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Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Posh private school DEI events canceled amid ‘evolving political and legal landscape'
The country's most privileged private schools canceled their annual diversity, equity and inclusion events after The Post revealed last year's conference was filled with such rampant 'Jew hate' that some students left in tears. The National Association of Independent Schools cited the current 'political and legal landscape' when it announced last week its 'difficult' decision to pause its People of Color Conference (PoCC) and Student Diversity Leadership (SDLC) Conference. The organization represents 1,300 schools, including the prestigious Dalton, Brearley and Collegiate in New York City. 'Amid the rapidly evolving landscape, we are taking time to assess the needs of our members and the purposes of these convenings to ensure that they evolve in ways that best support our schools,' the NAIS wrote in an April 3 letter obtained by The Post. 'Although we are taking this year to pause PoCC and SDLC, the values and lessons of the conferences are driving our work moving forward,' the letter continued. 'We know that diversity makes our schools and our entire sector stronger and we remain committed to fostering an inclusive independent school community where all members feel supported and valued.' The POCC, which aims to 'provide safe spaces for leadership and professional development for people of color,' was founded in 1986 and has been held in tandem with the SDLC since 1993. Last year, outraged attendees and families slammed the 'woke' NAIS for pushing 'indoctrination' through the events. Speakers, including Princeton University Professor Ruha Benjamin, accused Israel of 'ethnic cleansing' and 'genocide' and downplayed the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks, staffers and students told The Post. Kids said they felt unsafe, hid their Jewish stars and even left the talks early in tears. The NAIS later apologized and said all future presentations would be vetted in advance. Michelle Parker, an attorney who advises independent private school families in her private practice, told The Post that the NAIS' decision 'is the right first step given the increasingly divisive content presented each year.' 'In addition to a pause on these conferences, the NAIS community would be well-served by a broad and open inquiry into all of the guidance related to diversity, inclusion and belonging that the NAIS provides,' she added. 'It is alarming that this organization wields such influence over its member schools with little to no transparency.' In its letter, the organization said it is creating new events and resources and will continue hosting other events including its Diversity Leadership Institute (DLI), which is in June. Though the school did not specifically mention President Trump's federal initiatives, the conference cancellations come amid a continued crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the public and private sector.
The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How Afrofuturism can help us imagine futures worth living in
The digital age sings a seductive song of progress, yet a deliberate erasure echoes within its circuits. We stand at a crossroads, where technology, particularly the promise of artificial intelligence, threatens both to illuminate and to obliterate. Whose perspectives will shape, and whose will be erased from, the future we build? AI, in particular, has become the latest battleground in a culture war that oscillates between unchecked techno-optimism and dystopian fear. We are told, on one hand, that AI will save us – from disease, inefficiency, ignorance – on the other, that it will replace us, dominate us, erase us. Frequently, mainstream discourse around technology and the future is framed in the narrow vision of broligarchs. The philosophy of the broligarchs is a derivative of the techno-utopian Californian ideology promoted in 1990s Silicon Valley culture. However, this perspective has recently metastasized into the Dark Enlightenment, a techno-authoritarian, neo-reactionary philosophy now embraced by members of authoritarian governments like Elon Musk and in bureaucratic form expressed as Doge. This is where Afrofuturism enters – not just as a genre or an aesthetic, but as a paradigm shift. Contemporary Afrofuturism is a philosophy that empowers African people to locate themselves in the past, present and future with agency. Afrofuturism is transnational and translocal. Afrofuturism offers a vital perspective, not merely as a creative resource, but as a cultural and political framework for reimagining possibilities. Afrofuturism provides tools to envision alternative futures ethically grounded in the Black experience. As Ruha Benjamin reminds us, the 'new Jim Code' is not merely a metaphor; it is a reality, where algorithms perpetuate systemic inequalities, a digital echo of historical oppression. Afrofuturism challenges the foundations of what we call 'the future'. It rejects the a-historic narratives of clean-slate innovation and insists instead on ancestral reckoning. It knows that futures are made, not found – and that who gets to imagine them is a political question. Born from experimentation and exploration, from historical struggle as well as a wellspring of joy, play and boundless curiosity, Afrofuturism represents resilience and future-making. Our ancestors, facing dehumanization and erasure, created codes in spirituals and sound imagining vibrant, liberated worlds. These 'Afro-rithms' were not just acts of resistance; they were the initial cultural software that contributed to forms of Indigenous foresight and liberation tech. Now, as AI evolves with increasing sophistication and speed, it can reflect the biases of its creators. Systems designed with a narrow perspective can perpetuate inequality. As writer and editor Sheree Renée Thomas stated: 'We need Afrofuturists, like Walter Greason and William 'Sandy' Darity, to interrogate the foundations of global capitalism, to reveal the hidden histories of extraction and exploitation.' As historian Walter Rodney argued, Europe's post-war redevelopment was built upon the intentional underdevelopment of Africa, a cycle of extraction masked as 'fair trade'. Arikana Chihombori-Quao, the former permanent representative of the African Union to the United States, powerfully states, the aid Africa receives is insignificant 'peanuts' compared with what the west has taken from the continent. Afrofuturism requires restorative justice. Yet, in the aftermath, Black and Indigenous communities have not only survived. They have created. They have built technologies of renewal, from kinship systems to cultural codes, ontologies that do not submit to nihilistic pessimism, and spirit-based epistemologies that contribute to insurgent data practices. This is the essence of ancestral intelligence – what we call the real AI. Afrofuturism, then, is not a niche or a novelty. It is the future done well – a future that is accountable, embodied, culturally rooted and morally urgent. And in this reactionary moment of AI hype, digital displacement, incels and disaffected rightwing accelerationists, characterized by some as the Dark Enlightenment, Afrofuturism – and ancestral intelligence more broadly – offer our best chance to imagine futures worth living in. For all its reach, AI is bound by the logic of its creators – logics shaped by biased large language models, anti-Black racism, capitalist extraction and techno-utopianism. AI today is coded with the biases of its time and its makers. Because of this, it too often obscures, exploits or erases the very communities who have long practiced their own form of collective healing intelligence: ancestral intelligence. This is the real AI. AfroRithms from the Future – a collaborative, storytelling game Professor Brooks co-designed with Ahmed Best, Jade Fabello, Eli Kosminsky and others – offers a path forward aligned with other imagination games amplifying Black and Indigenous futures as pathways that can leverage ancestral intelligence for us all. Imagine AI griots that channel the wisdom of Angela Davis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Steve Biko or Kwame Nkrumah, revealing the hidden architectures of power, or economic models that dismantle the exploitative structures inherited from Jim Crow, apartheid or colonialism. This is not fantasy. It's what happens when we channel ancestral wisdom through speculative play. AfroRithms is both world-building and world-remaking. In the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM), we see blueprints for a different kind of intelligence – one rooted in kinship, reciprocity, imagination and healing. While some futurists speak only in data and charts, Sará King offers a different map: the body. In her Science of Social Justice, King defines healing as integral to futures literacy. This approach forms the basis for building an AI tool in development she calls the 'Mirror of Loving Awareness' – cultivating mutual attunement and serving as a neural network of the soul. When we fuse King's wisdom with the speculative, meditation and imagination become inseparable, giving rise to a new form of futures work rooted in ancestral intelligence. This depth of feeling is what Ahmed Best calls the Emotional Engine – a pathway to the driving emotional force that moves us toward fundamental change in how the future feels. It is empathy, purpose, and healing made kinetic. It's what activates futures not just as ideas, but as lived emotional truths. As Stanford computer science student Anabelle Colmenares observes, ancestral wisdom and AI aren't opposites – they curve back toward each other. The deeper you go into one, the closer you come to the other. Continuing this convergence of healing and technological foresight, Philip Butler explores the nexus of Blackness, neuroscience, technology and spirituality to shape radically pluralistic and liberatory futures. He is the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly designed conversational AI with embedded mental health capacities – an evolution in artificial cognition grounded in culturally attuned, healing-centered design. Together, King, Best and Butler advance a future where care, consciousness and ancestral wisdom become the very architecture of AI. The work of Toniesha Taylor at the Center for Africana Futures at Texas Southern University and the non-profit community work of LaWana Richmond and the Grioneers operate at the intersection of AI, visioning, the metaverse and technological futures to prepare young people for opportunities in policy and personal development. Audrey Williams amplifies speculative storytelling and writers with Ancestral Futures. Countering the Dark Enlightenment, Alan Clark creates 'the world's most dangerous comix' through Afrofuturist landscapes. Julian Chambliss at Michigan State University actively recovers lost Black historic civic futures. Nina Woodruff, Jasmine Wade and Kaya Fortune reawaken youth agency through the Community Futures School envisioning Oakland in 2045. Nyame Brown conjures artistic Black utopias in his Onyx universe. Joshua Mays literally covers Oakland in murals of Afrofuturist technicolor, reimagining it as the city of Olgaruth. Stacey Robinson, co-creator of Black Kirby alongside John Jennings, visual artists Quentin VerCetty, Tim Fielder, digital scientist Zaika dos Santos, curator Natasha A Kelly, cosplayer Shannon Theus and the First Noble Institute of the Netherlands reclaim political and visual space for the Black imagination. Their artistic productions are not only illustrations – they're glyphs, visual nommo, sigils and frequencies of alternate time loops. Then there is Sheree Renée Thomas, whose editorial hand has shaped two volumes of Dark Matter and, recently, Africa Risen, anthologies of speculative African-centered literature that remind us that the future is not inevitable – it is curated. Tiffany Barber curated the End of the World with New York Live Arts, and we survived Covid-19. The work of Sahelian performance artist Ibrahim Oumarou Yacouba AKA Sage Soldat, Cameroon Afrofuturist Nkolo Blondel and South African sound artist Michael Bhatch engage ancestral intelligence at the nexus of heritage and digital innovation. These creators prove that African speculative innovation is not a niche – it is a necessity. It is how Black people carry our futures without dropping our past. 1 The broligarchs hierarchy v our collective agency The current obsession with order through authoritarianism and fantasies of xenophobic neo-feudal enclaves is countered by Afrofuturism's decentralized communities. Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower narratives envisions grassroots networks thriving amid collapse, rejecting top-down control. 2 Technology as control v liberation The PayPal mafia and their ilk frame technology as an accelerant of capitalist alienation, transhumanism and a lack of support for democracy. Afrofuturism reimagines it as emancipatory. Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer explores digital consciousness as a site of resistance. Here, innovation fosters connection, not subjugation. 3 Historical amnesia v ethical memory The techno-authoritarian nostalgia for a mythologized past ignores the violence embedded in historical hierarchies. Afrofuturism insists on confronting legacies of oppression to avoid their repetition, rejecting their a-historical escapism and attempts at the agency reduction of African peoples. 4 Collapse v sustainable futurity The techno-authoritarian impulse welcomes societal collapse as a Darwinian purge. Afrofuturism rejects this nihilism, prioritizing sustainable communities characterized by a spirit of Ubuntu and ecological balance countering the authoritarian death-drive with a commitment to intergenerational care. The techno-authoritarians offer a future stripped of empathy – a regression to domination disguised as pragmatism. Afrofuturism, by contrast, asserts that another world is not only possible but already being built. It challenges us to wield technology as a tool for justice, or what our ancestors called Maat, to honor history without being shackled to it, and to craft communities grounded in equity. In an age of climate crisis and resurgence of fascism, this vision is not merely artistic – it is a political imperative. The techno-authoritarians' fatalism is a surrender; Afrofuturism is a rallying cry. Lonny Avi Brooks is Professor and Chair of Communication at Cal State East Bay, co-founder of the AfroRithm Futures Group, and co-creator of AfroRithms From The Future, a visionary storytelling game that imagines liberated futures through Black, Indigenous, and Queer perspectives Reynaldo Anderson is Associate Professor of Africology and African American Studies Temple University Acknowledgements: we wish to acknowledge Ben Hamamoto and Sheree Renée Thomas for their review of this article and their thoughtful suggestions and edits.
Middle East Eye
18-02-2025
- Politics
- Middle East Eye
Princeton University implicated in Gaza and Sudan wars, report says
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. New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters 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 Trump lays out blueprint to deport pro-Palestinian foreign nationals Read More » 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. 'I didn't read it': The campaign to ban a pro-Palestine book at Princeton Read More » 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."
