Members of the Indiana University Board of Trustees and the IU Foundation:
As scientists, educators, and workers committed to the liberation of knowledge production from systems of profit and oppression, we at Science for the People– Bloomington stand in solidarity with the IU Divestment Coalition’s demand for an ethics clause in institutional investment, and call for the same in research policy for Indiana University and the IU Foundation.
We support this policy change because the current investment framework at Indiana University contains no safeguards against funding or participation in projects that violate human rights, deepen global inequities, or militarize science. As researchers situated within a public university, we have a responsibility to reject partnerships, grants, or contracts that contribute to surveillance, fossil-fuel extraction, militarism, or the development of artificial intelligence systems that exploit labor and reinforce imperial power. While Science for the People takes the position that neutral or value-free science is impossible, this position also demands that science must be conducted as a public good. We ask: Who defines what knowledge or technology a community needs? Who benefits? And who bears the environmental, political, or social costs of the infrastructures behind it?
We are deeply troubled by the exploitation of our intellectual labor for the production of military technology, and call for an end to such educational and research partnerships, including that between IU and NSA Crane. Militarized technologies amount to human rights violations not only in their destruction of life but in their maintenance of conflict in the pursuit of profit. Such science harms humans and the environment, compromises the goal of science as knowledge production through investigations of nature, and demands secrecy within scientific practice conflicting with the ideals of open science and genuine collaboration.
We also offer grave concerns regarding so-called “AI for Good” initiatives and techno-fixes to the climate crisis, such as proposals for generative-AI weather-prediction tools for Global South farming communities, and as an alternative to the tacit skill and expertise of trained scientific labor. AI systems do not float in the cloud; they run on data centers that drain water, burn fossil fuels, and harden surveillance regimes at home and abroad. Much of this infrastructure is entangled with defense funding, dual-use research, and militarized applications that are deliberately obscured behind humanitarian, developmental rhetoric, and prioritizes profit, control, and geopolitical dominance over human well-being.
As the urgency of the global climate crisis increases, we reiterate concerns on the investment of scientific labor for fossil fuel extraction. In this privatization of science, which leaks into the public sector by way of university investments, impacting what research receives support and what is taught in the classroom, knowledge production is stalled while harmful excuses for solutions are pursued in the name of corporate, not public or global, interests. The containment of science within such corporate efforts has historically hindered the open understanding of the climate crisis and, as such, steps towards its mitigation. The combination of the vastly negative impact of extractivism and climate change on people and the environment, and the siloing of science for corporate interest over social benefit, constitutes an ethical violation within scientific spaces such as our university.
Students, faculty, and staff of Indiana University must not be complicit in human rights violations to pursue science, or be held to free market ideals in what knowledge production is or is not funded.
Our demands are simple:
- No university investment or research partnership with projects that violate human rights or exploit workers under the banner of “innovation”.
- No collaboration with projects that harm or destroy the environments of working people at home and abroad.
- A transparent, democratic review process for all institutional research funding and corporate contracts which includes real and representative input from students, faculty, and staff.
- A commitment to science that serves the people and the planet—not profit, war or empire, and values the production of knowledge through investigations of nature.
As educators, researchers, and STEM workers, we refuse to let our labor be weaponized. IU administration must not impose technologies or partnerships on us until they are proven to not harm people, communities, or ecosystems.
In solidarity with the IU Divestment Coalition, we affirm:
We will not do science that violates human rights; we will build science that restores them.
Signed,
Science for the People- Bloomington