Connor says: Another reminder that corruption runs much deeper than the current criminal war in the Oval Office. And while the following article provides a first-hand account of what’s happening at North Carolina State University, the story is much the same, if not worse, at universities across the country. Recall this informative diagram distributed at the 2024 Columbia University protests.
Nor is it just a criminal war of aggression. Here at home, it is similarly complicit in building a burgeoning police state.
(1):
Imperial boomerang: When colonial tactics exported overseas are imported domestically pic.twitter.com/EGbGFBhqkZ
— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) June 10, 2025
(2):
AI drones used in Gaza are inspecting American cities
Unusual increase in drone usage across the US by Skydio, based in Israel and tested in Gaza field https://t.co/OUhy37L9DI
— The Grayzone (@TheGrayzoneNews) November 2, 2025
Michael Schwalbe, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, North Carolina State University. Originally published in Common Dreams.
On February 28, 2026, the Trump administration ordered the U.S. military to begin a war of criminal aggression against Iran. In the first wave of bombings, U.S. Tomahawk missiles hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab, causing the roof to collapse and killing more than 100 children. According to media reports, more than 1,900 people have been killed and 24,800 injured since the attacks began. The casualty figures are provisional, but other than that the facts are indisputable.
Here are some more incontrovertible observations.
Many, perhaps most, of America’s research universities, both public and private, function in part to stake out imperialist powers. Military-related research at these universities helps imperialist nations find more effective ways to kill people around the world who resist U.S. rule. Today, these activities are rarely talked about openly, nor are there any protests against them. In most cases, universities’ aid to the capitalist class’ project of imperial domination is either not mentioned, normalized as morally unproblematic, or celebrated under the umbrella of nationalism.
Finally, here is a report from academia in a non-Ivy state. On March 12, 2026, Krista Walton, vice president for research and innovation at North Carolina State University (where I am a professor emeritus), sent a campus-wide email titled “Investing in the Future of Research Infrastructure.” According to the email, North Carolina State University “steadily ranks 6th among its peers (public universities without medical schools) in research funding.” This sounds harmless enough. Typical organized cheerleading.
But where did that money come from? And how exactly will the university’s research infrastructure be constructed? Mr. Walton continues to explain.
Major funding sources listed in the email include the Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Energy, and NASA. Walton boasts that “North Carolina State University ranks second only to Duke University” in Department of Defense funding. Regarding building infrastructure, the email calls for “positioning universities to align with national priorities” and “building infrastructure.”[in] “For the great work that our investigators are already doing in the field of defense and security.” More specifically, building on this effort will include the creation of a new “Defense and Security Institute,” for which faculty will be convened to “support the development of a unified vision, mission, and goals.”
Again, this email and invitation to participate (to ensure the university is more responsive to the needs of the imperial state) was sent less than two weeks after the criminal attack on Iran began, and less than two weeks after more than 100 schoolchildren were killed in Minab, and many more civilians died in the weeks that followed. Of course, the email makes no mention of killings, but it does implicitly call on faculty, students, and staff to support the kind of military violence that extends around the world, inevitably destroying innocent lives. In other words, it amounts to moral self-deception.
Analysis is needed to explain how we got here. I’ve done something like that before. I’ve written about North Carolina’s addiction to tobacco money, its multimillion-dollar deals with the National Security Agency, and its ties to criminal enterprises. A similar analysis could be made of how administrators and their political supporters stick their universities’ noses into the trough of military funding. As a result of the defunding of general national revenues, the nationalist ideology in which Americans are steeped, the immoral careerism, and the bureaucracy that allows citizens to separate intentions from results and contribute to the great evils of the Holocaust, genocide, and war. A thorough analysis will consider all of these causes and more.
But do we need further analysis now or are the results in? The facts are as I have stated. No one should regret interpreting these facts and their implications more honestly. In this sense, analysis is never-ending. It is the perpetual motion machine of academia. But for now, I’ve reached the point where all I can do is stand as an amazing witness. I speak only to profess. Not to solve sociological puzzles, but to publicly express conscience.
I believe that universities should exist to freely create and transmit knowledge that is beneficial to all people. To promote peace based on rational discussion. and to develop an understanding of our common humanity across sectors set up to further the domination of elites. I am therefore appalled by the subordination of universities to the service of the imperial state. Using universities in this way is a betrayal of the Enlightenment values that make universities humane institutions. It is an act of defiance that reduces universities to tools of nationalism and resource control for the benefit of those who have seized the reins of the state.
I am also appalled by the violence involved and how it is hidden and normalized. The NC State email cited earlier cheerfully urges universities to align with “national priorities” (who set them?) by building research infrastructure in the fields of defense and security. And for what? To make the despicable and powerful – the capitalist class, or as some might call it, the Epstein class – more powerful by destroying the lives and infrastructure of others when necessary. I disagree with this.
I also object to the hypocrisy of conducting research that incites this violence behind a veil of liberal values, while the violence is occurring so far away that it is difficult to see the connection between research done for the Department of Defense and military contractors, illegal wars of aggression, and dead school children. Refusing to see these links is more than just hypocrisy. It is a class injustice hidden within the shell of a system that claims the pursuit of truth is an apparently noble mission.
North Carolina State is just one example, not a special villain. The major leaguers in Military Valley are MIT, Johns Hopkins University, California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, and University of Maryland. To the extent that these institutions claim greater prestige by touting their humanitarian values and scientific achievements, their hypocrisy deepens. As long as these institutions support legitimate war-oriented research at less prestigious institutions like North Carolina State University, under the guise of being compatible with freedom, equality, and democracy, the damage they do is even deeper.
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Wilhelm Reich argues that the spiritual force driving fascism is repressed sexuality. As a social psychologist trained in sociology, I didn’t give this argument much weight. Much of what leads to participation in collective vandalism can be traced back to culture and social organization. But I think Reich was right when he looked back at the 1930s and said, “While we presented the masses with great historical analyzes and economic treatises about the contradictions of imperialism, Hitler shook the deepest roots of their emotional being.” Today, critical intellectuals offer similar analyses. But if, at the end of our analyses, we are unable to connect with the emotional being of ourselves, the part of ourselves that stands stunned and says, “Enough!”, then those analyzes will wither away, as they have often done in the past.
