Yale University Proposing to Use Immigrants as Guinea Pigs?

This sounds so crazy you’d think we’re making it up: Yale University is planning to partner with the Department of Defense to create a training center that uses local “non-white” immigrants as test subjects for “interrogations.

Yes, that’s right. One of the country’s most prestigious universities is ready to use immigrants as guinea pigs.

Tell Yale University Dean Robert Alpern to reject a military interrogation training center that would use immigrants as test subjects.

The professor in charge of the project, Charles Morgan III, laid out plans last week: the center would teach soldiers how to interrogate subjects who are “someone they can’t necessarily identify with,” specifically “Moroccans, Columbians, Nepalese, Ecuadorians and others.”

There is so much that is awful and offensive about the proposed center that it’s hard to know where to start. Lumping people of color in a category as out-of-the-norm folks who soldiers can’t identify with? And then using them as test subjects to test out war techniques?

Dean Alpern and other Yale leaders who are considering this proposal care a lot about the university’s public image. Yale depends on alumni for funding and already some former students have threatened to stop making donations after they heard about the center.1 If thousands of us sign this petition, the media will take notice and Dean Alpern will be forced to rethink this highly offensive plan.

Tell Yale University Dean Robert Alpern to reject a military interrogation training center that would use immigrants as guinea pigs.

It sounds insane that such an incredibly offensive project would be considered at an Ivy-league university whose motto is “truth and light.” But as students of the school have pointed out, Yale Dean Robert Alpern didn’t seek any input from students and faculty on the ethics of the project and didn’t consult community members about the impact this plan would have on the large immigrant community in New Haven. Rather, the school quietly moved forward with the awful proposal and plans to accept funding from the Department of Defense.

Please tell Dean Alpern that immigrants are not “test subjects” at the military’s disposal.

Sign this petition demanding Yale University Dean Robert Alpern reject a military interrogation training center that would use immigrants as guinea pigs.

Thanks and ¡adelante!

Published in Latino Daily News