The base of power for U.S. domination overseas lies so close to our lives that we can’t even see it, let alone attack it effectively. Research essential to military and civilian programs designed to insure U.S. control over the Third World has saturated the American campus. The university budget floats on subsidies geared toward national security. Research grants permit on-site investigations for basic intelligence. Quasi-governmental institutes and centers provide extra facilities and legitimatize off-campus roles as well as secrecy. Out of such “academic and scholarly” activity spring the mechanisms of domination and oppression. It is the role of student radicals to expose the sociologists, physicists and engineers who claim academic immunity and hide behind apolitical disguises.
A program geared towards throwing military work off campus requires an examination of two other related issues: (1) the role of universities and academics in American society, and (2) the nature (i.e., goals, means and results) of American overseas involvement, particularly in the Third World. These political issues can be dealt with concretely rather than abstractly when a chemistry professor doing research on chemical-biological weapons has his classes harassed and disrupted. The sociologist who can lecture about “scientific objectivity and neutrality” in research must be exposed as a counter-insurgency expert and his legitimacy as a spokesman from “science” must be blunted with copious quotes from his latest secret report on the newest “pacification techniques for preventing revolution.” Toward this end, NACLA, along with Students for a Democratic Society, the Radical Education Project and possibly the University Christian Movement and other campus-based movement groups, is now in the process of planning a conference for mapping out strategies for confronting campus military operations and research. Building from past experience (e.g., at the University of Pennsylvania) and utilizing detailed knowledge of contracts and the individual recipients, the conference will attempt to spell out specific action programs leading to politicization of the campus. If North Americans are interested in developments in Latin America, they must under stand the mechanisms of domination – civilian and military – that have their base of power within the confines of U.S. universities. This must be one of the foci of our attack.
At present the conference is projected for November 10-12 in Chicago. If you are interested in working on the Conference or want further information, write October Conference, c/o NACLA, Box 57, Cathedral Station, New York, New York 10025.
Further announcements will appear in succeeding issues of this Newsletter as well as in New Left Notes.
