The University of Hawaii is about to get hundreds of millions of dollars to do military research

The University of Hawaii is poised to renew a controversial contract to conduct research for the U.S. military worth up to $285 million over 10 years, in what administrators call a major source of federal funding for the university.

While supporters say the Applied Research Laboratory creates well-paying jobs conducting research with important civilian applications, critics say the university shouldn’t be engaged in a partnership that includes work for the military, some of which is classified.

Of particular concern is the laboratory’s sponsor, the U.S. Navy, which has been embroiled in controversy after back-to-back spills of jet fuel into the Pearl Harbor drinking water system, which serves some 93,000 people, in 2021.

Highlighting the fault line between university administrators and their critics, the University of Hawaii Board of Regents on Friday unanimously passed a motion effectively allowing administrators to finalize the contract, despite a resolution by the UH student senate demanding the university sever its ties to the military.

Vassilis Syrmos, UH’s vice president for research and innovation, said the outcry reprises one that started when the university began its partnership with the Navy in the early 2000s.

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“The catastrophic event at Red Hill brought all those feelings up again,” he said. “There is no way to sugar coat this thing.”

Native Hawaiian students and residents are leading the push against the Department of Defense, he said.

“It’s a movement,” Syrmos said. “It’s a Native Hawaiian renaissance against the DOD presence. It’s real, and I don’t think it’s going away.”

Momi Bachiller, a fourth-year student of molecular cell biology and Hawaiian language, said it’s disheartening to students that the administration is moving ahead with the contract renewal despite vocal opposition.

“We are stakeholders, but they don’t respect us,” said Bachiller, who also serves as a senator for the Associated Students of the University of Hawaii.

When the center was founded in 2008, the University of Hawaii became the nation’s fifth U.S. Navy University-Affiliated Research Center. The other so-called UARCs are located at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Washington, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Texas at Austin.

The UARCs are meant to serve as centers for research into critical Navy and national defense technology, focusing on core competencies of university researchers. In the case of UH, they include ocean science, astronomy, optics and renewable energy. The official name of Hawaii’s UARC is the Applied Research Laboratory at the University of Hawaii.

In a presentation to the Board of Regents earlier this month, Syrmos alluded to early criticisms of the center, noting that Denise Konan, then UH Manoa’s Interim Chancellor, initially recommended against going forward based on campus consultations. But the Board of Regents later approved the center after learning that dozens of UH’s most productive researchers supported it, Syrmos’ presentation said.

The presentation also quoted UH’s then-president, David McClain, who recognized the controversy but said researchers should be able to pursue their interests, even if some people didn’t like it.

“Because of the inherent diversity and need for freedom of inquiry which in my view does and should characterize the academy, I tend to be biased in favor of measures to support the individual scholar no matter how popular — or even more importantly, how unpopular — his or her research interests,” McClain is quoted as saying.

Nearly two decades later, the center and its Applied Research Laboratory, is a major source of funding for UH. In the past fiscal year, the Department of Defense provided about $65 million of some $615 million in so-called extramural funding the university brought in for research, Syrmos said. The research lab alone accounted for $15 million to $20 million he said.

Supporters include high-profile academics like Chip Fletcher, interim dean of UH’s School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology. He cited ARL’s support of diversity, equity and inclusion in written testimony to the Board of Regents supporting the contract.

“By engaging with underrepresented groups and providing opportunities for students from diverse backgrounds to participate in high-impact research, the ARL is helping to build a more inclusive and equitable academic environment,” Fletcher wrote.

Among the Applied Research Laboratory’s projects related to ocean science is the Rapid Resilient Reefs for Coastal Defense, a $27 million, five-year project conducted in partnership with the University of California San Diego/Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Florida Atlantic University and the Ohio State University.

The purpose is to create artificial reefs of fast-growing coral that mimic the biodiversity of natural reefs, said Joshua Levy, the project’s technical program manager. The hope is that such reefs can protect coastal communities in a time of rising sea levels, defending not against warships but the effects of climate change, Levy said.

“These are things that affect coastal communities around the world,” he said.

Other projects focus on information technology. On Maui, a 52-member team at the Vanguard Center of High Performance Computing is doing research into creating computers capable of complex tasks like engineering, weather forecasting and cybersecurity, says Tiare Martin, the center’s director.

“The vision is to have labs across the state,” Martin said.

Despite its economic benefits, the military has fostered animosity and mistrust in Hawaii for generations. The use of Koohalawe as a bombing target starting in World War II prompted protests in the 1970s. The herbicide Agent Orange was tested under a U.S. Army contract at the University of Hawaii’s Kauai Agricultural Research Station in the 1960s. Verdant Makua Valley in West Oahu was taken over by the military for live-fire military exercises for generations, from around 1930 to early 2004; the Army’s lease of Makua continues until 2029.

Against this backdrop, critics point to an overarching concern about Hawaii being a center for military research.

“You have to put it in the context of a genocidal settler colonialism,” Bachiller, the student government senator, said in an interview.

She was one of six students senators who testified against the research contract at Friday’s Board of Regents meeting.

Punia Pale, the student government treasurer, testified that UH “deepens the wounds of colonialization and exploitation” by using Native Hawaiian land without consent.

“These lands should be returned to the Hawaiian people, and they should not be used for research that serves the U.S. military interests – especially when such interests have historically oppressed Indigenous people around the world, currently now Palestine,” he said.

Kawai Kupuni, another student government senator, noted that academic research should advance human knowledge, not be locked up as top secret.

“Free inquiry will never be compatible with classified research,” she said.

Among those on the other side of the debate is former Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercombie, a current university regent who also served nine terms a U.S. representative from Hawaii. It’s not uncommon for military information to be classified, Abercrombie said in an interview. That includes parts of the Pentagon budget, which he was responsible for passing as a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

But, Abercrombie said, simply because some UH research is classified doesn’t mean professors are developing weapons there. Syrmos and others insist that’s not happening at the laboratory.

“They kind of set positions,” Abercrombie said of the protesters. “And no one talks to each other about what it is and is not because that might interfere with their ideological perceptions. And I understand that.”

But to suggest university professors are surreptitiously developing weapons under a cloak of military secrecy is “offensive to the integrity of the researchers,” Abercrombie said.

Joining Abercombie and the other regents who unanimously supported the military contract were long-time members of the UH community. Dr. Bill Haning is an emeritus professor of psychiatry at UH’s John A. Burns School of Medicine, where he’s been a clinician, educator and researcher with UH since 1989. Lori Tochiki served more than a decade as associate dean for student services at UH’s William S. Richardson School of Law.

Joshua Faumuina, a law student who serves as the Board of Regents’ interim student regent, said he shared the concerns of critics.

But, he said, “I would rather have that money with us than with a weapons developer.”

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This story was originally published by Honolulu Civil Beat and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.