UNM running SNL one of the worst mistakes UNM and NM could make

May 24, 2016

Perhaps you folks in Santa Fe and Taos might be interested in these comments also. The "political heroin" trope is courtesy Carol Miller and I (obviously) think it is excellent.

http://news.unm.edu/news/unm-part-of-team-bidding-to-manage-sandia-national-laboratories

http://www.togethersandia.com/

Dear [news] colleagues --

If UNM ends up helping run Sandia it would be one of the worst mistakes UNM could make, or the state could make.

This collaboration will do nothing for the state economically, just as the two nuclear laboratories have on balance hurt the state politically and economically so far. It is easy to focus on a few well-paying jobs and a little harder to notice the society-wide effects of supporting nuclear-military priorities.

Nuclear weapons are New Mexico's political heroin. Peddling ideals of mass destruction at the state's main university will make an intellectual desert there.

Sandia's overall purpose is global domination by force. There are a few other elements there but not many, and they are all either supportive or complementary to that central mission.

A bright future for New Mexico, by contrast, can only be built on notions of collective security, justice, environmental protection, and related job creation, funded as necessary from a different social contract. These are essentially opposite political values to those that animate our laboratories and bring them money.

Short of that radical green-pink agenda, the state will continue to fail and to fall. Tiny "reforms," so-called, sought by many but seldom enacted, would not even keep pace with the hammer-blows of bad news coming from our poor educational system, our drying climate, our extreme and rising inequality, and our many other comparative disadvantages.

Sandia is all about the talented 5% working for the continued financial health of the 1%. That model has failed. UNM could become something else, with the proper leadership. Clearly we don't have that. Anywhere, really.

Greg