they were allotted in favor of the resolution.

To rule out other similar errors, Davis said that the union’s director of legal affairs asked the membership department and elections committee staff to conduct a review of certified delegates and alternates.

The review belatedly found that two delegates elected in fall 2024 were not eligible to serve in the assembly, as they had not been members of their chapter for at least a year.

This meant that “two votes were improperly cast and two delegates were seated in error at the January DA meeting,” Davis wrote, leading to the executive council’s recommendation to rescind the divestment resolution and revote.

Evan Rothman, co-chair of the PSC-CUNY’s Graduate Center chapter and a PSC-CUNY delegate, introduced the divestment resolution to the assembly. He told Prism that the circumstances surrounding the resolution revote were unusual. 

“I’m not aware of any other case in which an investigation of this magnitude into the eligibility of delegates was carried out,” said Rothman, who has been a PSC-CUNY member for close to five years.

Harding, Rothman, and James Hoff, an alternate delegate for the BMCC chapter of the PSC-CUNY told Prism that union leaders, including Davis and PSC-CUNY Secretary Andrea Vásquez, emphasized risks associated with passing the divestment resolution in the Feb. 20 delegate assembly meeting before delegates voted, including potential membership loss and political blowback.

These fears regarding the consequences of the divestment resolution may have contributed to its overturn, the PSC-CUNY members said.

PSC-CUNY sent Prism a statement referencing the irregularities in the original resolution vote in response to a request for comment about leadership’s remarks at the Feb. 20 meeting.

According to a Feb. 22 email sent by a PSC-CUNY chapter head to delegates after the resolution’s overturn, union leadership is now considering requiring a supermajority for “all resolutions that are not about union policy or directly concerned with working conditions.”

Rothman said this would make passing a divestment resolution in the assembly more difficult. To account for this, Hoff believed that future advocacy for divestment should focus on building support among rank-and-file members. 

“That’s what every union needs to be doing if we’re actually going to manage to force our institutions to change,” Hoff said.

Editorial Team:
Sahar Fatima, Lead Editor
Lara Witt, Top Editor
Rashmee Kumar, Copy Editor