College campuses around the United States have been rocked by student-led protests against the Israeli assault on the people of Gaza. University messaging on these issues is muddled. On one hand, administrators express concern for the safety of the university community. Yet, they call in armed police who enact violence against protesting members of the university community. The dissonance of this position hints at the true power dynamics at play: student demands threaten institutional revenue streams.
Universities are epicenters for research and discovery. Many research projects in the sciences and engineering have direct or indirect implications for weapons manufacturing. Since the end of World War II, American universities have forged closer ties to the United States military and the industries that support military power. Therefore, we can expand the concept of military-industrial complex by recognizing academia’s role in warfare.
A quintessential example is napalm which was invented in a secret lab at Harvard and first tested on a football field next to Harvard Business School in 1942. The United States military went on to deploy napalm in Japan (World War II), Korea (the Korean War), and Southeast Asia (the Vietnam War). In 1980, the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons banned the use of napalm against civilians.
As such, university protests against military ends are not new. The Vietnam War drew student protestors who demanded accountability from both their institutions and the military. Often, protests were met with violence. Tomorrow (May 4) is the 54th anniversary of the National Guard shooting of protestors at Kent State University in northeast Ohio. Eleven days after the Kent State shootings, police shot protestors at Jackson State, a Mississippi HBCU.
In a 1972 retrospective of student protests against MIT’s classified weapons research (University and Military Research: Moral Politics at MIT), sociologist Dorothy Nelkin captured the tension that emerges during student protests:
Ironically, universities create their own difficulties by training students to view their environment critically. As a part of the students' environment, the university inevitably becomes a vulnerable target.
disclose, divest
A common refrain among university protestors is that institutions should disclose and divest financial ties to Israel given their assault in Gaza. Previous student-led activism has led to divestment from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa and from fossil fuels.
Disclosure and divestment primarily concerns university endowments - the total assets available to universities including real estate and investment portfolios (using funds from private donations). Endowment size varies between institutions, and Harvard has the largest fiscal year (FY) 2023 endowment, totaling $49.5 billion. In fact, 135 American universities have FY 2023 endowments larger than $1 billion. This is more money than anyone reading this will ever have in their bank account. These giant sums of money attract hedge funds and private equity firms. Access to even a fraction of a prestigious university’s endowment can sustain a firm and attract new investors.
Student demands for disclosure and divestment would require universities to sift through their hefty investments, identify sums of money invested in weapons makers who do business with the Israeli government, and sell those positions. Admittedly, this is a daunting administrative task that could not happen overnight.
Yet, it is notable that university administrators rarely entertain this possibility. Instead, they tend to declare student protests as violations of university policies (and begin internal discipline and/or police involvement) without good faith engagement with student demands. As it turns out, university administrators are directly accountable to their institution’s trustees - not their students.
Trustees are powerful within a university, and these positions attract wealthy donors including those tied to hedge funds and private equity. In fact, hedge fund billionaires are 3 times more likely to join boards at the top 30 private universities than billionaires from other sectors, according to a 2021 analysis by sociologist Charlie Eaton. Once in these positions, they can reap the profits - literally. Dartmouth, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, and Yale have disclosed that they have investments with at least one board trustee. These folks are making money from educational institutions while students1 accrue significant debt to attend.
Consequently, these billionaires are not enthusiastic about shifting large invested funds out of weapons manufacturers. However, less powerful university stakeholders tend to support divestment from Israel using democratic means. At my current institution, Stanford, the student body approved a call for divestment with more than 7 in 10 votes in favor. Votes with similar margins have passed at Columbia, Barnard, Pomona, and more.
So, what would divestment look like? Previous calls for universities to divest from fossil fuels provide insight. In short, universities would sell their investments in the problematic sectors and re-invest the proceeds in new, more humane industries. Such a large transfer of holdings could pose disruptions to university operating budgets, a common refrain from administrators responding to student demands. Yet, an economic analysis of fossil fuel divestment at North American universities proposed three alternatives to mitigate impacts on operational budgets:
Investment in non-volatile sectors like consumer goods. Any investment is subject to the whims of the stock market and larger economic outlook. However, some sectors are less volatile than others. In particular, consumer goods (think food, toilet paper, and anything else you stocked up on in March 2020) are more resistant to economic downturns because these products are always needed. Therefore, investments in these industries are fairly safe and often perform better year-to-year.
Investment in green bonds. Bonds supporting the development of low-carbon infrastructure have two positive outcomes. First, they contribute to the common good of creating sustainable infrastructure in the face of climate change. Second, the green bond market is expanding to meet the goal of climate change mitigation. According to Bloomberg, last year $939 billion were issued in green bonds, a 3% increase from 2022.
Cutting university costs. This one is fairly self-explanatory: Universities could reduce operational costs. Truthfully, this is a tough pill to swallow for institutions. Higher education budgets are already strained by stagnant enrollment and inflation. However, cost-cutting does not have to manifest as layoffs within university bureaucracies. Institutions could instead seek to reduce energy and water usage which again doubles as budgetary and environmental solution.
the military contracts
Student protesters are also calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. But university incentives are pretty war friendly. The United States Department of Defense is a major funder of research in the sciences, particularly in engineering and physics. And thanks to government transparency initiatives, we can calculate just how much money universities are getting from the Department of Defense.2
The total value of defense contracts to institutes of higher education in FY 2024 is $23.98 billion. This number is the sum of all active contracts with colleges and universities which will get paid over the multi-year contract. Of this total, 0.43% ($103.2 million) is coded as tuition, likely for current or former service members. The other legible contract codes (some are just strings of letters and digits) range from “Concert Hall Rental for the Marine Corps Band” (with the Commonwealth of Virginia) to “Full Spectrum Undersea Warfare” (with Penn State).
The table below breaks down the total value of active Department of Defense contracts in higher education by the recipient institution. It also includes the tuition and non-tuition values as well as the total number of contracts.3 MIT is set to receive the most money ($15.5 billion) in active contracts. In addition to MIT, three other university systems are set to receive over $1 billion from defense contracts: Georgia Tech ($2.4 billion), Johns Hopkins ($1.4 billion), and Carnegie Mellon ($1.1 billion).
Universities love funding from the government. In fact, Stanford has a special program (Technology Transfer for Defense) to assist researchers in pursuit of defense contracts. Having more funding allows labs to grow in personnel and technical capabilities, increasing productivity. While this money is granted to a specific researcher and project, the home institution generally takes a portion of each grant as “overhead.” Managing grants is arduous, and large research universities have specialized offices to assist in the process (thereby freeing up faculty to pursue their research interests). Overhead costs support these offices and their staff.
As an example of how much money universities can extract from government grants, let’s look at MIT which takes 59% of a grant in overhead for on-campus research (termed Facilities and Administrative Rates). Extrapolating out from the total value of current defense contracts, MIT is set to collect over $9.1 billion in overhead from these active funds.
Universities can also use these contracts to lure private donations (thereby increasing endowment size). Reaping large research sums from the Department of Defense signals to donors that the institution is involved in cutting-edge research.
The entrenchment of universities within the machinery of warfare poses a threat to civil society. As elaborated by Nelkin, “military support erodes the independence of the university and inhibits criticism of government policy.” Institutions of higher education owe it to their students to maintain their independence from governmental war-making. Higher education should ultimately be accountable to the students they serve - not the American military, billionaire trustees, or private equity.
While united in message, the current wave of university protests are playing out hyper-locally, each with different dynamics at play. Some campuses are seeing signs of institutional progress. At Brown, student protesters are dismantling their encampment in exchange for a vote on divestment from the university’s governing board. This doesn’t guarantee that Brown will divest, but the possibility is more alive there than most other campuses. Once one university takes concrete actions to divest, other institutions must cede that divestment is possible and instead articulate honest rationales for their inertia.
Myself included! I graduated with the University of Notre Dame with student debt that I am still paying off.
The data is from usaspending.gov. The site was pretty easy to navigate and covers grants and contracts from all government agencies.
Some contracts are awarded to university-affiliated labs such as the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, LLC. When these instances occurred, I kept the original data in the dataset and calculated the total numbers sent to the home institution. These are labeled as total. For example, there are three Johns Hopkins entries: “The Johns Hopkins University”, “The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory LLC,” and “The Johns Hopkins University (TOTAL).”