From jm_collective at inventati.org Thu Nov 17 17:31:49 2022 From: jm_collective at inventati.org (Just Mathematics Collective newsletter) Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2022 16:31:49 +0000 Subject: [jm_collective] Just Mathematics Collective Newsletter, No. 2 Message-ID: Hello! Welcome to the Just Mathematics Collective newsletter. This is a round-up of news about our campaigns and activities, suggestions for how you can help, and reading we've found useful recently. --- News/Announcements --- We are rekindling our email campaign to the AMS, and so we call on all supporters of the NSA campaign to send an email along the lines of the prompt below to AMS officers and ethics committee members. We deserve transparency! Email addresses: Ruth Charney (AMS president): charney at brandeis.edu Boris Hasselblatt (AMS secretary): secretary at ams.org Committee on professional ethics: -David M. Bressoud: bressoud at macalester.edu -Lars Winther Christensen: lars.w.christensen at ttu.edu -Yi-Zhi Huang: yzhuang at math.rutgers.edu -Tasha R. Innis: tinniss at spelman.edu -Robert E Megginson: meggin at umich.edu -Svetlana Poznanovic: spoznan at clemson.edu Dear ______, I'm writing to call on the American Mathematical Society to elaborate on its ethical stance regarding collaborations between mathematicians and military/security agencies like the NSA. In April of 2021, the president of the AMS responded to concerns from community members on this topic, but the response lacked the sort of transparency the mathematics community deserves from its representatives. Mathematics is too large and too influential for us to be avoiding the ethical questions about its uses, and the health of the mathematical community requires that we face these questions head-on together. I am therefore asking the AMS to address the following questions and concerns: - A 1987 AMS referendum passed a motion requiring the AMS to "direct their efforts toward increasing the fraction of non-military funding for mathematics research as well as towards increasing total research support." (See p. 554, April 1988 AMS Notices.) Is this still in effect? How has this been honored over the past 30 years? For instance, how has the ratio of, say, NSF funding for mathematics research to DoD funding changed over that time in response to AMS efforts? - An email from the AMS president to concerned community members stated that the AMS welcomes "any potential employer of mathematicians to engage with our community". Is any attention paid to the larger social effects of those employers' activities? For example, would the AMS offer a recruitment booth to a company known to engage in unethical labor practices affecting its non-mathematician employees? How would they respond if an intelligence gathering agency affiliated with another (non-EU or British) country asked to rent a table and do recruitment at an AMS job fair? - I call on the AMS to articulate an ethical stance on the relationship between the mathematics community and intelligence agencies. This stance should be historically-informed and should account for the actual geopolitical role of these agencies. This should be the result of some sort of consensus process and could perhaps take the form of a "position statement" alongside the existing ones that can be found here: https://www.ams.org/government/dc-collaborations. Sincerely, --- Signal boosts: stuff by other people we've read this month and want to share --- 1. How well-intentioned white male physicists maintain ignorance of inequity and justify inaction by Melissa Dancy and Apriel Hodari: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03522 2. TIAA Faces Climate-Washing Complaint: https://www.ciel.org/news/tiaa-faces-climate-washing-complaint-brought-by-academics/ --- Ongoing JMC campaigns/how you can help: --- 1. Cut ties between mathematicians and the NSA: https://www.justmathematicscollective.net/nsa_statement.html. Please sign the statement and take the pledges if you haven't already, and share with your colleagues. 2. Support the USACBI academic boycott of Israeli institutions: https://www.justmathematicscollective.net/USACBI_statement.html. Please register your pledge. --- As always, please feel free to contact us at justmathematicscollective at inventati.org with any questions, comments, or suggestions, including materials and campaigns for us to consider including in next month's newsletter. Also, please feel free to forward this to friends and colleagues, who can subscribe here: https://noise.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/jm_collective - JMC newsletter team --- Just Mathematics Collective https://www.justmathematicscollective.net/ https://twitter.com/jm_collective?lang=en -- jm_collective mailing list jm_collective at inventati.org https://noise.autistici.org/mailman/listinfo/jm_collective -------------- next part -------------- HTML attachment scrubbed and removed