>> Campaigning to end college arms investmentsBack in October 2005, the Campaign Against the Arms Trade put in a Freedom of Information request to find out how much universities had invested in the UK's biggest arms dealers, including BAE Systems, Smiths Group, Rolls Royce, Cobham, GKN and VT Group. Eleven Cambridge colleges confessed to holding shares.
Taken together they held the largest number of shares of any higher education institution - with more than 1.6 million shares.
At that time the largest investor was Trinity College, which had almost 800,000 shares in BAE Systems, although it has since slashed the number to just under 140,000.
The arms trade has devastating and destabilising effects worldwide; it sustains conflicts and diverts resources from health and education in some of the world’s most impoverished regions.
Investment in a company amounts to tacit support of that company’s actions; as members of Cambridge colleges whose rents and fees contribute to the maintenance of the college, we are morally implicated in the abuses perpetuated by such companies. It is both the right and the responsibility of students to take a stand when the institutions of which we are a part pursue courses of action which we find morally unacceptable.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, signifies a theft from those who hunger, who are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This
world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its labourers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” 
