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The Politechnic of Turin votes against suspending relations with Israel – SHAME!

The Polytechnic University where I work has missed another opportunity to do the right thing.

On July 15, 2025, the Academic Senate voted by a majority against the Motion for Gaza presented by a group of senators. The Motion called for two simple actions, expressing “deep outrage and condemnation of the ongoing massacre of the civilian population in Gaza”:

  • 1. Public and duly motivated refusal to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation (MAECI) to participate in calls for collaboration between Italy and Israel;
  • 2. Public communication addressed to Israeli universities, stating our University’s intention to suspend existing international agreements and not to sign new ones.

The negative Senate’s vote on these simple points is an expression of the technocratic, corporate, and essentially patriarchal approach with which the Polytechnic University of Turin operates.

Now, some colleagues are starting to say no. A petition has been started to express our individual ‘not in my name’ stance regarding this latest decision by the academic senate.

For me, it is important to emphasize that this ‘not in my name’ cannot be limited to the latest vote by the Senate, but must be traced back to the epistemic and material structures underpinning the Polytechnic University of Turin.

In my fourth month of work at this university, in 2021, very few of us said ‘not in my name’ regarding the agreement with Frontex. An agency working with the so-called Libyan coast guard and engaged in extensive pushback, ultimately killing asylum seekers at the border. Even then, the senate gave its best, with two votes that were as problematic as the one on Gaza today (here, or even earlier, here).

In 2023, before October 7, it was—for students and for very few of us—a ‘not in my name’ in relation to the direct collaboration agreements that bind this Polytechnic to producers of weapons and death such as Leonardo.

Then came years of encampments. Of occupations. Of demonstrations, assemblies, and public debates in every media outlet, where few of us continued to say NO and propose concrete alternatives to a certain kind of service-based research.

Now, in July 2025, there are a few more of us saying NO. Really good! But at this junction, all need to remember that saying ‘not in my name’ today cannot stop at a simple nominal dissociation related to the latest nefarious vote in the Senate. For the historical, material, and political reasons that link the genocide of the Palestinian people to the death industries some of us have been fighting for years, our collective NO today must also be a NO to those industries. A NO that changes the political and economic structure of the Politecnico. Otherwise, it will be nothing more than a mid-summer fling. A momentary lifting of our eyes from the Excel spreadsheet, rather than an honest collective raising of our heads.

We need to address the political economy that structures the academic-military-industrial complex in Italy and beyond. That is a form of radical change that is not required by history or that must be done for posterity, but rather must come from a simple respect for all human life here and now.

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Interview on il Manifesto on the new militarized political economy of Turin & ITA universities

Today, in an interview with the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, I tried to sum up the last three years of personal and collective thinking / political organising around the relationship between the university and the military sector, also in relation to the colonial war of Israel in Palestine.

The interview, in Italian, is available here: https://ilmanifesto.it/leonardo-sta-diventando-per-torino-e-per-il-politecnico-quello-che-fu-la-fiat/r/zPgY466LfF2b6WidCtAz2

An automatic translation is available below.

‘Leonardo is becoming for Turin and the Politecnico what Fiat was’
Interview with Michele Lancione, professor of political-economic geography

“Leonardo is becoming for Turin what Fiat once was”. Michele Lancione, full professor of Political-Economic Geography at the Polytechnic University of Turin, published last September with the publishing house Eris Università e militarizzazione. The dual use of freedom of research, well ahead of the current events of these days. “When I wrote it I wanted to open a discussion in the academic sphere, then there was an acceleration of the debate due to the disaster of the Palestinian situation that led to a strong awareness among students”.

In the preface, you wrote that he wanted to offer them a tool to ‘fight for the liberation of academic knowledge from military colonies’.

I did not imagine it would become normal to see police inside universities and students truncheoned for two placards. The perspective has been turned upside down: the university is used to have a critical spirit and protest, instead Minister Bernini gives reason to those who have sold it out. This has happened because for too long research has been intertwined with the military and the services connected to it, but this risks making the university lose its purpose of knowledge. Leonardo works to make a profit and should not pose ethical questions. The students’ protests stem from all this.

By militarisation, you do not only mean research.

No, I also mean that process, which began in the West after 11 September 2001, in which what is not pertaining to the defence sector, primarily public places, is turned into military.

The book asks whether the public university can do technological research without addressing the issue of dual use.

The transfer of knowledge or technology from the civil to the military or vice versa is a difficult issue to control. This impossibility of control is used as an excuse by those who are interested in bringing the university and the war industry together; we are told that we only collaborate with military partners such as Leonardo for civil research, but this is a hypocritical position. I will give an example: if a company makes a profit from armaments, it will be very easy to acquire technology that sends rockets to Mars, even to drop them on Gaza. But we must emphasise that if basic research is defunded, universities are almost obliged to look for money that way.

This, it seems to be understood, applies in particular to the Politecnico where you teach.

Since the automotive sector no longer guarantees jobs and research, Turin has decided to focus on the military aerospace sector. The first player is Leonardo. The Politecnico, which historically trained executives, managers and engineers for Fiat, saw a great opportunity in this new sector. In doing so, it granted Leonardo our knowledge and technologies, gave it an advantage over its competitors at the expense of the Italian university and offered it cultural legitimacy, a techno washing.

What role does Leonardo’s Med-Or foundation, on whose board of directors sit twelve rectors of Italian universities, play in all this?

It is an emblematic example of the militarisation of the university. Bernini, perhaps in good faith, boasts of this collaboration and is wrong. The think tank chaired by Minniti serves Leonardo to position itself in the strategic market of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It is natural that there should be an interest in the ongoing, or future, conflicts in these areas. Many chancellors are now beginning to wonder whether their mandate is to advise Italy’s leading arms manufacturer and whether this prevents sensible geopolitical analysis.

It is not only happening in Italy.

Across Europe there are very specific funding programmes that exist at various scales, such as Horizon. In Italy, the Pnrm (Piano Nazionale della Ricerca Militare – National Military Research Plan) was launched in 2022, which involves the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Education and Universities and has as its objective ‘the increase of the Defence knowledge base in high-tech sectors’. It actually serves to inject state resources and public researchers into the military industrial sector. But if the money is there, why not put it into basic research instead of throwing it to the military?

You are among the signatories of the letter that several professors sent to the rector of PoliTo.

We asked you to take a position on the beating of students inside the university, we are waiting for a clear answer.