Hello!

As you may have heard, the Just Mathematics Collective, in collaboration with the Muslim Justice League, pulled off a direct action at the Joint Math Meetings in Boston. We held space at the career fair with our "MATH MINUS MILITARISM" banner in protest of the NSA's presence and we canvassed around the conference, making connections with dozens of principled mathematicians who have joined our campaign by taking some of our pledges. Eventually, we were kicked out by conference organizers.


We're reaching out now because we need your help to show the AMS that mathematicians are committed to building a community beyond secrecy, surveillance, and racist oppression!  

We cannot do this without you and the action steps below are extremely easy to execute---the highest priority action step will take less than 2 minutes of your time:


Action Step 1 (highest priority): Email the AMS president, president elect, secretary, and chairs of the Committee on the Profession and the Committee on Professional Ethics. Script and email addresses included at the end of this message---all you need to do is copy/paste it, and send to the email addresses provided below! 


Action step 2: If you haven't done so already, check out our campaign statement and push yourself to take any of the pledges you haven't already taken. 


Script for emails: 


Send to 


Suggested subject: "Ethical policy on recruitment: no to the NSA"


Dear AMS leadership,


I'm writing to call on the American Mathematical Society to craft policies that are compatible with its own stated commitments to equity and diversity. I was dismayed and disappointed to hear that the AMS ejected activists and mathematicians from the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston (all of whom registered and paid to attend) for passing out literature and holding up a banner in protest of the NSA's presence at the career fair, especially given the AMS Council's statement that "In all its activities, the AMS seeks to foster an atmosphere that encourages the free expression and exchange of ideas."


As a mathematician whose interests the AMS purportedly represents:

I ask that the AMS craft a concrete policy on what sorts of organizations are allowed to recruit at their events and how this policy falls in line with the society's commitments to equity and anti-racism.


This policy should explicitly disallow agencies like the NSA---an integral part of the infrastructure of violence and oppression targeting Black and Brown communities all over the world---from participating in AMS events. 


Along the way to crafting concrete policy, I ask that the AMS expound publicly on a message sent from the AMS president to concerned community members in 2021, which 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? Or would it grant space to a white nationalist organization so long as they're looking to employ mathematicians? How would they respond if an intelligence-gathering organization that operates legally but is considered to act against the interests of the US government and/or its allies asked to rent a table and do recruitment at an AMS job fair?


More generally, I call on the AMS to articulate an ethical stance on the relationship between the mathematics community on the one hand, and intelligence agencies and other parts of the military-industrial complex on the other.


This stance should be based on an honest and historically informed accounting of (1) how the US military/security apparatus facilitates the systematic oppression of people worldwide and (2) the role mathematicians have played in this via our relationships with the security state. This should be the result of some sort of consensus process and should take steps towards honoring the referendum passed almost 30 years ago in 1988, which states that the AMS should "direct their efforts toward increasing the fraction of non-military funding for mathematics research as well as towards increasing total research support."


I implore you to take this very seriously. In larger and larger numbers, mathematicians are beginning to reckon with their social and ethical responsibilities. No longer can we treat as normal the unhealthy partnerships between our community and the military-industrial complex.


Sincerely,


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