Editor’s note: This letter to the editor by Steve Núñez will be published in two parts. This section discusses the University of Connecticut’s ties to the military-industrial complex.
We’ll never know the depth of UConn’s investment in the carnage industry because, though it’s a public university, the endowment activities are controlled by the UConn Foundation, a private corporation with no legal obligation to transparency, a fact that I’ve discovered through years of organizing and petitioning the university to cut ties with the punishment enterprise. Yet, for an institution that constantly purports to aspire to a more “peaceful” world, UConn (and universities in general) surely go through extensive lengths to cozy up to the capital gains made through the brutal annihilation of oppressed peoples.
UConn’s engineering program, in particular, is inextricably linked to the carnage enterprise. The university celebrates its ties to Lockheed Martin with its Master of Engineering program called Architect Development and Qualification that provides further education for Sikorsky-Lockheed employees to improve their destructive capacity. It also hosts, as an adjunct professor, Lockheed Martin Fellow in Systems Engineering, Daniel Durkin, who “serves as the Lockheed Martin’s Missiles and Fire Control business area Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Chief Architect, responsible for the modernization and digitalization of systems engineering processes and tools.”
UConn’s clearcut hypocrisy and coziness to death mongers is glaring. The profits that UConn accrues from partnerships with death mongering corporations like Lockheed dictate the actions that the university takes, and the refusal to speak out against the heinously violent Islamophobic hatred hurled at UConn stakeholders. While UConn publicly boasts its commitments to “striving towards a carbon neutral campus by the year 2050,” it actively supports some of the most militant purveyors of ecological catastrophe. Back in 2021, UConn hosted President Joe Biden at the Dodd Center for Human Rights where he purported to place human rights “back at the center of our foreign policy.” He committed to speaking out to “our friends and our adversaries alike,” whenever “we see our fellow humans being dehumanized.” Yet, in the face of some of the most grotesque abuses of international law, genocide Joe has consistently refused to rebuke the Zionist regime or call for a ceasefire. Instead, he has pledged billions of more dollars and United States-produced munitions to the fascist apartheid regime. In light of the U.S. financial, military and diplomatic support and enabling of the deplorable decimation of Palestine and Palestinian life, we are reminded of the longstanding fact that colonial commitments to “human rights” only apply to those who are conceived and perceived as “human” in the first place. UConn, like many other Western institutions, has again made abundantly clear that the bottom line trumps all; so-called “commitments” to human rights always end at the threat to profit margins.
Steve Núñez (he/they) is a former U.S. Army Special Forces Weapons Sergeant, holds a Master of Theological Studies in Religion, Ethics, and Politics from Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department whose areas of expertise include anti-colonial theory, revolutionary anti-violence and abolition and carceral studies.