Editor,
The story "Campus was vandalized during protest, police say" published in the Daily Lobo on Wednesday makes no mention of exactly why approximately 600 students, activists and community members from 50 different organizations choose to mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq on UNM campus.
UNM receives millions of dollars in funding for research from all branches of the U.S. military, Department of Defense and the weapons industry while maintaining close ties to the federal defense establishment.
The most recent example of this occurred just last week. According to the Tuesday edition of UNM Today, UNM President David Schmidly recently signed a new memorandum of understanding with Sandia National Laboratories. The article states that the purpose of this MOU is to "enhance the opportunities for top students at UNM to find placement at Sandia" and "help secure external funding for research projects" in areas including "computing and information infrastructure," "homeland defense" and "national security."
According to its Web site, Sandia National Laboratories is heavily involved in military planning and weapons research and other research with war applications, including C3ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Integrated Military Systems for Missile Defense and Strike Systems, complex adaptive systems and Homeland Defense and Force Protection.
The vandalism that occurred March 15, although minor, is absolutely unacceptable for those of us who worked diligently with the University to organize a peaceful protest in opposition to ongoing wars, the human and ecological disasters these wars create and the military-industrial-academic complex that sustains them.
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The perpetrators should be found and should pay for the cleanup. But it is worth noting that the building targeted by a few overzealous protestors is one of the many on campus linked with weapons applicable research.
UNM's Center for Science, Technology and Policy, for example, works directly with Sandia National Laboratories and recently secured $1 million to endow a chairperson in political science held by Andrew Ross, a veteran of the U.S. Naval War College, who has served as director of the War College's project on "military transformation and the defense industry."
In the fall of 2006, the center worked with weapons maker Lockheed Martin to organize a conference on the UNM campus to discuss the development of a new reliable replacement-warhead program.
Educator, activist and UNM alumnus Bob Anderson was one of the many who spoke out against this immoral effort to develop new and improved nukes and was arrested and banned from UNM's campus for more than a year.
While I appreciate the reporter's attempts to speak with protest organizers and get both sides of the vandalism story, I believe it is high time the Daily Lobo make the effort to look at the story behind the story and asks serious questions about what UNM's relationship to the weapons industry and the defense establishment is and what the role of a public university should be.
The work of Ross may be appropriate to the Naval War College, but do we want to become the UNM war college? Have we already?
Andrew Marcum
UNM student
