The Tartan

By William Curvan

Last Sunday and Monday, Feb. 11 and 12, students saw an unusual message on the Fence. The Forbes Avenue side displayed the words “Cockheed Fartin,” and the Hunt Library side had various messages in smaller red lettering, including “funding death since 1986,” “war for their profit,” and “war pigs.”

This message is a pun on Lockheed Martin, the largest aerospace and defense company in the world. In 2023, it had the highest total revenue of any military-product company and the highest revenue from defense-related sales. Lockheed’s products include military aircraft, submersibles, missiles, and cybersecurity systems.

Campus activists have been increasingly critical of the company. A Nov. 7 rally in front of Hamerschlag Hall protested a Lockheed Martin recruitment event. Fliers passed out at the event condemned the company, listing ways in which Lockheed’s products are used to kill civilians with an emphasis on the casualties in Gaza. A line on the flier read, “with just one internship at Lockheed Martin, you too can be complicit in the slaughter of endless civilians across the Global South.”

Concerns about Carnegie Mellon’s ties to the defense industry, as well as questions about the morality of working for defense companies, have been at the forefront of much political discourse and activism on campus. A pro-Palestine rally on Nov. 9 included speakers who emphasized Carnegie Mellon’s defense-related research and a Feb. 2 rally titled “No Tech For Apartheid” focused explicitly on this issue.

The Tartan spoke with two juniors majoring in mechanical engineering who interned for Lockheed last summer. Both spoke under the condition of anonymity.

One of the students claimed that he felt optimistic going into his internship, but as soon as he learned about his project, he “felt uncomfortable engineering deadly weapons … [and] skeptical with how much money Lockheed was making from selling them.” He said that prior to the summer, he did not know he would be working on missile systems.

“To think Lockheed Martin profits so much from war and spends millions lobbying the government makes me sick,” he said. He also argued that defense contractors should exist “to protect lives, not make money from promoting war.” The student said that he declined his return offer.

The other student spoke about an internship she spent working on Lockheed’s long-range radar technology. She described a very positive work culture that “was very learning-oriented, in a sense that they always encouraged us to ask questions.” She agreed that there are “valid reasons to be upset with the company” and that she doesn’t “have current plans to go back.”

Lewis Rockwell is a third-year mechanical engineering student. Though he will be working at Ford this summer, he applied for engineering internships at a number of defense companies, including Lockheed. When asked his thoughts about the message on the Fence, he expressed his belief that “The Fence is a means for students to exercise their right to freedom of speech,” saying that he believes Carnegie Mellon protects students’ freedom of expression by allowing students to paint the Fence.

Rockwell said that he “initially committed to not applying to any defense contractors,” but that once he started to receive rejection letters, he realized that he was overlooking a large part of the job market.

“A job at a defense contractor is better than no job at all,” Rockwell said, adding that he feels “blessed” to have received a job offer from Ford.

Professor Deanna Matthews is a teaching professor and Engineering and Public Policy advisor. She shared stories in which students accepted jobs that presented them with uncomfortable moral questions. A student interning at a large defense company told her that as their summer internship wore on, they began to feel an increased sense of “cognitive dissonance” over the work they were doing. Eventually, this student decided not to return to the company.

Students of hers who worked for petroleum and oil-drilling companies also found it difficult to square their beliefs about climate change with the direct impact of their work. Matthews said that when she was an undergraduate student, the conversation about defense jobs was not quite what it is now. A major social cause of the time was to advocate for universities to divest from companies that had ties to colonial governments, particularly apartheid South Africa; hence, that was what conversations about corporate morality tended to center around.

Matthews also pointed out that Carnegie Mellon has a very close relationship to the U.S. Department of Defense, which funds a lot of research on campus. Though no funding figures exist for the whole university, the contracts can be quite large; in 2020, Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute received a $2.6 billion grant from the Department of Defense for “software technology development and cyber security.” The military often sends individuals to receive Ph.Ds. on an accelerated track by paying the students’ tuition (a practice which allows the university to waive certain degree requirements, like working as a Teaching Assistant).

The Tartan also spoke with two of the individuals who helped paint the Fence, one of whom took credit for the pun. The pair of first years said that the idea started as a way for them and their friends to do something fun on a Saturday night, but they quickly decided they should also use the opportunity to make a more explicit point about the military industrial complex. Though the decision was spur-of-the-moment, it wasn’t the first time they had talked about the idea.

He also said their message is not directly motivated by a single current event, because the issue of war-profiteering goes beyond any individual armed conflict.

They said they deliberately chose to include humor, as they believed a straightforward anti-war message might not catch peoples’ attention.

They said they took a lot of inspiration from the punk scene and ways punk artists convey antiestablishment political messages. The phrase “war pigs,” painted several times on the Hunt Library side, referenced the Black Sabbath song of the same name.

Though not visible in the picture on the Fence Instagram page, they also claimed to have painted the “noise not music” symbol on top of one of the posts. This symbol, which depicts two beamed eighth notes crossed out with an X originates from the punk scene and rejects conventional ideas about music.

When asked how they feel about individuals getting jobs at companies like Lockheed, they said they understood that as college students we all need to make money, and that “it’ll pay the bills.”

They identified the root problem as the incentives of capitalism, which allow a small group of individuals to profit from war. One student argued that greed is part of human nature, and that any system which lets people “gorge themselves” on wealth will create perverse incentives. According to him, when people are detached from the source of their wealth, they become callous to the harms they cause.

They also said that, as an institution, Carnegie Mellon is complicit. Though they acknowledged that the problem is greater than any one individual or university, they argued that inviting defense companies like Lockheed to recruit students on campus makes it easier for the companies to find talented people to develop weapons.

They said their main goal was to catch people’s attention and start a conversation.