Date/Time
Date(s) - 09/24/2026
8:00 pm – 9:30 pm
Categories
The Military University:
How Universities Embed Students into the Military-Industrial Complex
At every stage of higher education, undergraduate to advanced degrees, research universities attract young scholars by the hundreds of thousands, promising a chance to work on intellectually stimulating questions and credentials for building a lifelong career. This becomes more pronounced as students gain specialized skills and work on tougher, unanswered problems. So, we are faced with an alarming precedent in which research universities collude with the military-industrial complex in increasingly invasive ways.
Students’ technological advances are integrated into life-ending rather than life-affirming equipment, and schools funnel graduating students directly into corporate defense. Even worse, in the U.S.A. the average university stands as a byproduct of colonialism by default, built atop stolen indigenous land. Whether the university is rotten at its core or whether it is becoming tainted, the wielded knowledge and collective voice of its primary participants, the students, can bring change toward a more peaceful world.
Our Guest Speaker
Crystal Kim is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who served from 2013 to 2019. In 2016, she was stationed as a Marine embassy guard at the U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem. During that experience, she witnessed the Israeli government’s mistreatment and apartheid against the Palestinian people, especially during her trips into the West Bank. After leaving service, Crystal educated herself on the politics and history of Palestine and became aware of the degree of U.S. military’s involvement in the Middle East and everywhere else. She is now a Ph.D. student in physics at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). After the current genocide in Palestine began in 2023, Crystal, along with a large group from Students for Justice in Palestine, helped to found UCSB Researchers Against War (RAW), a majority-graduate-student group seeking to unveil and sever the ties between university research and militarism. RAW has both presented information on UCSB’s hidden military ties to hundreds of student and dampened the military-industrial complex’s ability to recruit on campus.