Boots on Campus: Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia

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Boots on Campus: Yale Flap Highlights Militarization of Academia

Wednesday, 27 February 2013 16:06
By Kelley B. Vlahos, AntiWar.com | News Analysis


Have American university campuses become so inured to the militarization of policy, culture – our thought – that they can’t see the Trojan horse sitting in the quad, its occupants pouring out and passing out sweets and credits to all the Ivy Leaguers passing by with goggled eyes and open arms?

A caricature for sure, but is it so off base? How else does one explain the muted response to news that the Department of Defense may have been funding the "U.S. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience," at the Yale Medical School in New Haven? The proposed program, according to a report by ABC News last week, would teach special operations personnel the art of "conversational," and "cross cultural" intelligence gathering, and pay volunteers from the community’s vast immigrant population (mainly poor Hispanics, Moroccans and Iraqis) to serve as the guinea pigs test subjects.

ABC got wind of the story from both The Yale Herald and the Yale Daily News, the pages of which were used by students to complain about what they saw as their school/alma mater inviting military intelligence to campus to hone their wartime interrogation techniques on the local non-white population. Their outrage – which played out on only two national mainstream news outlets, by the way – ABC and The Huffington Post – was apparently enough for the school to announce Friday night that the program would not be coming to Yale, "until we have investigated all these issues" (we think the prestigious Ivy League got freaked when med school alumni start talking about withholding donations). However, as Nathalie Batraville, a Yale graduate student who wrote about her aversion to the program in The Yale Daily News, told Democracy Now! on Feb. 21:

…there has been an increase in recent years in the influence of the military in universities, in the presence of programs designed to help the military achieve its goals. And we would really like for this – you know, we would really like (to) make an intervention in terms of drawing a line and figuring out what is ethical, what is unethical, what is the relationship, how does this affect immigrant communities in New Haven, how does this affect the student body. And so, we’d really like more transparency, and we’d like to have an open discussion about the role of the military in the university.

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask for a school that has done everything but plant military insignia outside the administration building in order to make it feel welcome, the very least of which was to invite the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Court) back onto campus in 2012. Last year we read about how Yale students who more than 40 years before had marched in defiance of the Vietnam War and of the FBI’s COINITELPRO and Black Panther trials, were lining up like groupies to get into a new "leadership" seminar taught by rock star Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired from his command in 2010 for badmouthing the president, and who was never held accountable for the beating and torture of individuals under his authority in Iraq. ....................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/14837-boots-on-campus-yale-flap-highlights-militarization-of-academia

[Buzz Clik]

1. "The militarization of academia"?

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2. Ivy Leaguers...who is more narcissistic than Yale Med students/alum?

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3. .

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