University Investments: Divesting from the Military-Industrial Complex
The rage and protest against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, ongoing since the October 7 attacks by Hamas, has stirred student activity across a number of US university campuses and beyond. Echoes of the Vietnam anti-war protests are being cited. The docile consumers of education are being prodded and found interested. University administrators and managers are, as they always tend to, doing the bidding of their donors and funders in trying to restore order, punish the protesting students where necessary and restrict various forms of protest. Finally, those in the classrooms have something to talk about.
A key aspect of the protest centres on university divestment from US military companies linked and supplying the Israeli industrial war machine. (The pattern is also repeating itself in other countries, including Canada and Australia.) The response from university officialdom has been to formulate a more vigorous antisemitism policy – whatever that means – buttressed, as was the case in Columbia University, by the muscular use of police to remove protesting students for trespassing and disruption. On April 18, in what she described as a necessary if “extraordinary step”, Columbia President Minouche Shafik summoned officers from the New York Police Department, outfitted in riot gear, to remove 108 demonstrators occupying Columbia’s South Lawn. Charges have been issued; suspensions levelled.
Students from other institutions are also falling in, with similar results. An encampment was made at New York University, with the now predictable police response. At Yale, 45 protestors were arrested and charged with misdemeanour trespassing. Much was made of the fact that tents had been set up on Beinecke Plaza. A tent encampment was also set up at MIT’s Cambridge campus.
The US House Committee on Education and the Workforce has also been pressuring university heads to put the boot in, well illustrating the fact that freedom of speech is a mighty fine thing till it aggrieves, offends and upsets various factional groups who wish to reserve it for themselves. Paradoxically enough, one can burn the US flag one owns as a form of protest, exercise free speech rights as a Nazi, yet not occupy the president’s office of a US university if not unequivocal in condemning protest slogans that might be seen as antisemitic. It would have been a far more honest proposition to simply make the legislators show their credentials as card carrying members of the MIC.
The focus by students on the Israeli-US military corporate nexus and its role in the destruction of Gaza has been sharp and vocal. Given the instinctive support of the US political and military establishment for Israel, this is far from surprising. But it should not be singular or peculiar to one state’s warring machine, or one relationship. The military-industrial complex is protean, spectacular in spread, with those in its service promiscuous to patrons. Fidelity is subordinated to the profit motive.
The salient warning that universities were at risk of being snared by government interests and, it followed, government objectives, was well noted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his heralded 1961 farewell address, one which publicly outed the “military-industrial complex” as a sinister threat. Just as such a complex exercised “unwarranted influence” more broadly, “the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The nation’s academics risked “domination … by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money.”
This has yielded what can only be seen as a ghastly result: the military-industrial-academic complex, heavy with what has been described as “social autism” and protected by almost impenetrable walls of secrecy.
The nature of this complex stretches into the extremities of the education process, including the grooming and encouragement of Stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students. Focusing on Lockheed Martin’s recruitment process on US college campuses in his 2022 study for In These Times, Indigo Olivier found a vast, aggressive effort involving “TED-style talks, flight simulations, technology demos and on-the-spot interviews.” Much is on offer: scholarships, well-paid internships and a generous student repayment loan program. A dozen or so universities, at the very least, “participate in Lockheed Martin Day, part of a sweeping national effort to establish defense industry recruitment pipelines in college STEM.”
Before the Israel-Gaza War, some movements were already showing signs of alertness to the need to disentangle US learning institutions from the warring establishment they so readily fund. Dissenters, for instance, is a national movement of student organisers focused on “reclaiming our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.”
Such aspirations seem pollyannaish in scope and vague in operation, but they can hardly be faulted for their intent. The Dissenters, for instance, took to the activist road, being part of a weeklong effort in October 2021 comprising students at 16 campuses promoting three central objects: that universities divest all holdings and sever ties with “the top five US war profiteers: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and General Dynamics”; banish the police from campuses; and remove all recruiters from all campuses.
Demanding divestment from specific industries is a task complicated by the opacity of the university sector’s funding and investment arrangements. Money, far from talking, operates soundlessly, making its way into nominated accounts through the designated channels of research funding.
The university should, as part of its humane intellectual mission, divest from the military-industrial complex in totality. But it will help to see the books and investment returns, the unveiling, as it were, of the endowments of some of the richest universities on the planet. Follow the money; the picture is bound to be an ugly one.
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Return to home pageIn his previous column on this subject Dr. Kampmark expressed his anger and dismay at the apparent ease with which “…the Australian university sector is going the way of the US model of linking university research and innovation directly to a gluttonous military industrial complex. More importantly, these developments are very much on the terms of the US imperium, in whose toxic embrace Australia finds itself.”
I can readily see his point. Things have got to the stage where it’s no longer possible to sit on the fence about the future of our centres of higher learning becoming polluted by the rivers of cash now coming from the MIC.
Another author has noted that Australia’s “..41 universities have abdicated one of their principal founding roles – to be dominant sites of secular critique practised by people capable of living what they teach and committed to taking aim at the unequal, imperial, [antidemocratic] present.”
[ https://johnmenadue.com/a-silent-coup-in-plain-sight-aukus-and-the-universities/ ]
That same author notes wryly “…the world is AUKUS-centric: as an article of faith and operation principle, there can be no doubt that AUKUS will lead to a more secure Indo-Pacific region. Notably, the universities will become the “enablers of operationalizing the strategic intent around AUKUS.”
Later in this article the author references the recent publication from Declassified Australia which carried the heading: “The US military and arms dealers are paying hundreds of millions of dollars to ‘educate’ Australians at our leading universities.”
[ https://declassifiedaus.org/2024/04/18/revealed-the-pentagons-infiltration-of-australian-universities/ ]
I have to assume this is a development which either greatly concerns you, or is something about which you are merely indifferent.
Freedom, which “we” all cherish (don’t we??) is a peculiar thing to corner or define. In the USA for some time, it seems to mean a grossness of selfishness, the right to do what one effing well likes as driven by the balance of wisdom and ignorance one has. It is sickening to see fascist freedom about so many quite antisocial attitudes, while currently, students are being dangerously and surely illegally prevented from exercising freedom to demonstrate. Law dissipates into little streams of attitude, regulation, bylaw, rules, conventions, patterns of behaviour, but, too much racism, fascist flows, imperious pontification, nasty coercion occurs. Sad.
The military-industrial complex in the US, Australia and elsewhere is a cancer on society and as for the Police and Military, it seems to me their main purpose for existance is to protect government and corporate interests from the public.
Another objective analysis of the continuing devaluation of western society from within.
“Follow the money; the picture is bound to be an ugly one.”
I’ll bet the trail is a perilous, twisted, journey worthy of Heracles. With a bit more peril, and not of the rabbit kind.
It was interesting last night reading The Guardian as a large part of the action in the usless-states unfolded live. Especially the reports from California’s UCLA, where the students protesting about the actions of Israel in Gaza and calling for an end to the invasion and war therein, were attacked by a pro-israel mob of militia-like militants who were also calling for a “second Nakba”. The protesting students were deemed to be illegal, almost to the point of being declared terrorists, while the campus police and their CHiP support stood by and watched the attacks.
When “the land of the free” is declaring free speech to be a crime, and violent repression of that same free speech is both tolerated and supported, something is wrong. Very wrong.
Any thinking, rational, human accepts that hamas are terrorists. Nothing more, and nothing less. What they perpetrated on October 7 last year was a most heinous act of barbarism, but it was not going to be the end of Israel. Not even close.
Israel’s response has been cold, calculated, and inhumane, and by any standard, extreme. One can argue the semantics of genocide, mass-murder, war crimes, fog of war, bullshit bullshit bullshit for however long you like. A spade is a Spade.
To decry the actions of israel, and it’s army in Palestine is not an attack on people of the Jewish faith. That would be like describing someone calling george pell a paedophile an attack on Catholicism.
The israeli pm, and many others around Planet Earth, use “the holocaust” as a universal defence for israel’s own evil deeds, and the cry of “antisemitism” as a put down of anyone’s objections to Israel’s actions. He has stated that the idf will not stop until hamas is no more, and he refuses outright to even consider a two-state solution and recognition of an independent Palestine. He has also stated that the idf will enter (and destroy) Rafah whether there is a ceasefire agreement reached, or not.
There are about 3 million Palestinians in Gaza. What will be the final toll?
Read this, and weep.
https://www.gov.il/en/pages/statement-by-pm-netanyahu-30-apr-2024
Netanyahu has a long history of fascist manoeuvres, and stoking hatred within Jewish Israeli citizens. Recently, facing criminal indictment, to escape, he formed a Likud alliance with the most hateful and vicious extreme RWNJs, doctoring the IDF and military law system, as well as seeking to disenfranchise the civil legal system.
Ironically, a significance of perpetrators are American religious fundamentalists, come to skive off the system and break international law.
Plainly there is much lying, deception, thievery and death emanating from this fascist government, an utterly corrupted democracy.
I am neither a ‘Jew hater’ nor ‘anti-semitic’, albeit I note the convenient and despicable hijacking of the meaning and use of the term ‘semitic’. I even refrain from use of the term Zionism, because of its many variants.
My view and disdain is registered in the first three paragraphs above. And I won’t be bluffed by any BS semantics. It appears that many young folk around the ‘western’ world are like minded. Good on ’em.
As for MICs, they are at one with govts and their treasuries around the world. Whilst there’s notions of supremacy, there’ll be no enlightenment.
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