Editor,
I think UNM President Chris Garcia missed the point with his endorsement of military security clearances at the school (Albuquerque Journal, Monday, Nov. 25.)
The point to be questioned is why does anyone at a public institution of higher education engage in war research, secret or unclassified? These two institutions of our society, higher education and the Pentagon, are at odds in their goals, missions and methods of work and should be kept separate.
To allow military research at university has all sorts of undesirable ramifications, even with unclassified research. One is that tax payers wind up paying a hidden subsidy for war research done using facilities such as faculty time, offices and labs. Underpaid graduate students do most of the work in exchange for course credits.
A higher education institution should be about seeking truth, knowledge and wisdom for the public good, not creating weapons of mass destruction for what has become clear is private sector corporate dominance for resources like oil.
When the mission of the war machine creeps into a campus, faculty are induced to think not of questions that should be asked but of what cannot be spoken about without creating a security breach, for instance, and how to get more military contract money.
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The low crawl for money is what drives this destruction of higher education.
In the 1980s federal laws were altered to allow universities to obtain lucrative war research contracts to meet the shortage of money they were suffering from the state and federal legislatures.
As a result we now have schools like UNM conducting secret ways to kill people in large research parks paid for by taxpayers. Only the private sector and the war machine benefit from this, not the open and inspiring minds of the youth.
For Chris Garcia, the UNM Regents and the State Legislature, to allow secret war research at our state universities is an indication of how far down the wrong road they have traveled. It is time to turn this around.
Bob Anderson
UNM faculty
