In the 1980s, progressive undergraduates at the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded the Democratic Organization of Progressive Engineers and Scientists (DOPES), an anti-war science ethics group dedicated to challenging militarism — and particularly, student and graduate involvement within it.
They held a “consciousness-raising” die-in, lying outside Union South to protest the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the Reagan administration, set up anti-weapons booths at career fairs and created a parody game show called “The Price is Wrong” at the 1983 Engineering Expo to raise awareness about the cost of military weapons.
40 years later, DOPES alumni hope to continue those conversations amid escalating tensions between the Trump administration and the science community. DOPES will host a town hall Friday July 11 at 2:30 p.m. at the Pyle Center. A moderated panel of DOPES members hopes to tackle questions on modern technology issues, like climate change and artificial intelligence. But more than that, the town hall serves as a reunion for this band of progressive scientists and engineers who 40 years ago dared to challenge their fields’ status quo.
Engineering as a ‘force for good’
Joel Johnson, a DOPES member and retired audio engineer, graduated from UW-Madison in 1983 with a degree in electrical engineering.
DOPES, which had just been founded by three mechanical engineering students, met Thursdays at Memorial Union. “We were a student organization, so we had a discount on beer and popcorn,” Johnson told The Daily Cardinal.
An old DOPES poster, which piqued Joel Johnson's attention and led him to join the group, he told the Daily Cardinal
During his career, Johnson was the lead engineer developing one of the first noise-canceling headphones. He said DOPES solidified his decision to pursue music production, “a force for good,” after his degree in electrical engineering.
“Coming out of school back then, many of the jobs were [in] weapon systems,” Johnson said. “One thing that DOPES did for me was reinforce that the choice that I made was a good choice.”
Steve Asztalos, a DOPES alum and current professor of physics and astronomy at California State University, East Bay, graduated in 1982 and said DOPES influenced his decision to “avoid any job that had any connection to any type of weapons delivery or creation.”
Asztalos said the conversations and consciousness-raising events helped him realize his misgivings about a career in weapons production “weren't just empty thoughts.”
“When my two boys were very young, the idea of me working on nuclear weapons was unimaginable,” Asztalos said. “I couldn't come home to two young children, having spent a day at the lab designing something that could kill millions of children in a second.”
Beyond just an ethics club
Besides hosting “consciousness-raising events” like the die-in, DOPES often put on “Pagan Rites of Finals” at the end of semesters, donning robes on Library Mall, reading from their favorite textbooks — Johnson’s focused on antenna theory — and singing modified hymnals.
“We'd walk through campus chanting and hitting ourselves in our heads with our textbooks,” Johnson said.
DOPES Pagan Rites of Finals hymnal lyrics
DOPES was more than just a student organization; it was a social and political circle. Members of DOPES organized the Ant Bridge political party on campus, electing a full slate of Senior class officer candidates to the Student Senate, now part of Associated Students of Madison (ASM), in 1985.
One candidate was Christine Johnston, who currently works as a project manager in capital planning at UW-Madison. Johnston also played on DOPES’ intramural croquet team and contributed to DOPES’ Student Senate class gift: a swing set outside what is now Grainger Hall, which has since been torn down.
“Our present to the graduating class was going to be building an adult-sized playground, and the only thing we had managed to build, ever, was a swing set,” Johnston told The Cardinal. “But I actually have a coworker who said, ‘I remember that swing set. I used to swing on the swings all the time.’”
Much like the swing set, DOPES is no longer active on campus, but Johnson said the current political moment is at the heart of their reunion.
He expressed disappointment with the Trump administration, saying a national ethics crisis in part spurred the decision to host a town hall to “see if like-minded people are interested in talking about ethics in science and engineering at the university.”
Many DOPES members will attend the town hall as part of a weekend-long reunion from July 10 through July 13 that will also include a croquet game and a visit to the Terrace.
“When we're having fun, we're always talking and arguing and trying to figure out how we can fix the world,” Johnson said. “Not that we're gonna succeed, but we’ve got to at least try, right?”
Editor's Note: This article was updated July 11 at 11:30 a.m. to correct the spelling of Steve Asztalos and add additional context
