UCSB Researchers Against War Seek Separation of Campus & Military
Protestors gather to demand UCSB end its relationship with military contractors during a divestment rally on May 1st, 2024. (Photo by Ashley Segat)
Story by Zoha Malik || Listen to the story on SoundCloud
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Israel’s War on Gaza has continued into the New Year, with Authorities in Gaza stating that more than 45,000 people have been killed by Israeli attacks as of mid-December, 2024. For many students on campus, the human cost of Israel’s ongoing bombardments may seem to exist in another world entirely. But UCSB’s Researchers Against War (RAW) finds this to be demonstrably false.
CRYSTAL: Unlike any war in recent memory, the US government and private corporations remain complicit in this unwarranted assault against millions of Palestinians, not only through unwavering diplomatic support, but through the provision of funds, arms, and technology to the Israeli government. In light of this, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions urgently calls on workers everywhere to halt the sale and funding of arms to Israel and related military research.
Why are the fruits of our labor enticing to military funders? Even the support of fundamental science by the DoD [Department of Defense] and military contractors is not innocent. It is in their interest to stoke basic research that may, one day, bring about significant military advantage.
At universities across the nation, in the UC system, and at UCSB, the DoD and military contractors consistently fund research in line with their goals.
This is Crystal, a physics grad student at UCSB, reading the Researchers Against War pledge, the full version of which can be found on their website. Her, alongside Global Studies grad student Anam, and life sciences PhD student Hassan, are part of UCSB RAW.
As a group, RAW seeks to highlight and organize against “the US military’s involvement in university research and recruitment.” By researching and organizing against the university’s relationship to, and what they call, complicity in, the production of US weapons for wars abroad, the group ultimately aims to contribute to a military-free university. The current formation of the researchers who are part of RAW at UCSB have been meeting and organizing for a little over a year now.
Over half a year has passed since I submitted a California Public Records Act request for contracts regarding financial and research relationships between the school, the military, and defense manufacturers. This story is ongoing. While I waited, I wanted to learn more from community members actively pursuing similar research, I spoke to Crystal, Anam, and Hassan on their findings and what RAW is all about.
Here’s Anam describing their objectives for this year:
ANAM: And a lot of our focus has been about understanding the connections that UCSB has to both the US military generally but also very specifically to the war and genocide happening in Gaza right now.
Anam went on to describe how their main research focus – the connections between UCSB, the US military, and the ongoing War on Gaza – appear on campus.
ANAM: We’ve had different avenues of that research, whether it be understanding the research, funding that flows through UCSB from the Department of Defense, from private military contractors, and how that research that is made here has impacted kinds of weapons and military production in the real world.
We are also interested in how specifically private companies who are weapons contractors come into our Career Fairs and recruit UCSB students. Another aspect we’re interested in is how research that starts here at UCSB, that might be publicly funded by the DoD, can get spun out through UCSB, which is part of the goal of the of the technology office here, to spin out research into startup companies that then can use the research in weapons manufacturing – mostly as subcontractors for some of the larger firms like Raytheon, RTX Technologies, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing. A lot of these companies also have offices right here in Goleta and in Santa Barbara as well.
So we’re interested both in a spatial analysis of where we sit here on the Central Coast and in relation to a larger weapons production. We’re also interested in very specifically our role as researchers at UCSB in producing knowledge for military use.
This long-standing connection between these companies and UC Santa Barbara was not surprising to hear. Last June, Central Coast Anti-War Coalition organizer Marcy Winograd received contracts from the university from 2016 to 2021, which detailed financial relationships and deals between the school and military manufacturers, such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon. Some of these contracts were worth millions of dollars, detailing research for technology used in warfare.
UCSB’s Researchers Against War states they get a lot of their information from the UC’s publicly released data. Here’s Anam describing some of the data they’ve pulled – where they find UCSB received the most money of all the UCs from the world’s top five defense companies.
ANAM: So according to UC’s own data center, which is the “University of California Information Center,” which collects and publishes information on research and a lot of other statistics on campus, out of the top five defense companies in the world – Boeing, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop, Grumman, and General Dynamics – from 2005 to 2022, UCSB has gotten the most grant money from these five corporations for research on campus, for a total of around 21.9 million dollars over these years.
And that’s comparable to UCLA, which sits at 20.9 million dollars, UCSD 14.4 million dollars. And a lot of that we found is coming from RTX, Raytheon.
And we’ve also done an analysis, not only of how money is coming to campus, but where money is getting invested in campus as well. So, from 2005 to 2022, according to the UC Info Center, RTX, Raytheon has supplied a majority of its money – I think upwards of eight million dollars to the computer science department and then a solid portion to engineering. The engineering department here has gained almost 13 million dollars over these years, from these large military, contracting corporations.
The research performed by RAW found that, between the years 2005 to 2022, 18% of all research funding at UCSB came from military sources in that time period and that 35% of all funding to engineering departments came from military sources including the Department of Defense and private military contractors.
Crystal and Hassan told me about the related research done by UCSB’s engineering departments involving microchips and materials.
CRYSTAL: But in general. the engineering departments are focusing on robotics, microchips, and materials. So that is all heavily DoD- or military contractor-funded. Robotics are for autonomous warfare purposes; microchips are just one really big thing that a recent law that was passed has the DoD heavily invested in. We have a lot of actual military contractors using our microchip lab on campus.
The recent law that Crystal is referring to is the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act. Passed in 2022, this bill intends to provide about $250 billion to invest in semiconductor research and development, among other related goals. It has been used to serve these aims on campus. In late 2023, UCSB joined the California Defense Ready Electronic and Microdevices Superhub (California DREAMS), sponsored by the Department of Defense – since then, CA DREAMS has received over $260 million in funding from the CHIPS Act in 2023 to do this very research.
Crystal and Hassan tell me about what specifically these materials can be – and have been – used for.
CRYSTAL: for materials, there’s a lot of focus on blast resistant or basically very Hardy new light materials that the military could use for shielding or weapons and things.
HASSAN: Some of the materials that labs here on campus are making – these are materials that can still perform in the same way that current aerospace alloys, for example, are utilized, but are perhaps more cost-effective. They are lighter, easier to manufacture.
So there are actually a lot of close collaborations between labs on this campus with companies like Pratt and Whitney, for example, that manufacturers F-35 gas turbine engines, as well as General Electric.
Just for some numbers – in 2019 Pratt and Whitney completed 134 F-35 fighter jets; the US government objective at that time was over 2,400, and this number has just grown recently. We see that 25 F-35 Jets have been sold to Israel, and these jets are being integrated with these dumb bombs, these like 2000 pound Vietnam-era bombs that are being dropped on civilian structures in Gaza. And so, labs here on campus are generating novel materials. They call them “ceramic matrix composites” that the Air Force has announced will save a lot of cost and Manufacturing time in the production of these Air Force jets.
Another example is, some of the Alloys that are utilized are using cobalt. I think the majority of cobalt that’s brought into the US is utilized in military and aircraft applications. And these are used again in jet engine parts, they’re using the tail. They’re now being used to code jets to
provide them more stealth-like capabilities and avoid detection on radar. And so, there are labs here that are innovating cobalt alloys for these kinds of purposes.
The Nanofab lab on campus, according to its website, is a “research fabrication facility for micro and nano-scale processing”, and “provides the supplies, facilities, equipment and know-how needed to accomplish your cutting-edge research.” Notably, the facility can be rented out to researchers and companies alike. Anam explains what this can look like.
ANAM: Crystal, you mentioned the Nanofab on campus, and that this Nanofab is like a chip manufacturing fabrication – a state-of-the-art room that we have on campus that is owned by UCSB. In order to fund and to gain funds, it leases out space technology and expertise to private companies. In a lot of cases, private military companies come in and use the public resource here at UCSB for their private ends, and means, and profits.
And so, here’s like a really explicit example of not only how UCSB is complicit in the physical manufacturing of the weapons technologies, but how we, as a public institution, have a role to play in perhaps cutting these ties with these private entities that gain profits from our public goods.
Hassan, you have such a potent example of how the research done here at UCSB is exactly figuring into the genocide happening in Gaza right now. This is a big part of what our group is trying to do, is to really share how these connections are actually very close connections and they’re very real and material connections.
I think a lot of people who work in the Sciences would say that they do basic science research or “fundamental research” is what it’s called also. A lot of the DoD grants are basically classified like that, which means that it might not have a particular application in the moment (it’s not applied research), but actually the fundamental research and the basic research are processes by which in a longer time frame, perhaps, are integrated into the material manufacturer and production of extremely deadly and both destructive and precise weapons.
The group’s research process involves identifying and highlighting research on campus that takes Department of Defense or military contracting funding. Here, the three grad students speak more to their research process and motivations to better inform students and potential researchers on campus.
[13:25]
CRYSTAL: We’ve got sort of two broad categories, which is the grants that DoD or military contractors have with specific PIs [primary investigators] or labs on campus. Wwe were able to get this information, both from the UCSB side – which I believe they have taken down, but we got that before it was taken down – and the DoD side – who still have all their grants up, and we can see which ones are with UCSB. So we’ve actually gotten that information and we have compiled it but there is a lot to go through. So we’re just getting started with that.
And then, the second part is, kind of directly identifying, which PIs on campus are taking DoD funding, or military contractor funding? That specifically is not going to be listed with the DoD.
HASSAN: We’ve been able to compile a pretty long list of the funding that’s coming in. There are a lot of public databases like the DTIC, the Defense Technical Information Center, that holds all the DoD grants and we can search through those by campus.
And so we can go through those databases and try to find facilities on campus that are receiving a lot of funding. And from there, we’ve been able to identify like search search terms, keywords and, you know, if you conduct like a systematic search through Google or other kinds of search engines, you can start to turn up a lot of the information of how these basic research terms are utilized or acknowledged by branches of the military – the Air Force, the Navy, the Marines, the Army, Etc.
It’s not so difficult. Because again, the university is so entrenched with weapons manufacturing and defense manufacturing, to uncover the links between those kinds of like research terms, scientific terminology, and then different companies like Raytheon, Pratt and Whitney, Lockheed Martin.
ANAM: I think the point of the research that we’re doing is that we’re trying to show not only that UCSB is complicit in weapons manufacturing and in the US- and Israel- supported genocide, but that we as researchers, graduate students, and graduate workers have a role to play in this complicity, and we have a power to potentially, hopefully cut these ties between UCSB and the military; that actually the research that we do, even though it’s labeled as these signs is, of course, still applicable in some sense.
There’s a lot of workers who work on maybe really small kind of scientific problems in materials or engineering that are not sure exactly how how their project might be applied in Hasan’s example of like the F-35 fighter jet, but that we are trying to show that first, these connections very much exist, and then second, that you and we as researchers and workers have the power to to throw a wrench in these gears of war.
Just to speak to one of the things that we’ve also worked on in both the research and in what we’re trying to do to kind of cut these ties, is in during the strike last year in – that was in response to the UC’s violent police repression of protestors at UCLA, at Irvine, at San Diego, at Santa Cruz, and also here at UCSB. Part of our demand in that strike and a demand that we as Researchers against War support is a demand for the UC to make free transitional funding for STEM researchers.
This transitional funding demand would mean that if research workers or graduate students are put by their PI or lab or department under a DoD grant or a private military grant, first, they have the right to know that, and then second, that they are able to apply for transitional funding, if they would like that to transition out of the the DoD funding and private military funding into a different funding source that might be more amenable to them.
Hassan points me to a nearby connection between research on campus and the previously referenced aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, which he says has opened up a new manufacturing facility in Carlsbad based on work done on campus to build materials incorporated into the production line for the F-35 fighter engine, the most powerful of its kind.
The three stress the bigger picture of research done on campus.
ANAM: To fund basic research is part of a national project, and to do so, it gives us strategic advantage – this is using their work – in weapons and in our future war endeavors. Because the timeline is so long, it obscures that these are real and material connections that are happening. The research that’s done here won’t be utilized this year or next year, but perhaps in ten or twenty years, will become really important parts of weapons and of the most destructive weapons in the world.
HASSAN: Yeah, the Department of Defense, from their basic research directorate – their number one goal is “paradigm-shifting basic research that may lead to enhanced warfighter capabilities and strategic and tactical advantage,” which is what Anam had referred to.
So even even the really basic research, as far as it might seem from a military application, it can still be utilized.
In another useful historic example, to keep in mind – back in the 1940s, there was a plant physiologist named Arthur Galston at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and he was working on a DoD-funded project to accelerate soybean growth and flowering. And he found he discovered some agent that when applied in excess caused these flowers to defoliate and lose their leaves.
And later in the 50s during the Vietnam War, these chemicals were used. We now know them as Agent Orange. So this this one researcher was radicalized through this and became pretty staunch anti-war activist, because of how his research which he had intended for agriculture had been utilized to decimate, kill, and genocide people.
That’s one historic example that can really clarify how the DoD office operates. They aren’t funding DoD research for really civilian purposes. This is, again, as Anam had mentioned and as is listed on the research directorate website, for enhanced warfighter capabilities.
CRYSTAL: There’s another side to that. There’s a document that – it’s more like a presentation that the dod presented to internal folks – that explains and tries to convince people to understand why the DoD funds basic research.
And in this document they talked a lot about how there are other countries around the world who are emerging in research and development, and they view them as competitors for resources and things. And so that kind of pushes the DoD to feel that they must basically keep up or at least continue to stay ahead in terms of their research. Obviously, they mention China being one of the countries that are ahead in research and development. By putting them there, they kind of try to again put in the global arms race, like “we are afraid that China or other countries will come up and basically surpass us or compete with us and no longer supply materials to us anymore as their research gets more advanced.”
According to RAW, conversations with the administration regarding demilitarizing campus research have been stagnant.
HASSAN: One thing that we’ve been told is that you know they could remove some of the weapons manufacturers from career fairs. Eventually they backtracked on this and weren’t able to support this anymore.
In response to these allegations, UCSB spokesperson Kiki Reyes confirmed meetings between students and administrators took place regarding the career fairs. Reyes went on to say that “the university does not restrict employers from participating” in the fairs and that “students on campus were advised on campus policies regarding demonstrations and protests, and the rights and responsibilities associated with freedom of expression.”
Anam goes on to talk about how the issue of demilitarizing campus research may continue to be fought for as a graduate student union demand.
ANAM: The other side is also looking at that as grad workers, the contract that we are under with the UC is ending at the end of June. Our bargaining cycle is going to start in collective bargaining in January. This issue is a big issue for many of the graduate workers in the entire UC system. Hopefully, using our collective bargaining power, and our willingness to fight for the demands that we have, that transitional funding demand would be met by the UC, which would be an important first step inbuilding the power of research of grad workers as Researchers Against War on campus.
As a lasting thought, Crystal stressed the importance of questioning dOd labs on campus as an undergrad or a researcher.
CRYSTAL: If you’re listening to this, and you are an undergrad, please take this into account and think about this when you’re applying to your future jobs or to grad school. If you’re a graduate student, we hope that you can consider the impact that being funded by the DoD or being in a DoD-funded lab has on you, and the ways that you might have been made to feel that’s okay. But we want you to question and think about that further and consider joining us.
UCSB RAW is also in the process of producing a project regarding the historic relationship between UC Santa Barbara and the military industry in Goleta. This is set to be released at the beginning of 2025.
With KCSB News, I’m Zoha Malik. Thank you for listening.