Figure 6 shows the amount of funding awarded to various Stanford reseachers since 2002, in millions. Hover over the bars to see more interactive information about the number of projects proposed and number of projects sponsored.
As the chart depicts, Boeing has funded the most projects (52) and also awarded the most money (over 40 million dollars). Lockheed Martin also funded a sizeable number of projects (31), with over 10 million dollars of funding awarded. Notably, there have not been any projects funded by General Dynamics since 2002, although there were some before that period. Altogether, these top 6 weapons companies have awarded Stanford researchers about 60 million dollars worth of funding. As hovering over the bars shows, the vast majority of proposed projects end up being sponsored, revelaing the consistency of funding between these entities. In this way, Stanford's financial links to war appear not just in its endowment, but also through active research ties to companies profiting from war. Like the case in the grants awarded by the DoD, many of the projects funded here do not have extremely direct links to weaponry or war, but the financial ties with the weapons companies themselves reveal that these companies find Stanford research important for their success.
Note that this section is just the tip of the iceberg - Stanford's relationship to the military industrial complex far eclipses anything this introductory analysis can offer.
Stanford has long been an intellectual citadel for mouthpieces of empire, headquarted at Hoover Institution, who seek to establish US might not just through hard military power, but through soft cultural power. These conservative, pro-US military intellectuals have long used Stanford University as a base for providing the ideological justifications for war.
In the aftermath of World War 2, Stanford's relationship to empire-building transcending the realm of ideology, with DoD funding skyrocketing as Stanford became a bastion for Cold War-era research. The Stanford Research Institute was built, hosting a wide array of classified research projects related to war efforts in Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Stanford, a bastion for elite education, became a hub for not just justifying empire, but implementing war to preserve the empire.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the student movement against the Vietnam War successfully fought to end classified war research on campus. A major part of this movement was the protracted effort to research the infrastructure of Stanford's relationship war, and to disemminate it as broadly as possible. This social investigational and educational effort to understand the context and propagate it to the community proved to be instrumental in waging a successful campaign against Stanford's research involvement in the war, striking a small but important blow against the US imperialism right here at Stanford campus.
Today, while the Vietnam War is over, Stanford's ties to the war economy have only grown. Some of these links have been illustrated in this article, but much of this infrastructure remains to be understood.
Altogether, this visual reconnaissance reveals just a small slice of the extent of the US military industrial complex as well as Stanford's relationship to this behemoth.
May we or our descendants live to see a planet free from the scourge of militarism and imperialism, as we continue the struggle towards liberation for all people and land.