With money donated from the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Iowa State will be able to fund the Vance D. Coffman chair in aerospace engineering. Lockheed Martin is a defense department contractor, with sales of $25.5 billion dollars worth of weapons of mass destruction to governments around the world. When there is war, Lockheed Martin does well.

It is truly a sad day when our public universities, which are in a desperate shortage of funding to provide quality education, must rely on large corporations like these for funding. It is disappointing that our university, which encourages free and democratic thought, is forced to accept money from a corporation that produces weapons of mass destruction because of drops in state and federal funding of education.

Less money is being allotted for education, and universities all over the nation are required to search for alternate funding to stay afloat.

With this donation, and many others from large corporations, our universities are affected by corporate influence in their quest for increased profits. By accepting this money, Iowa State is tacitly acknowledging — and ultimately supporting — the actions of Lockheed Martin.

These actions include providing weapons systems that are used to kill and maim people all over the world. Lockheed Martin sells these weapons to countries that hardly have a clean record of human rights, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, China, India and Turkey, just to name a few.

In this day and age, when education should be geared toward understanding and accepting the differences between people, we students of Iowa State are forced to accept the strategies and goals of the Department of Defense, just by attending classes.

For some of us, religion, and for others, our moral orientation, asks us to disagree with these strategies and goals, which include waging war unnecessarily on (innocent) countries. By paying thousands of dollars to this institution, we are being forced to accept a course of thought that we possibly disagree with. This is a direct breech of our educational freedom.

Endowed chairs are very important to our university’s success because they provide Iowa State with the mechanism and money to retain and recruit the best faculty in aerospace engineering. The Vance D. Coffman chair will be much appreciated by the aerospace engineering program and help Iowa State to maintain the engineering college.

We also appreciate the financial crises our public universities are struggling through. I find it deeply disturbing that our federal government is not fully funding the Department of Education, causing soaring costs of tuition, loss of funding for Pell Grants and generally less money for state educational institutions and social services. All while the Department of Defense’s budget is bloated larger than ever, and the military industrial complex is seeing record profits.

This amount of money, $1.5 million, can have an enormous impact on our university. I do not expect the university to refuse a donation of this amount of money. What I do expect is that it holds these multinational corporations responsible for their actions with the research and services we provide to them.

Our own mission statement, states, “Iowa State University participates in international efforts to alleviate world hunger and poverty, to prepare students and faculty to be productive and responsible citizens of the world, and to contribute to increased cultural, educational, economic, scientific, and socio-political interchange and understanding between and among Iowans and other members of the world community.”

Does the acceptance of this money directly contradict our own mission statement? I feel it does. Many of us have given our all to this university, and we expect that it foster coexistence, rather than support companies that are developing weapons of mass destruction.