One of the fads that has been sweeping through higher ed is the divestiture idea — that schools should not have any of their endowment funds in stocks of companies that do bad things, or are in any way related to some entity that does bad things. Inside Higher Ed reports on the most recent manifestation here. Here’s the question. Do the Chinese care whether a block of shares in one of their enterprises is owned by Harvard or some other investor? To divest stock just means selling it to some other party who wants it at the market price. That isn’t likely to lead to any change in behavior by the Chinese government, so isn’t this just another empty “feel good” gesture?