More than any other actor, the U.S. military now sets the terms of the university research landscape. In 2023, nearly half of federal research funding went to the Department of Defense, ranking it first among all agencies that supply academic research grants, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation. Why is this the case? And what are the implications for us as research workers—our ethical principles, our relationships with principal investigators, our career goals, and our control, or lack thereof—over research applications? What can we do together to divest our labor from institutions of war and violence?

Last fall, a group of research workers at Columbia came together to begin asking these questions with the goal of converting our ethical concerns about militarized research into concrete action. In large part, we were motivated to band together by our shared horror at the Israeli military’s United States-backed genocidal assault on Gaza. We felt compelled to act in solidarity with our colleagues in Gaza, whose homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces have been reduced to rubble by United States-manufactured bombs. Indeed, we were responding directly to a call to action by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions to halt military research. Along with colleagues at other universities, we began to look into whether there were links—direct or indirect—between our research projects on campus and the ongoing United States-backed genocide in Palestine and the U.S. war machine more broadly.

Using a guide developed by organizers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, we mapped out the flow of military research dollars in Columbia departments and labs. In 2021, the Department of Defense contributed nearly $50 million to research at Columbia, funding everything from basic science to applied robotics. Over the past decade, the research fields that have attracted the most DOD funding at Columbia have been biomedical and clinical sciences, engineering, and information and computing sciences. The defense department’s funding agencies include the Air Force, Navy, Army, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Additionally, various labs in electrical engineering received a $35 million grant to start the Columbia-led Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity, funded directly by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other defense contractors to enable “transformational reductions in energy consumption across massive wireless and data center systems.” One can only imagine the even greater toll the current AI-powered genocide would have with more computational efficiency. Other military-funded projects include one focused on optimizing strategies for “games” in which “agents” find routes to “targets,” including consideration of “electronic surveillance technology such as drones.” Another project studies properties of energetic materials with “propulsion, explosive, and pyrotechnic applications,” which are described as “crucial to mission success.”

There is also significant funding for Columbia research that comes from Big Tech corporations—companies which, as critics note, are often closely tied to the military-industrial complex. For example, since its founding in 2020, the Columbia Center of Artificial Intelligence Technology has been heavily funded by Amazon, which has also provided unlimited cloud storage to the Israeli government, allowing them to store extensive intelligence collected from surveillance of Gazans. In a few instances, this information was used to confirm aerial strikes on military targets that also killed civilians. It is not difficult to see how projects like these enable the horrors of war.

We now ask ourselves and our coworkers: What collective actions can we take? Like organizers on other campuses, we know that such discussions are most fruitful when they happen within our own departments and worksites rather than coming from the outside. We’ve organized and invited coworkers to teach-ins and lunch discussions. Over the coming months, we plan to expand such outreach and facilitate more collective, department and lab-level group discussions.

We have learned much already from lab walk-throughs and one-on-one conversations, particularly regarding potential challenges for collective action. Contrary to stereotypes, we found that many STEM research workers are not “apolitical” or “complacent.” Based on our own experiences and discussions with fellow workers, STEM researchersoften deal with the most difficult working conditions among academic employees, such as abusive principal investigators, hazardous materials, and excessive hours. Grants from military agencies like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency often come with strenuous deadlines and intensive bureaucratic labor. Many research workers are exhausted dealing with immediate issues like late pay and bullying from principal investigators. Some are intimidated by the idea of taking on an entity like the “U.S. war machine” which, at first glance, may seem abstract, distant, or inevitable. Others question our concern about military funding for basic research, or for research with apparently non-militaristic applications. Many researchers in STEM fields are unfamiliar with or unsure about activist language more commonly used by our colleagues in the humanities.

With departments covering such a wide spread of disciplines coupled with individuals being steeped in their own highly specialized projects, we must overcome the fractured, individualized mindset that prevents us from seeing our connection to each other within this larger academic-military system. Rather than telling our coworkers what to think, we have tried to learn about their expertise and everyday experience. We should think about the answers to the following questions: Is your principal investigator transparent with you about funding sources? How would you feel if you found out that a product of your research was being used to build weapons? What do you think about military agencies setting academic research goals for principal investigators in Broad Agency Announcements—including objectives like “extending weapon range” and “increasing warfighters’ lethality”? How is it possible that the University receives millions of research dollars from the DOD, but won’t pay you on time? What do you think about the call to action from Palestinian workers? What would you have to do to switch to a different principal investigator, if it came to that? What do you think about the University’s policy on intellectual property? By discussing such questions, we have been able to connect the dots between our everyday work and anti-war principles in a way that resonates with coworkers.

Because of the collaborative nature of scientific research, STEM workers often have deep experience working in teams and problem-solving with coworkers—skills that are easily transferable to organizing around a cause. The conditions in STEM departments are ripe for education, agitation, and organizing—we simply need to draw connections between ideals of peace and justice, the principles of worker dignity, and our everyday conditions on the job. Whatever our backgrounds—there are plenty of STEM workers on our own and other campuses with direct personal experiences of war and displacement—none of us became scientists to develop more efficient techniques of mass killing.

We now stand at a historic crossroads as scientists, workers, and people of conscience. While the global labor movement has fallen short of stopping the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, workers around the world have taken bold action to disrupt the production and transfer of weapons and military technologies to Israel. At UC Santa Cruz, research workers in astronomy and physics have pledged to withhold labor benefitting militarism. In May, thousands of academic workers across the University of California system—many of them researchers—went on strike to assert control over the disciplinary and financial mechanisms of their workplace and act in solidarity with Palestinians and student protesters. The striking workers demanded that the university “provide centralized transitional funding to workers whose funding is tied to the military or foundations that support Palestinian oppression.” Recently, according to striking graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz, the University of California system has quietly made some concessions to these demands, but the strikers’ broader vision of divestment remains unfulfilled.

Organizers across campuses face daunting obstacles to materially disrupting the use of our research for military purposes. Nonetheless, we are witnessing the beginnings of a revival of anti-war researcher organizing, updating the lessons of the Vietnam War era for our present moment. Following the 1968 student uprising, Columbia researchers affiliated with the North American Congress on Latin America published the pamphlet “Who Rules Columbia,” which laid bare the corporate interests governing the University. At Researchers Against War, we take inspiration from our predecessors at NACLA, but have the advantage of organizing on the basis of our collective labor through our union, Student Workers of Columbia-United Auto Workers—a crucial source of strength that the ’68 organizers lacked. As researchers, we are able to go beyond the broad messaging of apartheid divestment and launch pointed campaigns to choke arms production at the research and development stage. A recent example is the victory of Scientists Against Genocide, who forced the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to discontinue the Lockheed Martin Seed Fund. Though the role of organized labor in the 1960s anti-war movement is often overlooked, today’s labor movement is more diverse and less segregated, with rank and file members standing against U.S. foreign policy. This bodes badly for the profiteers of the war industry.

We conclude by returning to our question: What collective actions can we take on our own campus, in our own everyday worksites? If you are a research worker reading this, we encourage you to start uncovering the links between research and war. Talk to your coworkers and learn together with them. Reach out to us. Together, we have the power to change the way that our work is used and make the positive impact that we all believe in.