[Peace-discuss] Militarized Academy

[LAURIE SOLOMON]

 In light of the story below, one is forced to recognize and confront the
problem of academics and intellectuals along academic establishment and the
institutions that house them and their projects being a significant part of
the problem and not detached from being an integral component of the  and
heavily dependent on the military-industrial complex.  They have undeniably
been if not open promoters, supporters, facilitators, and even actors in the
generation and perpetuation of militarism, neocolonialism, corporate
capitalism, socialism for the establishment and its friends, U.S. arrogance,
disregard, and respect for the rights and sovereignty of other countries and
peoples, etc. for many of decades now. It looks like they will now find all
kinds of rationalizations (1) for accepting the largess of the
military-industrial complex, governmental gifts of public funding, and
establishment privatization of the benefits of publically funded research
and research facilities (which many academics also participate in the
transformation of the research that they do in public institutions with
public monies in profit and profitable ventures in and for their own
personal interests - research park is full of many of their start-ups), (2)
for buying into new government ventures and intrusions in the future so as
to make academia indistinguishable from the government-military-industrial
complex and the corporate establishment that it serves and academic and
non-academic intellectuals dependent servants -not independent critics - of
the establishment and its policies, and (3) for perpetuating the very thing
that many of them, symbolically in glib words while secretly profiting from,
claim to object to and protest with respect to specific concrete symptoms
and consequential instances that are generated by the very programs that
they are involved with turning a blind eye to the fact that they are also
the monster.  Universities tend to be among the nation's biggest defense and
national security sub-contractors, biggest trainers of personnel to be hired
by the military-industrial complex to perpetuate and further empower their
dominant authority and power over the masses domestically and other nations
internationally.

 

The question is why should academics, intellectuals, and the establishments
that they live in not be called upon to clean up their own houses and acts
first before we go after other groups and protest their actions.  I fear
that one has to come to the conclusion that universities, apart from being
research facilities working for the State and private corporations, are
mechanisms for socializing and indoctrinating students so as to produce a
conformist and well behaved, establishment supporting and dependent, labor
force for the military-industrial-governmental complex.  So much for
academia as a bastion of free exchange of ideas and intellectual pursuits
where discussion and intellectual pursuits are undertaken in their own right
and on behalf of private and public organizations for the practical purposes
of making profits or reinforcing establishment positions of power and
authority or as the producer of scholars and intellectuals as opposed to a
vocational school aimed at training people for specific jobs in the public
and private sectors.

 

 

t r u t h o u t | 11.20

 

Henry A. Giroux | Against the Militarized Academy
http://www.truthout.org/112008J Henry A. Giroux, Truthout: "While there is
an ongoing discussion about what shape the military-industrial complex will
take under an Obama presidency, what is often left out of this analysis is
the intrusion of the military into higher education. One example of the
increasingly intensified and expansive symbiosis between the
military-industrial complex and academia was on full display when Robert
Gates, the secretary of defense, announced the creation of what he calls a
new 'Minerva Consortium,' ironically named after the goddess of wisdom,
whose purpose is to fund various universities to 'carry out social-sciences
research relevant to national security.'"

 

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