BECAUSE WE KNOW THAT:

a) SRI [ed. note: Stanford Research Institute] does chemical and biological warfare research (tear gas and crop defoliation).

b) SRI has had 55 staff members doing counter-insurgency work in Thailand since 1962.

c) SRI is performing cost analysis of alternative bombing sights over North Vietnam.

d) SRI is doing long-range surveys of investment opportunities in Southeast Asia for US corporations.

e) Many Stanford and SRI trustees are major executives of 1) war-based corporations such as McDonald Douglas, Hewlett-Packard, and General Dynamics, and 2) corporations with heavy investments in Southeast Asia such as Tenneco, Utah Construction, and Kaiser.

f) Many Stanford faculty members consult for or serve as directors of nearby war-based companies, and serve on Defense Department subsidized advisory boards and committees.

FURTHERMORE, WE DEMAND THAT:

a) All contracts, both classified and unclassified, be made public, complete with information on the value of the contracts and the individuals performing the work.

b) Stanford and SRI trustees make public all their corporate and governmental connections.

c) Stanford faculty make public all their governmental and corporate contracts and connections

BY MONDAY OCTOBER 14!

- Statement Regarding the Stanford Research Institute, Unsigned, 1968-69

The 1960s

In response to an escalation of the war in Southeast Asia beginning in 1965 with President Johnson sending ground troops into South Vietnam, anti-war resistance movements began to gather momentum on college campuses. These movements reached a fever pitch by the election of 1968, and saw conscripted men throughout the nation return their draft cards in protest of the United States’ “unwinnable war.” A week later, a nationwide call for students across college campuses to similarly turn in their draft cards in solidarity locally manifested its presence on Stanford’s campus at White Plaza, where activists like David Harris, who had recently been convicted for refusing military induction, were joined by other non-cooperators who stood together to read short statements explaining the anti-war motivations behind their actions.

The draft card actions corresponded to broader resistance in the Bay Area, ignited by the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front Strike at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley at the same time. By the spring of the following year, a broad coalition of campus organizations known as the April Third Movement came together to occupy Stanford’s Applied Electronics Laboratory, which housed classified military electronics research used in Southeast Asia, for nine consecutive days. Using that time to bake bread, take over the printing press, boycott classes, and hold meetings on what constituted appropriate research at Stanford, the sit-in became an important organizing hub for radical groups forming on campus, from which fourteen hundred members ultimately signed a statement of participation. 

Over the next month, militant actions by students increased, escalating in one standoff between thousands of demonstrators pouring out of Frost Amphitheater to confront riot police after they moved to arrest civil resisters calling for the removal of ROTC from campus. Another standoff involved hundreds of demonstrators who blockaded and defaced SRI’s counterinsurgency center at Stanford Industrial Park. Administration canceled classes for the remainder of the year, made mass arrests, and SRI was spun off from Stanford to continue with a more nominally independent program.[1] 

The 2020s

In response to Israel’s campaign to accelerate the genocide in Gaza after the fall of 2023, pro-Palestine student protesters across college campuses organized to push their academic institutions to denounce the genocide, call for a ceasefire, and join the broader BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement. On October 20, 2023, Stanford students initiated a mass rally and 120-day sit-in at White Plaza, beginning in the fall and growing into an area filled with chairs, tables, and a cluster of tents by late February, when the University had UG2 service workers and the Stanford University Department of Public Safety remove the physical structures that comprised the encampment.[2]

A few months later, in April of 2024, students and allied staff and faculty set up a “People’s University of Palestine” encampment in White Plaza, followed shortly by a hunger strike to continue to protest Stanford’s investment in companies linked to Israel’s war in Gaza. This series of protests eventually escalated to a group of protesters occupying the President’s office. Officers from the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Office arrived to arrest the participants, and one year later the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office announced felony charges of conspiracy to commit trespass and vandalism against eight current and three former students who had been involved in the occupation, an announcement followed by another hunger solidarity strike. In January 2026, the trial of the “Stanford 11” began in the Santa Clara County Superior Court.[3]

Around the same time, the DHS murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti during Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota brought over one hundred students, faculty, and staff together for a walk-out coordinated by a coalition of groups, from Tech for Liberation to Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), to protest the ties Stanford has to the surveillance and defense technology company Palantir. Pointing to the university’s failure to engage in financial transparency since the demands made during the hunger strikes, the walk-out connected demands for financial records related to university investments in Israel’s war apparatus to the lack of transparency regarding its dealings with Palantir—a technology company implicated in automated identification and targeting in both the genocide in Gaza and US mass deportation crisis under the current Trump administration. Only a few weeks after the walk-out, the Santa Clara judge for the “Stanford 11” case declared a mistrial after a deadlocked jury could not come to a decision (8–4 for the conviction on vandalism, 9–3 on conspiracy), with prosecutors subsequently declaring their intention to pursue a new trial in the future.[4] 

What is the Role of “The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis”?

In response to the colloquy theme “The Intellectual in a Time of Crisis,” I open with this brief, recursive history of anti-war pasts and presents in the palimpsest space of Stanford’s White Plaza in order to discuss both my understanding of the role of the “intellectual” and of what the nature of this “crisis” exactly is upon which we are collectively meditating. 

During my time at the Stanford Humanities Center, I have been tasked with working on my monograph called Bad Refugees: Manufacturing Statelessness at the Margins of the Global North, which critically traces genealogies of the “Vietnamese crime problem” that emerged in the 1980s in the national racial imaginary across the geography of the transpacific in order to draw attention to the troubled militarized and carceral grounds upon which settler state claims to territorial sovereignty and the right to deport are generally based. Broadly, the book articulates a concept called refugee racial capitalism to present a political economic theory of refugee displacement through war and development, and refugee removal through criminalization and deportation across the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism. Emphasizing the period of post-1975 Southeast Asian refugee resettlement, it particularly engages with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s theorization of the expansion of the carceral state amidst fiscal crisis (by many scholars of neoliberalism, still very much ongoing) in Golden Gulag, accounting for how Vietnamese and other Indochinese refugees arriving in the 1970s formed a special class in the state’s transition “from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism.”[5] Also situated in theories of colonial boomerang (à la Aimé Césaire) and asymmetric theories of global development (à la Walter Rodney), the book moreover concerns itself with charting a cultural and political economic history of the development of California’s oil, auto, aerospace, and tech industries vis-à-vis the nation’s military entanglements across the Asia Pacific region during “The American Century” as being the perverse geography from which refugees were both produced and also eventually resettled.[6] In doing so, it calls attention to the palimpsest landscape of the Golden State’s affluent suburbs—and the academic institutions and Research & Development industries often so central to them—as particularly complicit in constituting the spatialized emplacements and displacements manufactured from the ongoing functioning of what President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed the “military-industrial complex.”[7] 

One thread from this research concerns tracing a surveillance boomerang, as technologies developed in the inter-imperial context of Southeast Asia circulated between the colonial territories and US metropole. A related research paper I recently published examines the case of French and later US surveillance in Indochina/South Vietnam through the rationalization of police databases from analog to digital formats across the 20th century. As Stanford students made protest posters in the late 1960s reading “WE ACCUSE” in bolded letters naming persons such as Stanford President Wallace Sterling’s role in forming the Stanford Research Institute, alumnus and trustee Charles Ducommun in his director role of Lockheed Aircraft, and alumnus Roger Lewis in his chief role at General Dynamics, and as they similarly decried the university’s ties with Palantir founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp this past January as both Stanford alumni and visiting lecturers, this particular recursion can be understood as part of the historical boomerang of surveillance technologies and targets moving across these transpacific circuits that simultaneously built up California’s Silicon Valley economy and the US security state.[8] SRI researchers were in part affiliated with a group of defense contractors called The Jasons who inherited the mantle of scientific collaboration with the government after the Manhattan Project. Some worked on electronics and other areas of research to prototype the first major remote sensor warfare system for experimental use under the then-classified Operation Igloo White. This research, in collaboration with other scientists from across America’s top universities, produced sensor technology, however rudimentary, that eventually boomeranged back to the US-Mexico border in the 1980s to identify and target border crossers during Reagan’s War on Drugs, and beyond to downstream innovations during the US’s so-called “War on Terror.”[9]

Palantir and other technologies reliant on digital automation are therefore themselves the inheritors of these and other technologies developed during the Cold War to discipline and punish decolonial liberation movements across the Global South, from early advances in Geographic Information Systems to optical scanning and automated translation using IBM System/360 computers. Palantir’s role today in both automating the genocide in Gaza in collusion with the State of Israel and in targeting individuals for mass deportation in the United States under the second Trump administration consequently has deeper conditions of emergence that demand us to take up the question implicitly posed by students when they first moved to organize their sit-in in the Applied Electronics Laboratory and echoed in this colloquy: What is the role of the intellectual at Stanford in a time of crisis? By boycotting their classes and meeting to articulate what they understood as the appropriate scope of research at the university, Stanford student dissenters and allied staff and faculty in some sense reflected the impulse of a Gramscian “organic intellectual” to challenge the hegemonic concerns of their home institution. At the same time, Stanford faculty and trustee complicity with SRI in chemical and biological warfare research, electronic surveillance, bombing efficiency studies, spatial counterinsurgency, and investment portfolio speculation in the "war-torn" region reveals the dominant function of the academy in relation to the military-industrial complex during the Cold War into the present. 

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped a uranium bomb on Hiroshima and on August 9 dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, using what the Manhattan Project team of research scientists had developed in their remote laboratories in a more “applied” context. Four months later, the Manhattan Project formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists (later the Federation of American Scientists) to urge for international cooperation regarding the control of nuclear weapons. In the aftermath of the atomic bombings, J. Robert Oppenheimer voiced in his role as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that he “felt a particularly intimate responsibility for…achieving the realization of atomic weapons…[which] dramatized so mercilessly the inhumanity and evil of modern war.” “In some sense,” Oppenheimer declared, “the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”[10] At the same time, across “diaries, reminiscences, interviews, and histories, the Manhattan Project physicists have said they didn't necessarily feel they'd known sin. But they also didn't necessarily feel good about their bomb, and they became preoccupied by how to contain it. They knew that the problem they now faced was, in their words, 'getting the genie back in the bottle.'"[11]

The hubris of the liberal academic who is beholden to the hegemonic concerns of the institution is such that—analogous to Wendy Brown's conceptualization of the modern liberal state as the entity that both produces violence and claims that it is then the only legitimate entity to redress the violence that subjects consequently experience at the hands of the same state—the liberal academic both produces the technological conditions (i.e., said “genie”) from which global social catastrophes are wrought and then professes to be the most legitimate entity to redress the harms produced from the juggernaut of their and their colleagues’ intellectual pursuits.[12] After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not to mention the countless test bombings across the deserts of the American West and the islands of the Pacific, what did it even mean to put the genie back in the bottle, and was it sufficient penance for the sin of actual and perpetual nuclear annihilation posed by the invention of the atomic bomb in the first place? 

I close then by suggesting that this writing is an intervention into this linear-progressive liberal temporality of possible recovery and repair after the destruction of worlds, penned at a time when the ongoing crisis sustained since at least the 1970s has placed us yet again at the intersection of multiple militarized recursions in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, occupied Palestine, and beyond. Caught up in Stanford’s anti-war imperial boomerang during this fellowship year (and, admittedly, in an act of penance myself), I am struck by one more rhetorical recursion on the genie question offered by the gods of Silicon Valley. If what it means to be successful here is to “move fast and break things,” what will it spiritually cost us to adhere to a form of reasoning that is, at its heart, temporally unable to ultimately fix what it will inevitably destroy?

Notes

[1] Siegel, Lenny. Disturbing the War: The Inside Story of the Movement to Get Stanford out of Southeast Asia, 1965-1975. Pacific Studies Center. 2021.

[2] See: “Hundreds Call for University Action in Protest for Palestine.” The Stanford Daily. October 23, 2023. https://stanforddaily.com/2023/10/23/hundreds-call-for-university-action-in-protest-for-palestine/; “Stanford Removes Pro-Palestine Sit-In.” The Stanford Daily. February 20, 2024. https://stanforddaily.com/2024/02/20/university-removes-pro-palestine-sit-in-following-negotiations/.

[3] See: “Pro-Palestine Protesters Occupy Stanford President’s Office.” The Stanford Daily. June 5, 2024. https://stanforddaily.com/2024/06/05/pro-palestine-protesters-occupy-presidents-office/; “Felony Charges Filed against Pro-Palestinian Protestors for Breaking into President’s Office.” The Stanford Daily. April 10, 2025. https://stanforddaily.com/2025/04/10/pro-palestinian-protestors-charged-by-district-attorney-for-breaking-into-presidents-office/.

[4] See: “Student Protests Call on Stanford to Divest from Palantir.” The Stanford Daily. January 22, 2026. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/01/22/student-protests-call-on-stanford-to-divest-from-palantir/; “Mistrial Declared in Stanford Pro-Palestine Protesters’ Case.” The Stanford Daily. February 14, 2026. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/02/14/mistrial-declared-stanford-protesters/; “IDF Soldier Tackles Student at “heated” Tabling Event. The Stanford Daily.” April 23, 2026. https://stanforddaily.com/2026/04/23/idf-soldier-tackles-student-at-heated-tabling-event/.

[5] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.

[6] See: Luce, Henry. “The American Century.” Life, 10, February 17, 1941, 61-65.

[7] National Archives. “President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address (1961).”

[8] See: Leslie, Stuart W. The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford. Columbia University Press, 1993; Harris, Malcolm. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World. Little, Brown and Company, 2023.

[9] See: Finkbeiner, Ann. The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite. Penguin Books, 2007; Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. MIT Press, 1996.

[10] Oppenheimer, J. Robert. “Physics in the Contemporary World.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4, no. 3 (1948): 65–86.

[11] Finkbeiner, The Jasons, 9.

[12] Brown, Wendy. States of Injury. Princeton University Press, 1995.