The Gaza Protests Were a Mask-Off Moment for American Universities

Research powerhouses like MIT (over $1 billion a year in defense contracts for the Lincoln Laboratory), Penn State (recently awarded a $2 billion contract from the US Navy), Carnegie Mellon University ($2.7 billion contract with the DoD), University of Texas, Austin ($1.1 billion contract with the DoD) or Georgia Tech ($2.35 billion from the US Army) lean heavily on federally funded war research to balance their books.

Schools are further beholden to the Pentagon through their general reliance on public research funds. The federal government supports over half of all research conducted at universities—and therefore, the implicit threat of the state rescinding all research funds hangs over the question of divestment. In 2002, for instance, the federal government threatened to withdraw hundreds of millions in grants if the Harvard Law School did not allow military recruiters back on campus. Harvard caved. The dean of the law school laid it out quite plainly: “Most of us reluctantly accept the reality that this university cannot accept the loss of federal funds.”

The DoD is just one part of the picture. Private weapons manufacturers also partner with schools to conduct research and secure access to the next generation of workers. The University of Arizona, for example, houses a major Raytheon facility and provides the war industry giant with a steady stream of trained workers. Lockheed Martin has partnerships—which entail both research funding and employee pipelines—with at least 100 universities in the United States. At least a dozen universities celebrate “Lockheed Martin Day,” where company recruiters swarm campuses to show off their shiny new toys and entice undergraduates with financial aid and internships. At some schools, Lockheed asserts its dominance by landing a helicopter in the middle of the campus.

These companies are crucial engines of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. Raytheon sells Israel jets, drones, and cluster bombs, which have been used to murder thousands; Lockheed Martin provides attack helicopters and missiles like the one used to assassinate a Palestinian journalist in November; General Dynamics makes the 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs that Israel has dropped indiscriminately on Gaza, including in an attack on the Jabalia refugee camp that killed over 100 Palestinians; Boeing manufactures the F-15 jets that comprise most of the Israeli Air Force and the “precision” GBU-39 missiles that were used to commit the Rafah tent massacre.

The outsize role of war-making in the economy incentivizes universities to train workers for the industry. In a state like Connecticut, for instance, weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, Electric Boat, and Sikorsky constitute 12.5 percent of the state’s total GDP, and are the core of the state’s industrial (and tax) base. They wield tremendous influence within the state: In 2014, Connecticut granted $400 million in tax breaks to United Technologies (now merged with Raytheon to form RTX) after the company threatened to relocate.

It’s no surprise, then, that the state’s flagship university—the University of Connecticut—is deeply involved in both war research and developing students into war industry workers. Companies like Pratt & Whitney and Raytheon, along with the US Air Force, fund millions of dollars of research—into missiles, submarines, and fighter jets—at UConn. The top employers of recent graduates from the Engineering School are companies like Lockheed Martin and Electric Boat.

UConn is not unique. It is common practice for universities to forge corporate partnerships to funnel students from their schools directly into the arms of companies like General Dynamics and Raytheon. Weapons manufacturers take advantage of students, who—in an era of mass debt and soaring tuition—are easily wooed by scholarships, well-paid internships and post-grad job opportunities.

As faculty from California State Long Beach recently elucidated in detail, Boeing—one of the IDF’s longtime partners—has taken over the university. Driven by the twin pressures of austerity and militarization, professors wrote, “the College of Engineering and College of Business has quite literally transformed into Boeing’s labor-supply mill.”

As a result, Boeing employs more CSULB graduates than any other company. And that’s just Boeing—the College of Engineering’s advisory council “currently has three members from Boeing, two members from Raytheon, and two members from Northrop Grumman.”

You can find similar anecdotes at schools across the country. As Indigo Olivier wrote in a 2022 exposé on Lockheed Martin’s campus recruiting, “A student might work on Lockheed-sponsored research as part of their course load, then intern over the summer at Lockheed, be officially recruited by Lockheed upon graduation and start working there immediately, with defense clearances already in place—sometimes continuing the same work.”

Some schools are veritable factories for war industry workers. The University of Central Florida, for instance, brags on its website that it is the top supplier of graduates to the defense and aerospace industries, producing nearly a third of local Lockheed Martin employees.

Beyond what we think of as the traditional academy, there are dozens of universities that specialize in training students for military or intelligence service. An ecosystem of online war industry degrees has also emerged in recent years, sometimes funded directly by the DoD or the industry. For-profit “diploma mills” like the University of Phoenix are particularly prolific. Traditional universities have reoriented academic programs to serve the war industry as well.

Behind these efforts are deeply connected and deep-pocketed trustees and administrators. The University of Maryland, for instance, boasts on its website that at least five former Lockheed Martin executives have served in board positions at the school. The former CEO of Northrop Grumman sits on MIT’s board of trustees. Boards are littered with hedge fund managers, real estate moguls, industrial titans—all people with a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo. These boards form an entrenched base of power, which is unsurprisingly used to direct brutal repression against the anti-imperialist student movement.

Taken together, this web of entanglements sutures the interests of students and professors to not just the genocide in Gaza but also the entirety of the US empire—and renders any attempt to weaken these ties radioactive to university leaders.

The scale of repression that the movement for Palestine has experienced is a reflection of the threat that it poses to the university. Institutions only resort to this level of violence when their ideological barriers are breached and they are left naked, vulnerable to an attack on their material foundations. The mask that the university dons to portray itself as a bastion of critical thinking and free expression has slipped, revealing an unwavering allegiance to empire.

Though designed to demobilize us and sap us of our energy, the violence has instead seared a lesson into our consciousness: The imperial university cannot be reasoned with. Universities won’t be convinced to betray their own interests. Administrators and trustees—their allegiances inseparable from the interests of the US war machine—are not susceptible to moral appeals.

Instead of seriously entertaining students’ demands, what they can and will do is trot out time-honored techniques of counterinsurgency: committees and task forces to “evaluate” the issue, hysterical warnings about “outside agitators,” symbolic concessions, and hollow promises that trustees will consider divestment.

Activists should not mistake these two-faced moves for earnest engagement. This is how institutions deal with existential threats: first, the baton and the bullet; then, the technologies of co-option.

Because of the threat that we represent, the university has marked us as its enemy; it’s time to reciprocate the gesture.