Court Settlement Forces CUNY to Disclose $715,000 in Weapons-Maker Stock Holdings

The document is a 2025 holdings report, and it lists numbers that the City University of New York fought for more than a year to keep out of public view.

According to the disclosure, CUNY held $212,407.10 in unsecured Boeing stock and $107,488.89 in Boeing common stock, $65,302.74 in Lockheed Martin stock, $141,201.34 in Raytheon stock, and $189,348.48 in Palantir stock. Campaigners say the portfolio also includes holdings in Elbit Systems and General Dynamics, though the records reviewed do not specify dollar amounts for those two companies. The named holdings alone total more than $715,000.

All six companies have documented contracts to supply weapons or military technology to Israel. Boeing manufactures the F-15 fighter jet and the Apache AH-64 attack helicopter, both flown by Israeli forces, along with bunker-buster bombs. Palantir has publicly disclosed work with the Israeli military. CUNY is now one of a small number of American universities to have its investment ties to Israeli-military suppliers confirmed in public records, according to the campaign groups that obtained them.

How the records surfaced

The disclosure did not come voluntarily. Cuny4Palestine and Cuny Law Students for Justice in Palestine filed a Freedom of Information Law request in 2024 asking the university to account for its defense-sector investments. When CUNY declined to provide the details, the groups' client filed suit: Sarah Southey v. City University of New York. A settlement reached in mid-August required the university to turn over investment records dating back to July 2023.

"While we're grateful that the largest, urban public university in the country will finally disclose its investment records, it is outrageous that our client had to file this lawsuit in the first place," said Veronica Salama, senior staff attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Campaigners said the figures in the released report were higher than they had anticipated.

The organizing behind it

The disclosure fight traces back to April 2024, when CUNY students and faculty launched one of the earliest Gaza solidarity encampments in the country, following Columbia University's lead, demanding the university "disclose and divest" from defense contractors. Ties between American universities and the defense industry are widely known inside academia, but institutions have historically kept the specifics of their investment portfolios out of public reach. CUNY's settlement is a rare exception, produced only after litigation forced the issue.

Cuny4Palestine and Cuny Law SJP held a press conference outside New York City Hall following the release, framing the numbers as evidence that the university's endowment is tied to companies arming Israel's military during a war that has killed and injured more than 250,000 Palestinians since October 2023, according to the groups' own tally. That characterization is the campaigners' interpretation; the university has not issued a public response addressing the disclosed figures as of this writing.

The underlying dollar amounts, however, come from CUNY's own records, released under court order, not from activist estimates.