Apodaca I’m a visual artist living in San Diego. McRae I’m a graduate student in Psychology at UCLA and live in Los Angeles.
On the heels of mass demonstrations on college campuses across the U.S., calls for divestment from the genocide remain strong. On May 14, nearly a month after the first Palestine solidarity camp began, the UC Investment Office revealed that $32 billion of the university’s $175 billion holdings are linked to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. While 18% of UC’s investments is certainly a large sum, in the context of UC San Diego, where ties to the military-industrial complex are ubiquitous, calls for divestment can be more nuanced.
According to data from the University of California Information Center, 7% of research grants at the University of California came from the Department of Defense over the past decade. The University of California, San Diego, world-renowned for its scientific research, received $1.35 billion in research funding in 2019 and $592 million from the Department of Defense over the past five years. By comparison, the next most highly funded UC campus from the Department of Defense was UCLA, which received $230 million. It’s hard to determine how much of that amount goes to weapons production, since the Department of Defense also funds research in the fields of neurobiology research and cell morphology, according to a Guardian article.
But extrapolating data from the Center for Defense Technical Information found that of 598 University of California research grants funded by the Department of Defense since 2010, excluding congressional medical research, 161 used words like “military,” “weapons,” “defense,” “terrorism,” “naval” or “surveillance.” Additionally, grants from the University of California, San Diego, explicitly included weapons development or counterterrorism goals, including $964,000 in grant funding. To investigate “Israel-Hamas relations in suppressing terrorism from Gaza.”
Adding fuel to the fire, UC San Diego’s Jacobs School of Engineering’s Corporate Partnerships Program helps students find opportunities in the engineering industry through recruitment, internships, and fellowships with defense industry leaders. Eight members of Jacobs’ board of directors are leading defense contractors. According to UC Awards Explorer, from 2015 to 2023, BAE Systems, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and non-contractors such as the Army, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Israeli Ministry of Defense sponsored many UC San Diego research projects.
From a historical perspective, the corporate militarization of UC San Diego is not a new development, but rather an original intent from its founding. In a 2015 talk at UCSD, political theorist Mike Davis characterized the San Diego military-industrial complex as an iron triangle made up of three points: 1) military bases, 2) defense contractors, and 3) UC San Diego. As Davis notes, the founding of UCSD by General Dynamics and Roger Revell was intended to fill San Diego’s naval and aerospace research gap during the Cold War. Any other non-military research at the university was meant to be merely spinoffs. This meant that defense industry leaders would direct engineering research as well as political science and neurobiology.
This also means that the military-industrial complex can easily extract cheap labor from student researchers. Graduate research labor costs the DoD $26,000-38,000 for an average nine-month contract, cheaper than hiring a full-time person at an average of $88,000 per year. Although lab researchers are expected to work no more than 20 hours per week, many graduate students spend 40-60 hours or more in the lab per week, creating surplus value for the DoD. However, research grants are budgeted at a much higher rate per student researcher than they are actually paid, because UC takes 50-60 percent of grants as overhead.
That is why the UC San Diego student union should consider labor exploitation by the Department of Defense and defense contractors in preparation for a future strike. A starting point for labor exploitation could be amending the union’s contract demands to allow students to choose where their funds come from. The student union could also work to gradually reduce DoD funding or put a cap on the number of research projects sponsored by the Department of Defense. Student researchers who choose to take their labor away from DoD projects should be guaranteed transitional funding, and the university should divest from the genocide.
