The Gaza Protests Were a Mask Off Moment for American Universities

The brutal crackdown on the divestment encampments exposed a stark truth: The modern university cannot function without the support of the military-industrial complex.

Students and activists protesting Columbia University’s decision to suspend the student groups Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace on campus in Manhattan, New York, on November 15, 2023. (Shawn Inglima / NY Daily News via Getty Images)
The university presidents who have sicced riot police on students demanding divestment from Israel want you to know something: Violent repression is in the best interest of their schools. University of Chicago President Paul Alivasatos wrote that a police sweep was necessary because the protest “disrupts the functioning of the university.” At UCLA, the site of both pro-Israeli vigilante violence and a brutal police crackdown, Chancellor Dean Block wrote that the Gaza solidarity encampment “damaged our ability to carry out our mission.”

These statements have been mocked as cynical excuses for authoritarian repression. Really, though, they should be viewed as honest—perhaps unintentionally honest—admissions of the threat that divestment poses to the modern university.

The administrators are correct: Their institutions do function in concert with the war machine powering Israel’s genocidal war; their mission does depend on maintaining this alliance, even at the cost of brutalizing their students; and it is this material reality, more than anything else, that explains the ferocity of their response to the Gaza solidarity encampments.

The US military-industrial complex—which forms the industrial base for the world’s largest military and exports nearly half of all weapons sold on the global market—could not function without American universities. It needs college-educated engineers and scientists. It relies on thousands of research projects, funded by the Pentagon and carried out by academics around the country. The atrocities we witness every day in Gaza—including the abject horror that Israel unleashed on Rafah this past weekend—are carried out with American-made bombs, dropped from American-made jets, guided by sophisticated military technologies; all researched, designed and built with the full-throated participation of the academy.

Just as the university provides blood and oxygen to the US war machine, the scale of research funding and jobs offered by the industry lend it a tremendous amount of influence on campus. A recent report showed that Johns Hopkins University received more than twice as much money from defense contracts over the past decade than from tuition. Pentagon funding alone accounts for almost a quarter of the university’s total revenue.

Current Issue

This effect is compounded by decades of austerity (accelerated at public research universities in the past 15 years), which has plunged both students and non-tenured faculty into a permanent state of precarity.

Precarity fosters dependency—on the Department of Defense’s profligate research spending, and on weapons manufacturers, ever eager to employ debt-ridden graduates. The carrot of military funding and the stick of austerity have pushed the academy and the war industry into an intractable embrace.

War is not a side project that academia can cast off or divest from. For many schools—particularly large research universities—to divest from war would be to commit institutional suicide.

In the Cold War frenzy following World War II, the university developed into a critical node of the emergent military-industrial complex. C. Wright Mills wrote in 1956 that “the general direction of pure scientific research has been set by military considerations, its major finances are from military funds, and very few of those engaged in basic scientific research are not working under military direction.”

Ties between the military and the university waned in the 1970s under pressure from the anti-war movement. But powered by the neoliberal turn and the rabid post-9/11 expansion of the national security state, the war industry re-cemented its dominating role.

Since 9/11, the US government has consistently allotted between 45 and 60 percent of its multibillion-dollar R&D budget to “defense” research. In 2023, 46 percent of the federal research budget went to the Pentagon, far more than to any other government agency. Hundreds of schools conduct Pentagon-funded research, and this funding makes up a significant portion of many university budgets, especially at large research universities.

Research powerhouses like MIT (over $1 billion a year in defense contracts for the Lincoln Laboratory), Penn State (recently awarded a $2 billion contract from the US Navy), Carnegie Mellon University ($2.7 billion contract with the DoD), University of Texas, Austin ($1.1 billion contract with the DoD) or Georgia Tech ($2.35 billion from the US Army) lean heavily on federally funded war research to balance their books.

Schools are further beholden to the Pentagon through their general reliance on public research funds. The federal government supports over half of all research conducted at universities—and therefore, the implicit threat of the state rescinding all research funds hangs over the question of divestment. In 2002, for instance, the federal government threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions in grants if the Harvard Law School did not allow military recruiters back on campus. Harvard caved. The dean of the law school laid it out quite plainly: “Most of us reluctantly accept the reality that this university cannot accept the loss of federal funds.”

The DoD is just one part of the picture. Private weapons manufacturers also partner with schools to conduct research and secure access to the next generation of workers. The University of Arizona, for example, houses a major Raytheon facility and provides the war industry giant with a steady stream of trained workers. Lockheed Martin has partnerships—which entail both research funding and employee pipelines—with at least 100 universities in the United States. At least a dozen universities celebrate “Lockheed Martin Day,” where company recruiters swarm campuses to show off their shiny new toys and entice undergraduates with financial aid and internships. At some schools, Lockheed asserts its dominance by landing a helicopter in the middle of the campus.

These companies are crucial engines of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Raytheon sells Israel jets, drones, and cluster bombs, which have been used to murder thousands; Lockheed Martin provides attack helicopters and missiles like the one used to assassinate a Palestinian journalist in November; General Dynamics makes the 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that Israel has dropped indiscriminately on Gaza, including in an attack on the Jabalia refugee camp that killed over 100 Palestinians; Boeing manufactures the F-15 jets that comprise most of the Israeli Air Force and the “precision” GBU-39 missiles that were used to commit the Rafah tent massacre.

The outsize role of war-making in the economy incentivizes universities to train workers for the industry. In a state like Connecticut, for instance, weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky constitute 12.5 percent of the state’s total GDP, and are the core of the state’s industrial (and tax) base. They wield tremendous influence within the state: In 2014, Connecticut granted $400 million in tax breaks to United Technologies (now merged with Raytheon to form RTX) after the company threatened to relocate.

It’s no surprise, then, that the state’s flagship university—the University of Connecticut—is deeply involved in both war research and developing students into war industry workers. Companies like Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon, along with the US Air Force, fund millions of dollars of research—into missiles, submarines, and fighter jets—at UConn. The top employers of recent graduates from the Engineering School are companies like Lockheed Martin and Electric Boat.  » …
Read More