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By: Nate Foster
LOWELL, MA – UMass Lowell (UML) has always had deep ties to American industry. Located in a city that was founded to manufacture textiles during the Industrial Revolution, the university can trace its roots back to the Lowell Textile School in 1895. Integrated into the University of Massachusetts System in 1991, the UML mission statement echoes its predecessor’s founding purpose: preparing students for the American workforce through industry connection.
Much has changed since the days of the Lowell Textile School. Domestic textile manufacturing is a thing of the past in the mill town, retreating to urban immigrant worker enclaves. Now, UML uses debt to turn students into engineers that leave Lowell to find employment in tech hubs far from Lowell. In the 21st century, students in the former mill town find career and research opportunities in the military and security sectors. And with each passing year of graduates, UML welcomes thousands of new undergraduates each year that are drawn to its trademark programs leading to careers in U.S. tech industries – all five of the highest earning degrees at UML are in computer science or engineering.
These are tech disciplines increasingly dominated by large corporate contractors. These behemoths have come to control increasingly larger portions of the U.S. military in recent decades, with the Department of Defense spending over $431 billion in corporate contracts last year and over $100 million of those funds allocated toward just fourteen university R&D programs. These staggering figures illustrate the integral role the U.S. military plays in research funding for UMass Lowell, which has prioritized institutional connections to the booming military and security markets. Focusing on a growing military industry is a predictable move for UML, given its status as a public university with state funding concerns, a strong research apparatus in engineering and technology, and a student body filled with future industry professionals.
Six-figure opportunities are available to escape the financial hurdles and career uncertainties attached to higher education in Massachusetts. Lowell students are 41% students of color, 39% first-generation college students, and 30% of are pell grant recipients. Incentives for comfortable careers in lucrative defense fields are abundant, which makes the university’s push toward funnelling students with limited options toward these fields all the more insidious. All students have to do in return is join the ranks of the leading U.S. war profiteers, where designing the most destructive technologies in human history is another 9 to 5.
In Debt? Sell Your Labor to War.
UML is sharpening its military focus at a time when college is historically unaffordable for students in Massachusetts. As a public, state-funded institution, UML is supposed to present an affordable path to higher education for its students. In reality, students at Massachusetts public schools have been missing out on assistance for decades.
Despite a national 15% increase in state-funded financial aid across the country between 2001-2021, aid in Massachusetts simultaneously decreased by 47%. The cost of attendance for public universities in Massachusetts went up by 59% over the same timespan. With the absence of aid, many students are forced to borrow their access to education: 2001-2021 saw a 105% increase in students taking out loans at public universities in Massachusetts. UML is no exception, as 73% of students graduated with some form of student debt in 2020, with an average debt load of $33,500 per graduate. Debt drags upon students like a chain.
As financial pressures mount, many students prioritize fiscal responsibility over ethics and passion. Cost-consciousness is accommodated to avoid class-consciousness. Students take lucrative majors that will pay the bills in the future, complete with undergraduate research and networking opportunities for employment after graduation – military-funded jobs for military-funded purposes. Student debt doesn’t just lead to selling out to some corporate position; instead, because of how industry has captured engineering, student debt leads to selling labor to facilitate a smoother, more technologically savvy war machine.
Corporate Recruitment on Campus
UML students are an invaluable resource to the US military-industrial complex. Every fall semester, a campus full of future working professionals keeps its eyes peeled for career opportunities that offer financial stability. These students are at a critical juncture in the recruitment process for war profiteering companies that need college-educated employees and sustained university research systems.
Industry partnerships are further incentivized by the U.S. government, which provides funding to UML research initiatives that prop up its defense apparatuses. In a DOGE era, when the federal government is slashing one agency and one research fund after another, universities like UML have even greater incentives to do everything to facilitate the most stable research funds and institutional relationships with the institution: those prioritized by the U.S. government itself, in areas deemed critical by the government, like defense. Post-graduation employment rates, an increasingly important metric among powerful college rank lists, also push universities to match students’ skills with market needs dominated by defense.
Forty-four official UML corporate partners mention servicing various sectors of the defense industry on their official websites, including weapons manufacturing, aerospace, cybersecurity, communications, electronics, robotics, advanced materials and polymers, and energy. UML organizes their corporate partnerships into a tier system, recognizing special proximity to their “premier,” “select,” and “advantage” partners. At the top of the pyramid, both premier partners, Raytheon and Draper Laboratory (a nonprofit company), are active in the military industry.
UML’s partnerships with war institutions for corporate recruitment is blatant. Raytheon, for example, has collaborated with UML to establish the Raytheon UMass Lowell Research Institute (RURI). Located on campus at the Emerging Technologies and Innovation Center, Raytheon has clearly defined the founding purposes of RURI to be “workforce development” creating a “talent pipeline of new employees trained in additive and microwave technologies.” Raytheon’s UML partnership has been a profound success on both the research and recruitment fronts; the corporation employed over 700 UML alumni as of 2021, far outpacing any of the university’s other corporate affiliates. RURI has also secured numerous research projects with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Raytheon is on the front lines of corporate recruitment into war efforts at UML, but far from the only example of the school’s pipelining. RURI is just one of seven of UML’s listed research centers and institutes and eleven laboratories and research initiatives that work with military contractors or the U.S. military directly. An affiliated nonprofit entity called the UMass Lowell Applied Research Corporation (UMLARC) is explicitly dedicated to securing DoD research contracts. UMLARC is staffed by UML vice chancellors, former U.S. Air Force members, and corporate representatives, and is active through the Northstar Campus, a branch of the UML Research Institute which was established to strengthen university-corporate-government relations in the military industry.
UML has reserved entire sections of land for the pipeline.
Outcomes of War Profiteering in 2025
War profiteering only works when there is war to profit from. Markets surge with the onset of the newest invasion, proxy war, or security concern, as conflict leads to windfall profits for corporate contractors. There is a human cost associated with tying research and career opportunities to such an industry that does not show up on a corporate bottom line or the UML website.
A potent case study in the effects of war profiteering at UML is the school’s participation in Israeli apartheid and mass-murder campaigns via military research for the U.S. defense industry. UML is partnered with numerous U.S. weapons contractors that provide the bulk of arms sales to the Israeli occupation. Most notable are UML partners Raytheon and Lockheed Martin; the world’s two largest arms dealers supply the missiles, bombs, and fighter jets that have seen heightened and indiscriminate use on large populated areas in Palestine, killing tens of thousands of people directly and likely hundreds of thousands more to follow from the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure. Raytheon also helped create Israel’s trademark Iron Dome missile defense system, and provides various other radar systems to Israel; this may raise eyebrows towards RURI at UML, which primarily conducts radar and communications research. Coincidentally, RURI was created in August of 2014, as Raytheon-made bombs were falling on Palestinians during what Israel called “Operation Protective Edge,” a high-tech killing spree of over 2,000 people in just 50 days.
UML seems disinterested in what its closest industry partner does with its research, and the school certainly isn’t trying to distance itself from Israel. One student profiled on the official UML website as part of the UML Center for Terrorism and Security Studies (CTSS) described his experience studying abroad in Israel:
Each week was a different topic, including Jihadi terrorism in the Middle East and Israel national security threats. In the morning there were classes and lectures, taught by numerous individuals, including faculty from The University of Tel Aviv and retired generals from the IDF… On the last day of the week they took an all day excursion to locations such as the Syrian Boarder [sic] and the Gaza Envelope. During the free time they has [sic] the ability to travel and would go to places such as Jerusalem, the beach, or the market. This program can be taken as a 3-credit course under a Security Studies elective.
UML promotes a school-sponsored trip to multiple violent occupation zones deemed illegal under international law, described with an enthusiastic sense of adventure that would not be out of place in an advertisement for a Disney cruise vacation. UML students embarking on this trip in the summer of 2017 were learning jaw-dropping “security” tactics; it was just a year later that IDF soldiers were admitting to holding kneecapping competitions while putting down the peaceful Great March of Return demonstrations, which protested Israel’s ongoing illegal blockade of Gaza and denial of the rights of refugees to return to their homelands. Over 200 Palestinians were killed and over 13,000 were wounded by Israel during the demonstrations that took place at the Gaza border fence. One imagines that the bodies were cleaned up quickly, should the next batch of UML CTSS students be sightseeing on their way to Tel Aviv beaches.
UML understands the potential for public backlash to its controversial institutional connections. This is especially true in the midst of relevant political movements, which bring those connections into uncomfortably sharp focus in the public eye. However, when faced with institutional criticism, UML did not respond with institutional change in any way.
After October 7, UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen issued a single vague 119-word blurb calling for a “swift end to the violence” that managed to avoid naming a single involved state or actor. This abstract position of “neutrality” serves only to publicly distance the school from its proximity to Israel, and stands in profound contrast to the substantial volume of war profiteering opportunities at UML, which obviously indicate a strong partisan stance on the “war” in question. Such a throwaway PR campaign also misinforms students, who are exposed to all of the career specifics of war profiteering and none of its outcomes. It is no surprise that 20 months after Chen’s statement, there has been anything but a swift end to the violence in Palestine, and UML’s cheap one-time message of neutrality crumbles under the weight of its institutional actions as students are funneled into the ranks of Israel’s biggest weapons suppliers. UML’s underlying wants are clear: not a swift end to the violence, but a swift end to the perception of violence by the public or the student body that may implicate the university, or cut its funding.
From Palestine to the Border
The U.S.-Israeli genocide is not the only case of UMass Lowell’s aiding and abetting of state violence. In April 2025, Trump’s second administration revoked a UML undergraduate’s immigration status alongside fourteen other UMass students. UMass administrators condemned the anti-immigration campaigns, but without acknowledgement of its own series of research centers and initiatives at UML that support the secret police and surveillance state apparatuses sponsored by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) itself.
Only four months earlier, UML unveiled the plans for a new “Cyber Center” on campus in collaboration with the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Fortune 500 technology company and prime contractor for DHS. SAIC is responsible for AI-based governance and biometric solutions in the U.S. border system – an automation and digitalization of surveillance technologies that can and are deployed against immigrants. UMass President Marty Meehan, who in April 2025 would call the “actions of the federal government” on campus “unprecedented” and “extremely troubling and upsetting”, said the following only five months earlier in December 2024 regarding the UML partnership with a major DHS contractor:
The SAIC partnership and creation of a Cyber Center is great news for UMass Lowell and the city of Lowell… These developments promise new knowledge and technological advances in a critically important field. At the same time, this collaboration will produce an important pipeline of talent as we develop the workforce urgently needed to join the work of securing our networks and information infrastructure and ensuring their resilience into the future.
For students pursuing engineering and technology careers, this pipeline characterizes futures. Whether through campaigns of aggression using corporate weaponry, violent “security” tactics, or discriminatory federal policies, students are coerced into participation in an industry that uses university research and educated workforces to produce catastrophic real-world outcomes. Hands are wrung and emails carefully crafted when the blowback from those outcomes reaches university doorsteps, but ultimately none of this concern is translated to what UML as an institution actually does with its resources and personnel. When it comes time to announce the newest contract or research initiative, there is nothing but vociferous adulation in LinkedInese from all of the relevant higher-ups in university and industry.
UML couples full-steam-ahead military investment with empty community assurances, and pipelines and partnerships are elevated over the people who bear their consequences.
For the Many, Not the Few
UMass Lowell, with the breadth of its involvement in war profiteering, is yet another cog in the expansive U.S. military-industrial complex. The pipeline that creates the next generation of weapons designers and security scholars is at work on campuses across the U.S., embedded in our public schools, supported by the institutions educating the American people.
The U.S. defense budget balloons every year, yielding more government contracts and subsequent corporate profit maximization. Well-connected to this booming industry, UML gains research funding and corporate connections. Debt-riddled engineering students get pointed towards the lucrative career paths that are spoonfed to them. People are killed at the other end of the newest weapon to hit the market, yet their deaths are never brought up in the classroom where the weapon was conceptualized.
The solution is education that prioritizes human need and human welfare instead of the weapons supplies of apartheid states: an engineering for the many, not the few. That requires viable STEM and technological alternatives that actually serve the people made available for students, but offering that is difficult without fundamental changes to how the U.S. economy is organized. Careers in military research will be prioritized by students for as long as the military-industrial complex profits through warfare and enlists university help to bolster its workforce and technology. The increased military privatization efforts and cost of attendance spikes of the 21st century have only exacerbated this dynamic.
There is no magical divestment button or replacement industry partnership to give UMass Lowell without addressing the root causes of its institutional decision making. Students and workers must also have far more democratic and empowered control over institutional decision-making, as equal stakeholders in the public institution. Students cannot control their career paths if they have no say in the administration of their universities. Workers who don’t own the products of their work have no way to challenge a boardroom decision to use those products for violent means. War profiteering is not actually profitable for the vast majority of people, and would not take its present form in a democratically organized society.
With this ultimate goal in mind, many actions can be taken in the moment. Students should continue to organize towards a collective understanding and dismantling of war profiteering on campus, and demand participation in the decision-making processes of their tuition-funded shcools. Universities and corporations that participate in the military-industrial complex and disregard its human cost need to face popular pressure for the damage, for the sake of both students herded into the military industry and the people around the world that suffer for it.
A future of ethical technology-based livelihoods is possible – but only once students are unencumbered by an industry that exchanges bombs for bottom lines.
Nate Foster is a member of Boston DSA.
The post Inside UMass Lowell: How to Create a University Pipeline to War Profiteering appeared first on Working Mass.
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