Much of our higher education system is a
glorified feeder for Lockheed Martin and other
defense industry firms
By Indigo Olivier
August 19,
2022:
Information Clearing House
-- - "Guardian"
-
In
his 1961 farewell address, Dwight D Eisenhower
warned the nation against the “unwarranted
influence” of the military-industrial complex.
But a lesser known part of the speech was
addressed to universities: “In the same fashion,
the free university, historically the
fountainhead of free ideas and scientific
discovery, has experienced a revolution in the
conduct of research. Partly because of the huge
costs involved, a government contract becomes
virtually a substitute for intellectual
curiosity.”
We didn’t listen.
For the better part of
the pandemic, I’ve been researching the defense
industry’s ties to college campuses as part of
an investigative fellowship for the magazine In
These Times. On 11 August, we published a
4,300-word
feature article on Lockheed Martin’s
sweeping recruitment on college campuses.
We found an environment
in which Stem students are funneled into the
defense industry through recruitment, research,
financial assistance or some combination of the
three.
Lockheed offers
cash-prize competitions, scholarships and paid
internships to students which have served as
pipelines to employment. In 2020, the company
hired 2,600 interns and claimed over 60% of
graduating former interns converted to full-time
jobs.
On campus, Lockheed has
set up recruiting tables in the lobbies and
hallways of student buildings and hosts
workshops on everything from space exploration
to résumé-building. At the University of Texas
at Arlington, a $1.5m donation resulted in one
of their buildings being
renamed the Lockheed Martin Career
Development Center.
But the company’s
signature recruiting event, which is hosted at
more than a dozen universities, is something
called Lockheed Martin Day. Recruiters attract
students with virtual reality demos, flight
simulators and, in some cases, landing their
helicopters directly on campus. Company
officials have been known to offer on-the-spot
job and internship opportunities to students
during the event.
Additionally, Lockheed
has poured resources into the financial support
and recruitment of students at historically
Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), earning
its place as the number one industry
supporter of HBCU engineering institutions
for seven years in a row.
But before anyone says
this is a good thing, it’s worth pausing to ask
ourselves how we got here in the first place.
When Black women hold the
highest average student loan debt ($41,466),
it’s hard to argue against additional financial
support no matter where it comes from. Unless
you start with a more basic question: why do
Black women graduate with the largest debt
burden? Why are HBCU endowments, on average, 70%
smaller than other universities?
Why is $1.7tn for
Lockheed’s F-35 fighter jet considered a
worthwhile investment but $1.7tn in student debt
relief considered a handout?
The answer boils down to
what priorities we set as a nation and the
investments we are willing to make based on
those priorities.
Last year, the
Biden-Harris administration
announced an unprecedented $5.8bn investment
for HBCUs. By comparison, the administration has
sent nearly twice that figure in military
assistance to Ukraine.
This country reached a
grim milestone in 2020. For the first time,
government funding to Lockheed Martin
exceeded funding to the Department of
Education. When a nation spends more on a single
military contractor than the agency tasked with
overseeing college financial assistance,
Lockheed’s scholarships seem less like an act of
charity and more like intentional policy
choices.
While Lockheed’s presence
on college campuses goes back decades, its
scholarship program was only launched in 2019.
Following Donald Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs
Act, Lockheed made a
commitment to invest $50m in Stem education
enrichment programs and a Stem scholarship
program over the next five years. Hundreds of
millions of dollars more went to employee
training and other education initiatives
including tuition assistance for employees,
research and development, and award money for
competitions.
Corporations will have
saved millions in profits while
adding nearly $2tn to the deficit over the
next decade. At the same time, Republican
officials in congress argued that universities,
which have traditionally been tax-exempt, were
hoarding their wealth and needed to pay up.
The 2017 tax cuts
included a provision to impose a 1.4% excise tax
on the endowments of the wealthiest private
universities in the country. One Washington Post
reporter explained that “the revenue from
the endowment tax will not be used to lower the
cost of higher education but instead to offset
corporate tax cuts”.
If budgets are moral
documents, what do ours say about us?
By the air force’s own
admission, the F-35
has been a failure. What was supposed to be
a lightweight, low-cost, multi-purpose fighter
jet has, over the years, gotten heavier, more
expensive and less effective. As the air force’s
top general put it last year, “The F-35 is a
Ferrari. You don’t drive a Ferrari to work every
day, you only drive it on Sundays.”
I’ll acknowledge that
these policies have resulted in a complicated
reality. Millions of people around the country,
including students, now depend on exorbitant
defense spending. According to a 2021 Bloomberg
report, “nearly every US state has economic
ties to the F-35, with 29 states counting on the
project for $100m or more in economic activity.”
A similar analogy can be drawn based on the
defense research at universities that support
students, professors and institutional budgets.
But knowing that all of
this work is underwritten by the federal
government and funded by taxpayers, we could
just as easily decide that investing in jobs
that improve human lives is more important than
investments in ending them.
Lockheed’s presence on
college campuses poses this question to us and
underscores two competing visions for the
university: a political and economic tool in
service of the world as it is or an institution
dedicated to advancing critical thinking and
civic engagement for the world as it could be.
Once the question has
been asked, it’s up to us to decide whether we
will continue to prioritize war profiteering
over posterity.
- Indigo Olivier is a Reporter-Researcher
at The New Republic
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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