Lockheed Leaves The Career Fair: Reflections on the Power of Principled Dissent
In spite of MIT’s crackdowns on free expression, students of principle emerged with shining resilience and renewed dedication towards the Palestinian cause
The MIT Fall Career Fair is MIT’s largest annual recruiting event -- this year, the career fair was marked by substantial security presence and a certain vacant booth.
It comes as little surprise, given MIT’s unique position within the American military-industrial complex, that defense contractors like Lockheed Martin have had — and continue to maintain — a heavy presence at MIT’s Career Fair. Lockheed manufactures F-16 and F-35 fighter jets; these aircraft are extensively used by the Israeli military to conduct indiscriminate air strikes in Gaza, and they were also used to support the Israeli invasion of south Lebanon in the past week. Lockheed also manufactures AGM-1149R9X Hellfire missiles; these missiles have been deployed against targets like Al-Shifa hospital, resulting in heavy civilian casualties.
Contractors like Lockheed Martin profit from the mass slaughter of over forty thousand Palestinians, including over twenty thousand Palestinian children -- these numbers are more than mere statistics. These numbers represent tents of sleeping children set ablaze, they represent refugee camps blasted into craters, they represent irreconcilable violence against civilians whose sole crime was being born on the wrong side of a border wall.
This year’s career fair was distinguished from previous years by its heavy police presence — when the fair opened, the line stretched from the Z center all the way to the bus stop on Mass Ave due in part to police-enforced checking of IDs, and it was impossible to look in any direction without seeing a police officer. Signs prohibiting “banners, signs, posters, and placards used for protests” were taped against the windows; the Lockheed Martin booth was surrounded by at least three police officers at all times.
Notably, the CAPD website requested that plans to protest recruiters be registered “three business days in advance”, in accordance with the “MIT Rules for Campus Protests and Demonstrations”. These rules were drafted around November 2023 by the Division of Student Life, MIT Emergency Management, and the MIT Police, but without input from a single faculty member, including the Faculty Policy Committee and the Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression.
Regardless of MIT’s attempts to crack down on protest activities at the career fair, students took collective action to disrupt Lockheed Martin’s recruiting efforts. Student after student lined up to talk to Lockheed’s recruiters for five, ten, twenty minutes, before stating that they wouldn’t work for a company that supports genocide. Rather than exchanging contact information, they left phony resumes detailing Lockheed’s enablement of war crimes and climate destruction, including the suppliance of arms to Israel used to destroy Gaza, the provision of bombs to Saudi Arabia used to attack school buses in Yemen, and the emission of twenty-nine million metric tons of CO2 this year alone.
Students undertook similar actions against Chevron, leaving resumes detailing the environmental abuses of the fossil fuel industry.
Around noon, a banner reading “LOCKHEED KILLS CHILDREN IN GAZA” appeared over the second floor of the career fair; its placement was such that it couldn’t be taken down without disrupting the fair. Although the banner was removed about an hour later, Lockheed recruiters packed their things and left their booth at around 1 PM, three hours before the end of the fair.
They did not return.
Lockheed’s vacation of the career fair is a victory to all who oppose the slaughter of the Palestinian people. This victory comes in the context of MIT’s severing of the MIT-Israel Lockheed Martin Seed Fund after months of sustained pressure; it comes in the context of the Israeli defense company Elbit Systems’ recent eviction from its Central Square office after months of consistent canvassing, picketing, and direct action from both MIT students and the greater Boston community. These triumphs testify to the strength of students united against their institution when their institution develops tools that destroy human life.
Defense contractors like Lockheed still sustain a heavy presence at MIT -- through the Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), MIT maintains direct partnerships with companies like Elbit Systems, Raytheon, and Boeing that sell weapons to Israel.
It is exceedingly clear that MIT weaponizes a facade of neutrality to defend its bottom line. We reject MIT’s presentation of itself as an unbiased arbitrator between pro-Israel and pro-Palestine voices because it is simply untrue -- MIT maintains longstanding research and recruiting relationships with companies directly profiting from Palestinian bloodshed.
We reject MIT’s presentation of itself as an institution devoted to solving the climate crisis while the MIT Climate Project continues to accept funding from fossil fuel companies like Chevron, which has been shown to lead to biased research that does not address the root causes of climate change. We reject MIT’s presentation of itself as an institution that uplifts URM students when its administrators refused to accept any responsibility for the drop in Black student enrollment from fifteen percent for the Class of 2027 to five percent for the Class of 2028 -- a drop that goes unmatched by peer institutions -- during the Affirmative Action town hall.
Whether they work in Bethesda or Cambridge, it is MIT students, faculty, and alumni that are building the Longbow Hellfire missiles that destroy the Gaza Strip and the P-3 aircraft that surveil the increasingly-militarized U.S-Mexico Border. If you carry the privilege of being an MIT student, you must ask yourself: how much is a human life worth to me? How much must I be paid to develop missiles that have slaughtered tens of thousands of children? Will I build tools for genocide in exchange for a dental plan?
If you refuse to support the mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza and Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, I invite you to join the 1,000+ MIT community members that have signed the Scientists Against Apartheid pledge and vowed to withhold their labor from war-profiteering companies like Boeing, HP, Lockheed Martin, Dell, and Google and Amazon’s Project Nimbus.
As scientists against apartheid, we will not build the armies that maim children, nor the drones that strike hospitals, nor the bombs that annihilate cities. We struggle against the systems that, in the words of Audre Lorde, orchestrate crisis after crisis and grind all of our futures into dust. We stand in solidarity with the wretched of the Earth. We refuse to devote our labor to genocide.
The Coalition for Palestine remains firm in its demands for MIT to cut its direct research ties with the Israeli Ministry of Defense and its ILP partnership with Elbit Systems. In spite of MIT’s crackdowns on free expression, students of principle emerged with shining resilience and renewed dedication towards the Palestinian cause. The forces of life will always prevail.
Kate Pearce ’27 and Hana Flores G are members of the MIT Coalition for Palestine. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect those of any MIT-affiliated organization.