Move Your Money Now! (guest post)

  L3 Harris-Palantir Demo Video Sept 2026   

by Hannah Appel, Seeta Chaganti, Charmaine Chua, and Noah Zatz

Many thousands - perhaps the majority - of UC workers, decry the violence that surrounds us. We protest the masked ICE agents who kidnap our neighbors, students, and family members. We protest the concentration camps for immigration detainees and the domestic military deployments imposing policies of mass criminalization. We cry out Lagainst imperial violence in Venezuela and Iran. We protest genocide, occupation, and apartheid from Palestine to Sudan. And yet, many of the state forces terrorizing our neighbors and innocent civilians around the world use surveillance technology and weapons from companies funded by our pensions. 

The University of California system has $198 billion in investment assets (see UC Investments Annual Report 2024-2025 for these and related data). We (yes we) hold these assets in three large pools: Working Capital, the Endowment, and Retirement. Of those three, the UC Retirement pool is by far the largest at $154.4 billion. To state the obvious, this fund ensures the comfort and security of UC workers in retirement. Perhaps less obvious: our comfort in retirement is deeply invested in state violence–from prisons to weapons manufacturing to border terror. In May 2024, for example, UC Regents disclosed that the UC Investment portfolio holds a total of $3.3 billion in holdings from groups with ties to weapons manufacturers. Mostly through index funds, we have billions invested in Palantir, GE Aerospace, and Raytheon, among others. 

We are complicit, but we also have the power to change that if we organize. 

A group of UC faculty and other workers convened a bit over a year ago to strategize a winnable campaign to do just that, and UC Move Your Money was born. Our goal is to build and exercise shared governance over our pensions by divesting our retirement funds from industries and companies that facilitate state violence including military aggression and occupation, prisons, border security regimes, apartheid and genocide.

We decided to do this work for two reasons. First, divestment from state violence is an ethical obligation. For those of us who research, write, teach, and commit our lives to social justice, human rights, anti-imperialism, anti-racism, environmental justice and democracy, profiting off of state violence to enjoy a comfortable retirement is untenable hypocrisy. And yet too often, we neither understand that complicity nor have a clear route out of it. UC Move Your Money sought to change that through research and campaign design. 

Second: We must build a new kind of worker power (and faculty power in particular) in the face of attacks on higher education. Trump’s assaults on public higher education are placing an existential threat on the core values of our public mission. But well before Trump won the presidency, faculty have seen increasing centralization of power in UCOP and the Regents, and increasing disregard for faculty voice and governance. One of these sites of the centralization of UCOP’s power has been in decisions around investments and investment income. Faculty and other workers currently have no governance over how this half of the university - its investment wing -  runs. Shared governance in the faculty senate takes the form of advisory, and not formal authority over budgets and compensation, including our pensions. In demanding and using the ability to move our money out of unethical sources, we can build our power alongside the UC Faculty Associations that have been on the frontlines of fighting back against the current attacks on higher ed. We can refuse what the university has become (an investment entity sectioned off from democratic governance) and instead organize around new kinds of worker power.

How do we propose to do this?

We can each take tangible steps right now to begin divesting from state violence. In fact, with just a few clicks, we can each divest our retirement savings holdings (UCRSP) from Palantir, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Caterpillar, Walmart, and several other companies directly profiting from border violence, prisons, and weapons manufacturing. 

Through this concerted action - thousands taking coordinated individual action - we can build power to demand more. And by demanding more from the UC, we can ease the path to divestment for other institutions. 

Our approach uses a specific form of leverage and opportunity: individual retirement accounts established as part of the UC Retirement Savings Program (UCRSP). Nearly all UC faculty and most other workers have funds in at least one of these accounts - 364,000 of us to be precise. At $44 billion dollars, the UCRSP is the second largest public defined contribution plan in the United States, behind only the federal government. Crucially, each of us can choose how to invest this money from a menu of available investment vehicles chosen by UC Investments. (These are primarily index funds that themselves consist of stock or equity investments in large numbers of specific companies.) 

Our strategy is to begin divesting now via the best available fund option–the already-existing UC Social Equity Fund. By alerting faculty not only to the existence of this fund, (which is already divested from weapons manufacturers,) but also to how easy it is to Move Your Money, we aim to get 10% of UC faculty across the system to move 10% (as a minimum threshold) of their UCSRP investments into Social Equity, (which again is already divested from Palantir, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Caterpillar, and Walmart, among others.)   

We will then use this base of support to demand the UC offer a new fund more fully divested from state violence - we call this the No State Violence Fund or NoSVF.

NoSVF will expand divestment targets to include Palantir, for example, the military technology firm currently making billions of dollars supporting ICE with real-time surveillance of migrants. Once such a fund is created for use in the UC system, it would become an off-the-shelf divestment option for individual and institutional investors across the United States and beyond. 

The campaign is organized in three sequential steps: 

Step 1: Move Your Money Now! 

Get 10% of faculty (or more!) to direct 10% of our UC retirement savings into the already-existing UC Social Equity Fund. 

Step 2: Create a No State Violence Fund (NoSVF) 

Get 10% of faculty (or more!) to demand that UC Investments offer a new UCRSP fund option (the NoSVF) that more robustly divests from prisons, the criminalization and militarization of migration and borders, apartheid, genocide, and war. 

Step 3: Extend the NoSVF far and wide 

Extend the NoSVF option, creating an actionable divestment demand beyond the UC, across higher ed retirement plans and beyond. This would include a demand to divest the UC Retirement Plan (defined benefit, not just defined contribution) as well. 

As the second largest public defined contribution fund in the United States, we have enormous market-making power. UC Move Your Money invites every worker in the UC system (including but not limited to faculty) to turn our complicity into organized power, and to begin, little by little, to democratize each and every part of ostensibly public institutions, starting with our own workplace. Learn more (including step by step directions for how to move your money!) on our website, or reach out to us for a campaign presentation to your faculty association, department, institute, interest group, union, or other gathering: ucmoveyourmoney@gmail.com.