By Tarik Aougab and Marissa Loving

Disclaimer: While we planned a Summer@ICERM program with other people, the opinions expressed in this blog post reflect only the views and experiences of the two authors. 

We’re writing this post for two reasons: 

1. We dedicated several weeks during one of the busiest times of the year (towards the beginning of the Fall 2022 semester) to crafting a carefully written proposal for an undergraduate summer research experience at the Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics (ICERM). After initially accepting our proposal, ICERM rescinded their acceptance when we said that we were not comfortable with the program being partially funded by the National Security Agency (NSA). We don’t want others to waste the same valuable time and effort that we did and so we’re writing this as both a public service announcement and a warning.  
2. We are incredibly frustrated. We feel like we were treated callously by a major mathematics institute that couldn’t care less about our time or the opportunities our program would have provided for historically excluded students and mathematicians. So, to be completely honest, we are writing this because ICERM acted like our concerns about accepting NSA funding (and how that decision would impact both our goals and our integrity) were meaningless and silly, and now we want to be heard. 

After giving a very brief summary of the events as we experienced them, we thought the most effective way to share this story would be with receipts – quotes from the email back-and-forth we had with an ICERM representative. We have chosen not to reveal the identity of the person with whom we corresponded, as we are quite certain that these replies reflect the collective position of the ICERM board, as opposed to the ICERM representative’s personal opinions on the matter. We want to emphasize that the purpose of this blogpost is to highlight how normalized it is to accept funding within mathematics without being critical about where that funding is coming from or how it has been obtained. Thus, this recounting of events is not intended to target any one individual.

We also want to acknowledge that because of how pervasive and unquestioned the use of national security, defense, and military funding in mathematics is, it makes sense that ICERM wasn’t prepared for us to say that we will not accept funding from an agency that proliferates violence, racism, and oppression on a global scale. However, what truly shocked us was how little ICERM was willing to engage with us on this incredibly important topic, or to relinquish any control or authority over the funding process.

We’re led to believe that ICERM’s board was afraid to set a precedent in which organizers have any say whatsoever over major funding decisions, even when the source of the money impacts the capacity of the organizers to carry out the very programming they approved of in the first place. But we’ll let readers decide this for themselves.

After submitting our proposal, we received the good news that ICERM chose it and was ready to move forward with us in planning the Summer’s programming:

We replied to this email and explained that we weren’t comfortable accepting NSA funding for this programming. Both of us have publicly pledged to avoid this sort of support with the Just Mathematics Collective’s campaign “Mathematics Beyond Secrecy and Surveillance”. We asked if there was any leeway when it came to this plan; in response, we were sent a breakdown of ICERM’s budgeting for the program, and the proposal that we (as organizers) could be paid using other moneys but