Our tools check the University of Washington retirement plan against four independent lists of companies. Each list is built and maintained by a different organization, for a different reason, using public sources. Together they answer one plain question: how many of your retirement dollars sit in companies that someone with a clear standard has flagged?
A quick orientation before the details:
- Every dollar figure here is a floor, not a ceiling. We can only count what each fund actually discloses in its public holdings. The real number is almost certainly higher.
- A company can appear on more than one list. When that happens, we count it once, so the screens never double-count your money.
- All four screens are on by default. You can toggle any of them off to see the plan through just one lens, or any combination.
- We say “flagged,” not “guilty.” A flag means a named, sourced organization put the company on its list. You can follow every link below and check the source yourself.
Across all four lists, 379 of the 444 named companies are held somewhere in UW’s plan. Combined and counted once, that’s about $1.55 billion — roughly 1 in 8 dollars in the plan.
Start here: Class C — UW’s own standard
Of the four screens, one is different in kind: Class C is the standard the University of Washington adopted for itself.
On May 30, 2024, the UW Faculty Senate passed the Class C Resolution — “Ethical Divestment from Weapons and Technology Companies Contributing to Violations of Humanitarian Law and Human Rights.” This screen simply operationalizes that resolution: it asks, by the resolution’s own stated standard, which companies in the plan would the University’s own policy point to?
What it flags: companies that supplied weapons or military technology used to unlawfully kill or harm civilians, or whose products and services contributed to documented violations of human rights and humanitarian law.
Who maintains it / where the names come from: the company list is sourced only to what the resolution’s own standard names — the UN OHCHR settlement database, forensic findings from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and UN Special Rapporteur findings only where Amnesty or HRW independently corroborate them. Nothing on this list rests on our own judgment; it rests on UW’s adopted standard and those external bodies.
Example companies this screen catches in the plan: Microsoft, Palantir, Boeing, Caterpillar, and Booking Holdings.
This is the only screen grounded in a standard UW itself adopted — which makes it the most institutionally legitimate of the four. 40 of the 41 companies on the Class C list are held in the plan. Its disclosed floor is $477 million, the second-largest of the four screens.
A deliberate line we drew: Class C does not flag Google/Alphabet or Amazon. Some advocates name those companies, but Amnesty and Human Rights Watch — the corroborating bodies the resolution’s standard relies on — have not formally named them. To keep the screen defensible, they stay off. (They are still flagged by the Prison screen below, for different reasons.)
The other three screens
Weapons — Weapon Free Funds (As You Sow)
What it flags: makers of military weapons, nuclear weapons, and controversial weapons.
Who maintains it: the nonprofit As You Sow, through its Weapon Free Funds project.
Example companies in the plan: Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, and General Dynamics.
This is the broadest of the four by company count: 286 of the 328 companies on the Weapons list are held in the plan. Its disclosed floor is $368 million.
Prison industry — Prison Free Funds (As You Sow)
What it flags: companies tied to incarceration, immigration detention, surveillance, and border enforcement.
Who maintains it: also As You Sow, through its Prison Free Funds project.
Example companies in the plan: Microsoft, Alphabet (Google), and Amazon — flagged here for the cloud, surveillance, and data-services side of the incarceration and border-enforcement industry.
This screen produces the largest dollar figures because it flags very large technology and retail companies that sit near the top of almost every standard index fund. So the same handful of giant holdings that show up in everyone’s retirement account also drive this number. 84 of the 86 companies on the Prison list are held in the plan, for a disclosed floor of $1,187 million — by far the biggest of the four.
AFSC divestment shortlist — American Friends Service Committee
What it flags: companies tied to Israeli military occupation, apartheid, and genocide. This is the narrowest and most conservative of the four lists.
Who maintains it: the American Friends Service Committee — a Quaker peace organization founded in 1917 — through its Investigate project. (See investigate.info/divest.)
Example companies in the plan: Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin, IBM, and Elbit Systems.
63 of the 84 companies on the AFSC list are held in the plan, for a disclosed floor of $232 million — the smallest figure of the four, which reflects how tightly drawn this list is.
How the screens work together
Because the same company can land on more than one list, the screens overlap. A few examples from the plan:
- Lockheed Martin is flagged by all four screens.
- Caterpillar is flagged by AFSC, Weapons, and Class C.
- Microsoft is flagged by Prison and Class C.
- Boeing is flagged by AFSC, Weapons, and Class C — but not Prison.
When you turn on more than one screen, the tool counts each company only once, so your total never inflates from a company appearing on two lists. That’s why the four per-screen figures don’t simply add up: combined and de-duplicated, the four screens together flag about $1.55 billion, even though their individual floors sum to more.
You’re in control of the view. All four screens start on, but you can switch any of them off — to see the plan through, say, only UW’s own Class C standard, or only the narrow AFSC list, or any combination you want to examine.
This is an independent transparency tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the University of Washington or TIAA. Every figure is an estimate based on the most recent public holdings each fund discloses, and is a floor — the true exposure is likely higher. This is not investment advice, and nothing you enter is stored or leaves your browser.