Last month, Northeastern announced that the speaker for the May 2014 commencement ceremonies would be Janet Napolitano. This is disappointing but unsurprising.
Napolitano is the former governor of Arizona, and was the secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration from January 2009 until September 2013. There are strong connections between Northeastern, the Department of Homeland Security and Napolitano. In 2012, she created the Homeland Security Academic Advisory Council, and appointed President Joseph E. Aoun to it. The year before, Northeastern opened the Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at its Burlington campus. Both of these academic-government partnerships are of dubious purpose beyond strengthening the financial connections between the US government and our university. Northeastern under President Aoun has been eager to take the government’s money in exchange for promoting its goals. The choice of Napolitano as this year’s commencement speaker is just another event in which Northeastern gets in bed with DHS.
DHS was created by President George W. Bush as a reaction to the September 11 attacks. Along with the passing of the Patriot Act, these two developments enabled the militarization of the police, the culture of never-ending and omnipresent war, and the destruction of Americans’ civil liberties. Disappointingly, when President Obama took office, he reneged on his campaign promises to reverse this trend, instead speeding it along even faster.
This is where Janet Napolitano came in. Under her leadership, the Transportation Security Administration, which runs the security systems at American airports, spent billions of dollars every year to violate the Fourth Amendment rights of every person who flies on a commercial airline. This highly expensive and intrusive security theater has utterly failed at ensuring the safety of airline travel. It has wasted taxpayer’s money, eroded our faith in the efficacy of the government, and for those of us unlucky enough to appear vaguely similar to the terrorists who committed the September 11 attacks, taught us that government-sponsored racism is alive and well.
Also under the DHS umbrella is the US Border Patrol, US Coast Guard, US Customs and Border Protection, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and many more agencies. After consolidation under DHS, all of these agencies have been pushed from their original civilian functions to adopt a more militarized posture. The very word “homeland” evokes the idea that our republic is under attack, and that we will never know when or from where it will come. DHS has tried to turn America into a battleground in its never-ending war against largely imagined enemies.
War is good for business, as President Aoun knows. He has taken extraordinary steps to accept money to fund research into things of no genuine academic interest. We do not need “research” into how to build better blast-proof structures, as photos on the Kostas Institute website imply they are doing. The site brags that it “provides a high-trust environment to bring together academia, industry and government researchers and practitioners and advance resilience in the face of 21st century risks.”
“High-trust” sounds like a code word for secrecy, a practice that DHS loves, but runs against the principle of openness that has been at the cornerstone of academia for centuries. “21st century risks,” of course, means the nebulous threat of terrorism that DHS believes is lurking around every corner, despite the very low incidence of actual terrorists attacks.
When we hear Janet Napolitano speak, remember that things did not have to be this way. Those in the corridors of power control our world and the messages we receive. Ms. Napolitano is one of these people, and she has made our world a worse place in which to live. Northeastern’s partnership with her is shameful.
-Charles Connell is a senior computer science major.
