Mudders Against Murder hosts first teach in of the year, invites new students to organize against military industrial complex

On Sept. 6, Mudders Against Murder held a teach-in about their demands for Harvey Mudd College to cut ties with weapons manufacturers and defense companies. The teach-in highlighted the college’s current ties to defense companies and emphasized the broader implications of the military technology that Mudd students’ labor is helping create. 

The campaign, which became a chapter of national anti-militarism organization Dissenters in the spring, has specifically called for an end to defense projects in Harvey Mudd’s engineering and computer science “clinic” programs, where juniors and seniors complete projects with outside companies for academic credit. The campaign has also opposed Harvey Mudd’s Office of Career Services bringing defense companies to campus for career fairs. 

HMC sells student labor to defense companies, MAM says

In the past five years, HMC’s clinic program has had over 57 contracts with weapons and defense companies, according to MAM. By MAM’s calculation, the college is selling over $60,000 of student labor to defense contractors & National Defense Labs through the program this year.A student presenter, who requested to remain anonymous in this article to prevent retaliation from administrators, named HMC’s partnership with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory — which receives 90% of its funding from the U.S. Department of Defense — as an example. “Mudd has sold over $150,000 worth of their students’ labor to Lincoln Labs to help drones detect and track communication devices. Let your imagination run wild, speculate how this technology could be used,” the speaker said. 

The presenter elaborated on how HMC has rejected clinic sponsors in the past due to concerns surrounding surveillance and disparate impacts on certain communities, referring specifically to ShotSpotter, a security technology company that rapidly locates outdoor gun fire for faster police response times based on the placement of sensors in certain neighborhoods.

“It’s interesting how those concerns were so clear for ShotSpotter, yet were ignored for Lincoln,” the speaker said.  

Intel and Texas Instruments, two other companies with ties to the clinic program, have supplied Russia with analog devices in order to fuel their weapons production and their invasion of Ukraine. 

“Mudd has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of their students’ labor to Intel and Texas Instruments, two of the companies that are circumventing sanctions to aid Russia’s war effort [in Ukraine] and to make the war longer and more destructive.” 

The presenter also spoke about OCS’s upcoming event entitled “Rockets, Rovers, and Rollercoaster: A look inside ATA Engineering” on Sept. 23. Despite advertising the event as a potential career opportunity, they spoke about how HMC has not acknowledged the company’s involvement in surveillance both inside the United States and at the border. 

“Strangely no mention of the Predator drones [ATA helps model, analyze and test], or the fact that many of their jobs require you to be eligible to receive a security clearance. [These Predator drones] were used for recon by the Air Force and the CIA and were later modified to carry hellfire missiles and other munitions. And while they were still in use by the military, they were also used to surveil and arrest a man in North Dakota…after [a SWAT team] borrowed it from the Department of Homeland Security.”

MAM also pointed out the ties that many defense companies, such as Boeing and Northrop Grumman, have to the Zionist entity’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“The GBU 39 missile that [was] used in an airstrike on a displacement camp [in Gaza] was made by Boeing. Mudd’s last clinic project with them was in 2019, [where they worked with] Millennium Space Systems, a Boeing subsidiary.” 

Harvey Mudd also has ties with Northrop Grumman, which was just awarded a 8.9 million dollar contract for 30mm MK44 Stretch cannons for the Israeli military. The company will be present at the HMC career fair on September 25. 

The MAM campaign since March

The presenter also went over how MAM launched their campaign last year on March 26 with a teach-in and a schoolwide petition that 10% of the HMC student body signed within two days of its launch. The petition has currently amassed 740 signatures. 

On April 6-7 MAM distributed flyers to prospective students at HMC’s admitted students day which outlined their demands and contained a QR code to the group’s petition. A few days later on April 9, over a dozen students delegated their demands and provided a copy of their petition to HMC’s director of career services, Shannon Brawn. The next day, the group delegated the same demands to Engineering Clinic Director, Steven Santana. 

MAM’s demands were continuously ignored by the administration, which led to 36 students disrupting President Harriet B. Nembhard’s speech at Harvey Mudd’s Alumni Weekend on April 27. On April 30, 20 students shut down the annual Luncheon for HMC’s Projects Day clinic lunch where students listed 12 defense companies that MAM wanted the Clinic Program to cut ties with. A week later on May 10, students delegated and passed around zines to the Board of Trustees. The semester wrapped up at graduation on May 12, where a student speaker from MAM spoke at graduation to a heartening standing ovation. 

Mudders Against Muder is just one student organization in the backdrop of a much larger movement across other STEM schools and software companies. The teach-in highlighted the work done by groups such as No Tech for Apartheid and highlighted employees at Google who were protesting the company’s involvement in perpetuating the ongoing genocide in Palestine. 

The teach-in concluded with the student speaker discussing the importance of MAM’s campaign and the potential it holds to change the landscape at HMC and beyond. “We have a responsibility to make it as difficult as possible for [defense companies] to recruit, retain, and use our labor. And we can start right here at Mudd by working to kick those companies off of our campus.”