The 75th Student Senate at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB) passed a resolution Wednesday calling for the divestment of the university from defense companies, as well as the disclosure of financial information by administrators, amid the war in Gaza.
The associated student legislative body voting 18 in favor, four against, and two abstaining.
The resolution also emphasizes the need for compliance with public records requests and increased outreach with the student body.
According to the resolution, UC Santa Barbara has accepted $18.3 million from defense-based corporations through research grants and $3.32 million in private philanthropic donations during the past academic year. The resolution links some of these corporations to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) and global resource extraction efforts.
The resolution further stated that UCSB received 277 research grants worth $187.7 million from entities associated with the Department of Defense. This information was included in a letter from the UCSB Gaza Solidarity Encampment to the university’s administration, demanding divestment from defense contractors.
In a statement to KEYT, UC Santa Barbara clarified that the university does not engage in classified or weapons research and the campus conducts only fundamental research under export control regulations, which allows for the open publication, dissemination, and use of research information.
On May 20, in response to a 2021 California Public Records Act (CPRA) request, UCSB released copies of its 2016-2021 military contracts with weapons manufacturers, reports Marcy Winograd, co-chair of the Central Coast Antiwar Coalition. [Note: these documents have yet to be independently verified]
UCSB shared contracts with General Dynamics, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now named RTX), and Northrop Grumman. However, the university stated it had no records of existing contracts with Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, or Northrop Grumman.
“Our public university risks becoming a private weapons and surveillance lab with a few wandering poets and philosophers among the fig and Eucalyptus trees. These released contracts are a hint of what’s to come if we don’t choose another path,” said Winograd. “We need to transition from an institution serving up cheap labor for war and colonization to a university that empowers our youth for a sustainable and life-affirming future.”
The resolution also states approximately $32 billion in assets owned by the University of California system, which comprises nearly one-fifth of the system’s total assets, is due to connections with defense contractors.
The resolution also calls for UC Santa Barbara’s administration to publicly disclose retirement and pension programs, endowment pools, and the UC Foundation’s holdings, as well as the personal tax returns and external financial or education board representations of the UCSB Chancellor, Vice Chancellors, and Board of Trustees members.
“This resolution aims neither to condemn a country, a people, or a community nor to determine a political solution or cast moral judgment, but is solely aimed at ending our University’s support of companies that enable human rights violations,” the resolution states.
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University of California should get out of the war mongering business
TIMOTHY – Absolutely. The Regents have their fingers in a lot of death, not just with Israel, but with all the research and development in the nuclear weapons field. The UC system should be in the business of education, not furthering the planet’s destruction.
So if I understand correctly, the students want UC to sell the shares it owns in certain companies to somebody else. The companies, not caring who owns their shares, will continue doing exactly what they’re doing now. So nothing will change in the world, except the students’ self-perception of how morally pure they are will go way up. Is that about right?
What does person with a PhD in French literature from SUNY- Plattsburgh know for sure? I don’t know, but I’m not calling the French literature Dept. to ask for help assembling my Ikea furniture or for help in filling out my ballot, amongst other things.
PhD academics can be unintelligent, particularly when acting from hubris. All of us are prone to f-ing up under the influence of hubris, academics seem overly prone to thinking that their credential equals expertise beyond the actual.
By hubris, I mean saying things like “I was valedictorian of my high school and am a PhD candidate in the humanities at Harvard so you must agree with me that what Israel is doing in Gaza is genocide”. It is horrible, I want it to stop, but it is not genocide. The war in Gaza is not even a war crime, and shouting something louder doesn’t make it so.
Students protesting today have almost zero at stake compared to Vietnam era student protestors.
Students in that era had student deferments from the military draft. Getting kicked out of school or arrested and/or flunking out while sorting out the legal system could mean you could be drafted into the war service and maybe get infantry. If you got beaten with a billy club you were not only not getting a cash settlement, you might not even get stitches or even an aspirin. You had the right to an attorney, but the phone could be broken for days. You were supposed to be fed, and maybe you’d get a little mini cup of peanut butter a couple times a day. Some of this new crew wouldn’t last an hour under the conditions the 60’s protestors handled
In an academic setting, I expect to be able to discuss use of terminology and facts rather than feelings.
I’m OK with discussing feelings as well because war it cruel and we should all have feelings about it. Sometime we humans flip flop between feelings and facts in the same sentence and it gets hard to communicate.
Bumper sticker slogans like Divest from Genocide look good but require the divestor to properly define genocide and they may logically conclude they are not invested in genocide thus no need to divest. The students description of “genocide” is just that. A description. There are subjective criteria that go into definitions and academics should follow those steps.
End all Imperialism is another good bumpersticker that needs fleshing out. In this context it would be helpful to dispense with the word “all” because there is imperialism going on in Africa, Venezuela is talking about annexing an oil rich part of Guyana, China is gobbling up Filipino and Vietnamese islands, Russia is expanding into Georgia and Ukraine so ending all of it is a great idea, but lets stick to the topic at hand which is Gaza and then we can move to the west bank where jewish settlements can be discussed as possible imperialism. Small “i” with Russian Imperialism being big “I”.