What does it mean for a public university to promise that students will use AI “responsibly and ethically” while tying its future to Big Tech, military contractors, and the security and carceral state?
That contradiction sits at the center of Central Connecticut State University’s proposal to remake itself as a polytechnic research university.
CCSU says this transformation will remain grounded in humanistic values. Its materials describe graduates as “ethical analysts” and assign the liberal arts and social sciences a role in connecting technology to ethics, policy, and community partnership. This sounds reassuring, but CCSU never explains what ethics requires of the university itself —even as it builds ties to ethically fraught industries.
CCSU presents responsible AI as a student skill: understand its limits, evaluate its output, and avoid misuse. But this responsibility begins only after harmful technologies have been developed, sold, and embedded in education, work, public services, and state authority. It evades larger questions: what these systems collect, whose interests they serve, who profits, and whether they should exist at all.
This framework pushes responsibility downward. Students are held accountable under vague and inconsistent rules, while CCSU selects vendors and pursues partnerships with corporations that further entrench AI —including surveillance technologies—across public institutions, law enforcement, and the security state. Ethics becomes a burden imposed on users rather than a restraint on institutional power.
University-approved technology can still cause harm. More accurate biometrics can expand warrantless surveillance and persecution. Transparent predictive software can still sort people by alleged risk. Sometimes the ethical problem is not misuse. It is the intended use.
That matters because CCSU is building its vision around AI, cybersecurity, Industry 4.0, applied research, and corporate partnerships. Its plans promote corporate-sponsored research, workforce pipelines into “priority sectors,” the possible co-location of companies within the Central Applied Learning and Industry Corridor, and CCSU’s National Security Agency-validated cyber programs.
Terms such as “aerospace” and “advanced manufacturing” conceal the political character of this alignment. CCSU’s strategy includes Pratt & Whitney, Sikorsky, and Electric Boat —subsidiaries of RTX, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics. These companies are pillars of U.S. militarism and prominent participants in CCSU’s workforce strategy. Pratt & Whitney maintains engines for Israel’s F-15I and F-16I fleets, while Sikorsky has supplied Israel with CH-53 military helicopters and is building their replacements. Their parent corporations have supplied Israel with weapons and military systems during what leading human-rights organizations have identified as its ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Calling these relationships “workforce development” does not erase their function. The fields and technologies CCSU is expanding are integral to war profiteering, mass surveillance, and border militarization. Yet CCSU has not said what projects it would reject regardless of profit or political connections, how it would review dual-use research, or whether faculty and students could decline military work. “Ethical AI” makes this alignment appear socially responsible before meaningful boundaries exist.
Big Tech is already embedded in the project through NVIDIA hardware, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Copilot, GitHub, and an autonomous drone. CCSU also plans research with multinational corporations and government agencies. These companies control much of the AI infrastructure, and several hold military, intelligence, policing, and immigration-enforcement contracts. Their systems turn human thought, expression, behavior, movement, and relationships into raw material for profit and institutional control.
ICE uses cloud databases, facial recognition, location tracking, social-media monitoring, and AI-assisted analysis to identify, detain, and deport people. These systems extend racist immigration enforcement into the digital sphere, drawing people’s homes, workplaces, movements, and relationships into a deportation dragnet. CCSU’s strategy helps feed this apparatus by constructing a publicly subsidized pipeline for an AI economy centered on automation, data extraction, and predictive control. Yet CCSU confines ethics largely to bias, privacy, and appropriate use. A public university cannot credibly claim to govern AI while relying on platforms it cannot inspect or control.
The environmental and labor costs remain ignored. Generative AI depends on energy- and water-hungry data centers, mining, semiconductor production, and rapid hardware replacement. It also relies on exploited workers who label data, moderate disturbing content, manufacture equipment, and maintain data centers. Once deployed, AI can diminish professional autonomy, eliminate entry-level jobs, and leave fewer employees overseeing more automation.
CCSU celebrates servers, robot dogs, and autonomous drones without binding standards for energy use, sourcing, labor conditions, or disposal. It is not simply preparing students for the future but helping construct one shaped by automation, monitoring, and corporate control.
Weak shared governance reinforces the danger. Forums, surveys, and appointed task forces do not replace access to contracts, faculty deliberation, and a formal vote. CCSU holds students responsible under unclear rules while declining to impose binding limits on its own purchases and partnerships. It has not established independent partnership review, identified applications it will reject, or guaranteed faculty authority over technology adoption.
Its “ethical and responsible AI” is therefore not merely vague but duplicitous: moral restraint in words; corporate dependence, mass surveillance, racist policing, military alignment, environmental harm, and labor exploitation in practice. Until CCSU accepts enforceable limits, public accountability, and real shared governance, “ethical AI” is not a safeguard. It is moral cover for the polytechnic brand.
Timothy Scott is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Central Connecticut State University, a tech industry researcher, and the author of the book, Schooling for Silicon Valley.