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The AI Push Is Reigniting the Battle for the Soul of the US Academy
The moment requires greater public pushback against the military conquest of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers.
Oct 01, 2024
The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.
Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.
In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding.
And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.
The Pentagon Goes to School
Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least—and brace yourself for this—$100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: Two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.
In 2020, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.
Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics—weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.
“I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”
Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.
In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically Black college.
Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.
For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.
A Science of Death or for Life?
Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.” By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: “A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms “drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”
The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes. When President Ronald Reagan announced his “Star Wars” missile defense plan in 1986, for instance, he promised, all too improbably, to develop an impenetrable shield that would protect the United States from any and all incoming nuclear-armed missiles. In response, physicists David Wright and Lisbeth Gronlund circulated a pledge to refuse to work on that program. It would, in the end, be signed by more than 7,000 scientists. And that document actually helped puncture the mystique of the Star Wars plan, a reminder that protest against the militarization of education isn’t always in vain.
James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded.
Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.
A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.
Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture
The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.
The HTS was initially intended to reduce the “cultural knowledge gap” suffered by U.S. troops involved in counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq early in this century. The theory was that military personnel with a better sense of local norms and practices would be more effective in winning “hearts and minds” and so defeating determined enemies on their home turf. The plan included the deployment of psychologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists in Human Terrain Teams alongside American troops in the field.
Launched in 2007, the program sparked intense protests in the academic community, with a particularly acrimonious debate within the American Anthropological Association. Ed Liebow, the executive director of the association, argued that its debate “convinced a very large majority of our members that it was just not a responsible way for professional anthropologists to conduct themselves.” After a distinctly grim history that included “reports of racism, sexual harassment, and payroll padding,” as well as a belief by many commanders that Human Terrain Teams were simply ineffective, the Army quietly abandoned the program in 2014.
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” James E. Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to U.S. intelligence, helped develop the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the U.S during its post-9/11 “war on terror,” even sitting in on a session in which a prisoner was waterboarded. That interrogation program, developed by Mitchell with psychologist John Bruce Jessom, included resorting to “violence, sleep deprivation, and humiliation.”
The role of psychologists in crafting the CIA’s torture program drew harsh criticism within the profession. A 2015 report by independent critics revealed that the leaders of the American Psychological Association had “secretly collaborated with the administration of President George W. Bush to bolster a legal and ethical justification for the torture of prisoners swept up in the post-Sept. 11 war on terror.” Over time, it became ever clearer that the torture program was not only immoral but remarkably ineffective, since the victims of such torture often told interrogators what they wanted to hear, whether or not their admissions squared with reality.
That was then, of course. But today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.
Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon, as noted in a 2021 New York Times report by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kate Conger. Their article pointed to Google’s “aggressive pursuit” of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project, which will attempt to “modernize the Pentagon’s cloud technology and support the use of artificial intelligence to gain an advantage on the battlefield.” (Cloud technology is the term for the delivery of computing services over the internet.)
Meanwhile, a cohort of Google workers has continued to resist such military projects. An October 2021 letter in the British Guardian from “Google and Amazon workers of conscience” called on the companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus [a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services to the Israeli military and government] and cut all ties with the Israeli military.” As they wrote then, “This contract was signed the same week that the Israeli military attacked Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—killing nearly 250 people, including more than 60 children. The technology our companies have contracted to build will make the systematic discrimination and displacement carried out by the Israeli military and government even crueler and deadlier for Palestinians.”
Of course, their demand seems even more relevant today in the context of the war on Gaza that had then not officially begun.
The Future of American Science
Obviously, many scientists do deeply useful research on everything from preventing disease to creating green-energy options that has nothing to do with the military. But the current increases in weapons research could set back such efforts by soaking up an ever larger share of available funds, while also drawing ever more top talent into the military sphere.
The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.
Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.” ICRAC elaborates on precisely what these risks are: “Autonomous systems have the potential to accelerate the pace and tempo of warfare, to undermine existing arms controls and regulations, to exacerbate the dangers of asymmetric warfare, and to destabilize regional and global security, [as well as to] further the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of force and obscure the moral and legal responsibility for war crimes.”
The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”
Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to Earth?
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Student Researchers Expose Fossil Fuel Ties at US Universities
"It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said one organizer, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
Sep 19, 2024
Students at universities and colleges across the U.S. have long demanded that their schools cut ties with the fossil fuel industry as planetary heating has increasingly been linked to extreme weather and pollution-causing emissions have continued.
New findings released by student researchers with the Campus Climate Network on Wednesday, said the organization, "add more detail and evidence to what these students have already been campaigning for—fossil fuel funding has no place in universities' climate research."
The students spoke at a virtual press conference titled "Big Oil's Stain on Our Universities," presenting research compiled in six reports regarding fossil fuel industry ties at Columbia University, Princeton University, Cornell University, American University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and University of California San Diego.
The six institutions have collectively received more than $108 million in direct funding to the fossil fuel industry, published more than 1,500 academic articles and papers funded by oil giants, and count 10 people affiliated with the industry among the members of their university governance boards, according to the research—which follows the first-ever literature review of investigations into Big Oil's links to higher education, published in the peer-reviewed journal WIREs Climate Change earlier this month.
Columbia and Princeton were by far the biggest recipients of fossil fuel money, accepting more than $43 million each from companies and their foundations.
Sunrise Columbia, the Sunrise Movement's chapter at the university, published a report presented at Wednesday's press conference, detailing how Hess Corporation—an oil and gas company acquired by Chevron—was the largest fossil fuel donor to the prestigious university. The company contributed more than $15 million to Columbia from 2005-24.
Koch Family Foundations, "which have spent hundreds of millions to finance groups promoting climate denial," and liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm Cheniere Energy were also major contributors.
Fossil fuel money at Columbia has gone toward funding the Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), the School of International and Public Affairs, and the university's Climate School—which "powers innovative research in the science, consequences, and human dimensions of climate change."
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions. Many of our findings directly contradict these missions."
The Climate School has received $741,967 from fossil fuel giants since it was established in 2020.
"CGEP, the Climate School, and Columbia repeatedly claim to produce unbiased, reputable research to advance climate solutions," reads the report. "Many of our findings directly contradict these missions—from Columbia being named explicitly by a BP [vice president] as essential for their outreach and influence to being specifically mentioned as a producer of biased research, Columbia has fallen short," said Sunrise Columbia.
At Princeton, student researchers wrote that the university "legitimizes and financially supports the fossil fuel industry," continuing to invest "approximately $700 million in privately held fossil fuel companies without justification," even after divesting its endowment of fossil fuel holdings worth $1 billion.
The report notes that the school's New Jersey campus "has not been spared" from extreme weather that's growing more frequent as the planet gets hotter and scientists warn that limiting planetary heating to 1.5°C is getting less likely.
"Last summer, our campus was shrouded by smoke from incinerated Quebecois pine trees, smoke that turned the sky a burning orange. Outdoor workers on and off campus were hit hardest," wrote the students. "Floods nearby destroyed transport infrastructure and made it harder for our community members to come to campus to work or to learn. Scorching temperatures at the start of each fall semester make it difficult to think."
But while students, faculty, and staff have suffered the effects of fossil fuel extraction, major fossil fuel companies including BP, Exxon, Shell, and TotalEnergies have spent more than $43 million on research at Princeton, funding papers containing "explicit applications for continued or expanded fossil fuel use."
At the virtual press conference on Wednesday, Campus Climate Network research manager Maddie Young said the articles detailed in the six reports focus primarily on methods for fossil fuel extraction, methods and "benefits" of "false solutions" like carbon capture, and extending and upholding "the social license of the fossil fuel industry to operate."
"So these might be articles that are connected to healthcare or health research and promote the image of corporate social responsibility connected to the fossil fuel industry," said Young, "and allow them to continue to leverage these relationships to universities and to greenwash their own image and present themselves as socially responsible."
The student researchers recommended that Princeton prohibit all research funding from the industry and complete divestment from all oil, gas, and coal companies, as well as cut ties with Petrotiger, a fossil fuel company that Princeton "appears to own," having earned nearly $140 million in the last 10 years in investment income and direct contributions.
"These recommendations are all within Princeton's power to achieve," said the student researchers. "The university must act upon these items with the urgency the climate crisis demands."
Young, who is also a student organizer at American University, said the student-authored reports are "only the beginning—we have a strong, national student movement that will continue to expose and cut the ties with Big Oil."
“It's time for our universities to become real climate leaders," said Young, "and cut ties with the fossil fuel industry once and for all."
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Universities Welcome Students and Staff Back to School With Repression
Administrators, driven by fear, political pressure, and donors, have engineered a power grab bypassing the established structures of governance to securitize campuses and restrict free speech.
Sep 17, 2024
In the 1960s, social critic Paul Goodman offered a parable to describe what had gone wrong with American higher education.
He wrote:
Millennia ago, there were wise people who knew many things that they were eager to share. Young people came to them and asked, “Would you teach us?” And they did. Over time more students came to learn. And after learning, there were many more wise ones able and willing to teach. The enterprise grew with more students, more teachers, and more subjects to teach. It became so complicated that the wise ones hired clerks to keep track of who was teaching, what they were teaching, and which students were with which teachers. The problem today is that the clerks are running the show deciding who will teach, what they will teach, and who is qualified to learn.
The lesson conveyed by this parable is relevant to understanding worrisome developments unfolding on U.S. college campuses. Israel’s assault on Gaza, following Hamas’ attack of October 7, spawned a nationwide revolt of the young. While organised groups helped mobilize demonstrations demanding a cease-fire and Palestinian rights, the breadth and depth of the effort was more akin to a spontaneous eruption.
In this regard, it was not unlike earlier spontaneous protest movements that sprang up over the past decade: the Women’s March, the “Welcome immigrants” demonstrations that filled U.S. airports in response to the “Muslim ban,” the student-led “March for our Lives” after repeated mass shootings, and the Black Lives Matter movement that erupted after the murder of George Floyd.
The cease-fire/pro-Palestinian movement had much in common with these earlier efforts. Its politics skewed left, it was youth-led, and it was racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. The difference was that a main locus of its activities was college campuses.
While many have expressed concern that these polices are similar to McCarthy-era repression and intimidation, equally worrisome is what all of this means for the future of the university.
It began with demonstrations, teach-ins, and vigils. But as the war continued into the spring and the world became aware of the mass killings and devastation inflicted by Israel—and the Joe Biden administration’s unconditional support in the face of the enormity of human loss and suffering—the intensity of the student response grew as well. This gave birth to the “encampment movement” that rapidly spread to hundreds of campuses across the country.
From the early stages, the campus anti-war protests were confronted by a number of malign actors who sought to silence or discredit the dissent. Charging that administrations weren’t acting to quash the protests, a number of pro-Israel donors and trustees at some elite universities withdrew their financial support.
While most of the early protests were self-policed, there were often instances where students on both sides of this emotionally charged conflict engaged in hurtful or threatening behaviors. At this point, a second group of malign actors entered the fray.
A few prominent pro-Israel Jewish organisations drummed up an exaggerated campaign charging that the entire protest effort was at its core antisemitic and should be stopped to protect Jewish students who felt threatened or excluded. They published reports, conducted a huge media campaign, and testified before Congress making their case. While some examples they used were clearly hurtful, the bulk of the instances they cited were not, by any reasonable standard, antisemitic.
This effort was enough to provide the impetus for a third group of malign actors: Republican members of Congress. For the GOP, this was “a perfect storm.” The cast of villains were “elite” universities with their spoiled upper-class students, those who oppose Israel, and Democrats who tolerate, or even encourage, disruptive behaviors.
Ivy League university presidents were summoned to testify before congressional committees, where they were badgered and confronted by deceptive and misleading questions designed more for media hits than information. The pressures placed on these presidents after they bungled their confrontations before different committees resulted in many feeling compelled to resign.
Republicans sensing victory and smelling blood in the water went further in their campaigns of harassment—threatening funding for colleges that didn’t act as the GOP saw fit and demanding more oversight. They also moved from maligning the movement as antisemitic to also supporting “terrorist ideology.”
Confronted by these multi-layered challenges and fearful of the pressures from donors and congressional meddling, many universities reacted by inviting in police to dismantle the protests—often using brutal force. In a few weeks, police arrested more than 3,000 students nationwide, with universities suspending many and banning several student groups from operating on campus.
When students and faculty returned to their campuses this month, they discovered that college administrators had been hard at work during the summer revamping policies with regard to both allowable protest activity and acceptable speech. While there were some differences from campus to campus, the new regulations had enough in common to lead researchers to uncover an industry of “security consultants” who had been brought in to advise on changing campus policies and practices.
The new procedures place limits on time, place, and duration of protests and require that sponsoring groups secure permission for protest activity and, in some instances, the content of signs to be used. Some faculty have been required to submit their curriculum for review (not only by administrators but by requesting members of Congress). More problematic has been the fact that all of these changes have been made without involvement of the schools’ faculty or student senates or the established faculty/student judicial committees. Instead of dealing with infractions internally, they involve external police enforcement.
While many have expressed concern that these polices are similar to McCarthy-era repression and intimidation, equally worrisome is what all of this means for the future of the university. And this is where Goodman’s parable is relevant, because what we have is a situation where the clerks, driven by fear, political pressure, and donors have engineered a power grab bypassing the established structures of governance and have securitized campuses, restricting both academic freedom and freedom of expression.
And all of this was done to silence a new awakening in support of Palestinian human rights.
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