Princeton University implicated in Gaza and Sudan wars, report says

Middle East Eye

18-02-2025

Princeton University receives millions of dollars worth of contracts from the US Department of Defence as well as weapons manufacturers, tying it to several sites of conflict around the world, including Gaza and Sudan, a new report released by an anti-war group has revealed.
Several sources told Middle East Eye this week that the report is one of the first to showcase how modern American academia thrives as a US war machine service provider.
The report, published in early February and produced by a new anti-war group made up of independent researchers, comes on the heels of a student movement around the country that has called for universities to disclose and divest from companies purportedly profiting from the Israeli occupation and war on Gaza, which has been called a "genocide" by legal experts, human rights bodies and political leaders.
The student movement, considered by many observers as the largest since the anti-Vietnam War protest movement in the sixties and seventies, continues to face a severe crackdown from administrators, culminating in arrests, suspensions, as well as ongoing surveillance as university leadership leaned on a US political establishment determined to crush protests they label as antisemitic.
At Princeton, more than a dozen students continue to face criminal charges for "trespassing" after conducting a sit-in on the main campus in April 2024.
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Meanwhile, members of the university community have been operating over the past 16 months in an atmosphere of repression and constant surveillance by university administrators.
The new report, student organisers and faculty say, is not merely an indictment of Princeton's entanglement with the military or large corporations, it also shows that material considerations primarily drive the crackdown against protesters.
"It's not simply that protesters offended the delicate sensibilities of university administrators, it's about their bottom line - the investments, contracts, and endowments they are desperate to protect," Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American studies at Princeton University, told MEE.
"This report exposes the deep hypocrisy that has been festering long before this latest wave of academic repression. Universities claim to be 'in service to humanity' while helping to develop technologies that obliterate flesh and blood human beings," Benjamin added.
The 17-page report was written primarily by a PhD graduate from Princeton and released by a group called the "Antiwar Initiative".
The report argues that despite Princeton plugging itself as a pioneer in the study of the humanities, it has periodically focussed on streams of funding and research that in part "rely on contracts and subcontracts that either directly involve private defence contractors and foreign governments or are explicit in their applications to war".
The report is the first in a new campaign to reveal how American universities are entangled in the wider American military-industrial complex.
History of collaboration
The report, which took five months to research and produce, is likely to cause a stir amongst Ivy League institutions where the administrations are battling students over higher education's complicity in Israel's war on Gaza.
With US President Donald Trump looking to institutionalise the targeting of pro-Palestine protesters on campuses, specifically foreign students, the protest movement has largely retreated as they look to re-strategise against university administrations emboldened by the president's actions.
Meticulously referenced and drawn from publicly available documents, including university and company auditing reports, it alleges that Princeton has accepted funding from the Israeli Ministry of Defence, as well as collaborated with arms companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, among others.
The author told MEE that though not all relationships with Israel were strictly of a military nature, be it in mathematics or infectious disease research, it was conceivable that the state could later weaponise findings for military purposes.
The report highlights a specific tie-up with the national security firm, Peraton.
In 2024, Peraton Labs was awarded a contract with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop the necessary technology for drone swarms - used for military reconnaissance and attack missions - to adapt to unexpected circumstances.
'I doubt there are many students drawn here to develop better sensors or software for guiding missiles'
- Curtis A Deutsch, professor at Princeton
The project was in conjunction with Princeton and Imperial College in London.
Peraton has previously lauded its relationships with universities around the country, describing its investments in university relationships as a way "to fund key areas that will fuel business, increase impact, and positively affect the future of our industry".
"This higher education ecosystem is beginning to mature at the exact time when national security is reaching a new precipice of challenges," Peraton, which performs a variety of services for the US government and army, including supporting the integration and conduct of cyberspace operations and electromagnetic warfare, said.
Similarly, in its examination of Princeton's ties with several companies, the findings imply the university could not be disentangled from the actions of companies it often partnered or collaborated with.
The report says, that given university advisors, invited guests, visiting scholars, and department collaborations often reinforced Princeton's stake in the defence ecosystem - it naturally raised uncomfortable questions over the complicity of faculty, as well as students, in the actions of the several companies in areas of conflict around the world, the report said.
Several researchers and graduate students at Princeton told MEE that not only did these ties directly contradict the university's stated commitment to being a harbinger of a liberal arts education in the United States, but these relationships were often left undisclosed to research staff.
"This collaboration with the war industry and the apartheid state of Israel not only exposes Princeton's moral bankruptcy but how it and other universities have betrayed the core values that universities were created to nurture and protect," Chris Hedges, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former professor at Princeton University, said.
"The disregard by Princeton and other schools of the rule of law, the failure to protect the sanctity of human life and the plight of the most vulnerable among us is one more sad reminder of the moral rot that infects nearly every leading institution in the United States," Hedges told MEE.
Princeton's communication office did not reply to MEE's request for comment.
The pro-Palestine encampment at Princeton University in April 2024 (Azad Essa/MEE)
Princeton University is one of the richest universities in the world.
With an endowment of over $34bn, the university functions as a corporation with the ability to lobby Congress as well as state and local governments, the report said, noting that it leveraged its wealth to influence the corridors of power through its DC-based Office of Government Affairs.
The report found that the university spent $490,000 and $330,000 on lobbying government officials in 2023 and 2024 alone, respectively.
One of the key bills it periodically lobbies for, the report said, is the Department of Defence Appropriations Act. The bill decides how much public funding would be directed to the Department of Defence (DOD) for military activities, of which universities usually receive a share of the budget.
In 2023, the DOD contracted around $8.03bn to universities, with Princeton's lobbying providing it a share of "direct contracts" with the DOD as well as federal funding in the form of grants, general awards and fellowships.
Princeton, which gets around $30m per year from the DOD, has also done work for weapons companies like RTX/Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, in government-facilitated deals.
Though the report clarifies that contracts with the DOD or specifically with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) - which produces technologies for use by the military - aren't always strictly of a military nature, sizeable contracts have been awarded to Princeton towards the study of insurgency and counter-intersurgency as well as the production of geolocation algorithms, the report says.
"This relationship via sub-contracts fosters collaborations between Princeton and researchers at defense contractors," the report said. It added that the collaborations demonstrate the university's standing as a "warring institution linked to documented human rights violations" in places like Sudan and Palestine via the US government, arms manufacturers, and arms sales to Israel and the UAE.
"Therefore, it's implicated in the global arms trade and the broader proliferative tech industry, which raises serious and critical ethical concerns on the relation of human rights on campuses to human rights off campuses," it added.
Ethical questions
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The new report comes just months after undergraduate students passed a divestment resolution at Princeton.
The resolution, passed in December, came after months of protest following a sustained campaign by the Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divestment group (Piad).
Student and faculty organisers said the new report provided context for the links between Princeton and weapon companies, examining contracts, funding, collaborations, and start-ups associated with the university. They added that it also appeared to take the call for divestment one step further by looking at the university as a purveyor of war and propaganda for US imperialism.
In a statement sent to MEE, Piad welcomed the report, adding that the findings illustrated the extent to which Princeton was invested in the dispossession of Palestine and the Palestinians through its research ties.
"One of Piad's demands has been for Princeton to cut research ties with Israel and with all entities that enable and profit from its occupation of Palestine," a spokesperson for Piad told MEE.
However, the author of the report emphasised to MEE that he hoped his findings would also help shed light on the massive contradiction of modern American academia projecting itself as performing a salient function in uplifting society while allegedly complicit in war and conflict.
Princeton University's informal motto describes itself as functioning "in the nation's service and the service of humanity".
Benjamin, who also heads up the Ida B Wells JUST Data Lab, noted that while the university touts its efforts in areas like cancer research and climate mitigation, one would be hard-pressed to find it spotlighting the countless labs, collaborations, and startups tied to military contractors and weapons manufacturers.
"In light of the findings in this report, why shouldn't we view Princeton itself as a weapons manufacturer?" Benjamin said.
Benjamin added that it was crucial to recognise that the university, like the US or Israeli army, was indulging in linguistic gymnastics when it came to describing its operations.
"Just as the US-backed Israeli military's AI systems, designed to generate new human targets at an unprecedented rate, are chillingly named ''Lavender', 'Where's Daddy?' and 'The Gospel', university-backed research that enables war and violence is often wrapped in euphemisms - words that conveniently ignore the devastating reality faced by those on the receiving end of these so-called 'innovations'," Benjamin said.
"It's easy to downplay the harm caused by university research when you're not the one staring up at the bombs raining down on your land and life," Benjamin added.
Curtis A Deutsch, a professor of geosciences at Princeton, told MEE that the contrast between research with military applications outlined in the report and the lofty rhetoric in Princeton's brochures will disturb most students.
"Students here are full of idealism and the enlightenment ideas about education and its ability and responsibility to improve the human condition. I doubt there are many students drawn here to develop better sensors or software for guiding missiles," he said.
"Whether the student body can assert its values on their educational institution remains to be seen. But this report will certainly add fuel to their moral fire," Deutsch added.
Another member of the faculty, who asked to remain anonymous, said the findings should concern stakeholders connected to the university, especially faculty, "because at the heart of this issue is the ethics of knowledge production for fatally unethical purposes".
"The possibility that research being conducted at Princeton is providing the knowledge and intellectual resources that go into the war machine of an incredibly violent state is alarming, ethically disturbing, and deserving of a thorough and transparent investigation," the professor said.
The report examines another cause for concern at Princeton and the university system at large: a lack of oversight in the sciences.
"Ethical regulations and deliberations within the sciences [at Princeton] are abysmal if not absent," the report said.
The report said that given the context where both arms and software production have been centralised between Silicon Valley and weapons manufacturers, it was incumbent to consider scientific discoveries as also integrated with and used by the state.
"There is a glaring need for unionised bodies that govern and determine the ethics of studies and the ethics of new technologies or new applications of existing ones so that university officials take responsibility and enact justified moral standards rather than deferring to those of governments," the report says.
The lack of checks and balances, the report says, means that academics are being made complicit in the foreign policy choices of the US government. As a result, these collaborations implicate the university in human rights violations.
In the case of Intel, which makes up 1.7 percent of the Israeli economy and functions as a crucial hub of research and manufacturing in the country, it has sponsored $2m of research at Princeton, has an affiliate undergrad research internship in the electrical engineering department and hosts the dean of engineering science, Andrea J Goldsmith, on its board.
In another example, the report cites the collaboration between Picatinny Arsenal, the American military research and manufacturing company with the Andlinger Center, which falls under Princeton's School of Engineering and Applied Science, which began in 2016.
According to the agreement, the duo agreed to "share information and collaborate to promote energy and environmental research and to get the most out of technology transfers for defence and industry".
The company, which became the DOD's Joint Speciality Site for Guns and Ammunition in 2011, has since been accused of providing ammunition to the Israeli army during the genocide in Gaza.
One graduate student told MEE, on the condition of anonymity, that there were several cases of students and researchers being drafted into projects, including greenwashing projects, that serve the interests of large corporations, especially big oil.
In 2023, The Guardian alluded to this conundrum when it reported how students at Princeton were surprised to discover that their lecturer, who taught about "negative emissions technologies" and argued that transitioning from oil and gas would be "very "difficult", was a senior scientific officer from the oil behemoth, Exxon.
'Weapons manufacturer in a trench coat'
Chris Hedges, the famed journalist and former lecturer at Princeton, says the report also alludes to another problematic trend that has emerged over the past several decades: the corporatisation of colleges and universities.
"University presidents and administrators do not work for the students or the faculty but for uber-wealthy donors, many of whom have ties to predatory corporations, the war industry and private equity firms," Hedges added.
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The report suggests that the revolving door at Princeton for the defence department officials, weapons and fossil fuel executives is seamless, even at times venerated by the university itself.
For instance, in 2019, Princeton's Alumni network ran a glowing profile of Norman Augustine, the founding CEO of Lockheed Martin between 1995-1997.
Augustine had originally graduated from Princeton with an aeronautical degree in the late 1950s, served as undersecretary of the US Army from 1975 to 1977, and returned to Princeton to teach in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences after his retirement from Lockheed Martin in the late 1990s.
'When I was CEO, almost the entire aerospace industry was led by people with Princeton degrees," Augustine reminisced in the article in 2019.
'Other schools produce great engineers, just as Princeton does. But I think studying engineering at Princeton produces a different kind of engineer: I learned to write, and very few engineers that I've run across in life can write,' he said.
One graduate student at Princeton, who also asked to remain anonymous given the current climate on campus, said upon reading the report that they were "sad" to see the extent to which so much of their research was being "funnelled towards war crimes and mass death".
The student said that while more people are realising how corporatised US universities have become, especially with regards to the accumulation of real estate, displacement of local communities and gentrification of entire zip codes, there was still a hesitancy to consider universities as outsourced service producers for the military-industrial complex.
"We have to see that the university is itself not just any corporation but a weapons manufacturer in a trench coat," the student said.
The report, though discreetly uploaded onto the internet in early February, has already caught the eye of anti-war scholars around the world.
"The Anti-War Initiative brings renewed hope that our universities will be returned to us emancipated from the clasps of war profiteers," Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek economist and politician, told MEE.
"Nothing taints the world of difficult knowledge and path-breaking ideas more than its association with blood-stained cheques from enterprises dedicated to violence and expropriation," Varoufakis added.
American universities have had a long history with the military, with the US government often calling upon researchers to assist in the manufacture of new weapons or military tactics.
Research for the Manhattan Project that led to the creation of the atomic bomb, for instance, or in the development of other nuclear weapons, was contingent on the research of large Ivy League institutions like Princeton.
The author of the report told MEE that though academic collaboration with the defence complex is nothing new, discussion about its pervasive nature on academic and campus life was largely absent.
"I am not sure that the public is generally aware of these collaborations. Therefore, students do not think of their attendance of universities or working within groups as being a political choice."