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from the they-have-to-come-from-somewhere dept.
VICE News reports
An information and intelligence shift has emerged in America's national security state over the last two decades, and that change has been reflected in the country's educational institutions as they have become increasingly tied to the military, intelligence, and law enforcement worlds. This is why VICE News has analyzed and ranked the 100 most militarized universities in America.
Initially, we hesitated to use the term militarized to describe these schools. The term was not meant to simply evoke robust campus police forces or ROTC drills held on a campus quad. It was also a measure of university labs funded by US intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.
But ultimately, we came to believe that no term sums up all of those elements better than militarized. Today's national security state includes a growing cadre of technicians and security professionals who sit at computers and manage vast amounts of data; they far outnumber conventional soldiers and spies. And as the skills demanded from these digital warriors have evolved, higher education has evolved with them.
The 100 schools named in the VICE News rankings produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state, and profit the most from American war-waging.
[...] Twenty of the top 100 schools that instruct people working in intelligence agencies, the military, and the worlds of law enforcement and homeland security--including their private contractor counterparts--are effectively online diploma mills. Twelve are for-profit companies; several didn't exist before 9/11. The schools have become so important that two of them, American Military University (No. 2) and the University of Phoenix (No. 3), rank near the top of the list based on the sheer number of their graduates working in the Top Secret world.
Seventeen of the 100 top schools are in the Washington, DC area, reflecting the concentration of all things national security around the nation's capital. The University of Maryland handily outranks all other schools at number one, while Georgetown University (No. 10), George Washington University (No. 4), and American University (No. 20)--all considered among the country's 10 best schools for the study of international relations--rank among the top 25 most militarized schools.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Thursday November 12 2015, @05:53AM
Sorry Hartree, but you missed it. The article I saw has a picture of some Texas A&M students holding a banner, and I can assure you that school is heavy into military service. Cadets have tons of little privileges, seemingly to constantly remind everyone that the school is joined at the hip to the military. For instance, they have right of way. If you're walking along and a group of cadets is marching on the same sidewalk, you are supposed to get off and get out of their way, don't make them break formation to go around your wussy civilian ass. They really do have this attitude that men (and to a much lesser extent women) who serve in the armed forces are holier than thou. Heinlein's Starship Troopers expresses much the same attitude.
Cadets participate in Texas A&M football games. Along with the band, cheerleaders, and such that every school has, Texas A&M always has that extra item: a group of cadets dressed in shiny uniforms. They used to wear swords at the football games, until one stupid hothead got so mad at being mocked by the opposing team (think it was Rice, back in the days of the Southwest Conference) that he actually drew his sword. After that, no more swords allowed. Just like Indiana Jones showed everyone by pulling his gun on a swordsman, swords are stupid anyway. Just one more extremely obsolete thing, along with kings, nobles, knights in shining armor, and stone castles, from the far too romanticized, Disneyfied Middle Ages. It's okay to wear a blunted sword to a renaissance festival, as long as it's also sheathed and firmly wrapped up so you can't get it out quickly, but to actually make them part of the uniform of a modern military is carrying the romance much too far.
The brainwashing is thorough. Is military force our best tool for solving our problems? If the only problems you see are other peoples, you are also likely to think that the military is the best answer. They love this sort of world view in which the world is an indestructible stage upon which groups of people can fight each other for supremacy for all eternity. Indoctrinating students with this sort of thinking, rather than educating them, is doing us all a huge disservice, and any institution that does that doesn't deserve to be recognized as a school, let alone a university. These military universities flirt with crossing that line. Fortunately, indoctrinating college students isn't so easy. Many military folks eventually realize that they are more tools of corporate power rather than the Arsenal of Democracy.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @01:34PM
The brainwashing is thorough. Is military force our best tool for solving our problems? If the only problems you see are other peoples, you are also likely to think that the military is the best answer. They love this sort of world view in which the world is an indestructible stage upon which groups of people can fight each other for supremacy for all eternity.
Military life was very important to the ancient Greeks and Romans as a way of 1) ensuring their survival against enemies, and 2) ensuring that trade routes weren't disrupted, which allowed them to maintain their standard of living. Military dominance protected and supported the democratic political tradition, and the great works of literature, philosophy, art, mathematics, and engineering.
The same was true of the British empire of the late 18th to early 20th centuries. Then, as now, enemies abounded that wanted to take it all away, either by conquest or just for short term plunder. The US is an analogous position to the ancient Romans and Victorian Britains; even most of the intellectually challenged members of Congress realize that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 12 2015, @02:55PM
Yes, the bogeymen will come and get us if we don't steal people's money to fund an over-sized military. The thing is, the bogeymen aren't a very big threat. Rather, they are merely convenient tools that corrupt politicians use to scare people into voting for warmongering pieces of trash so the military and defense agencies can get virtually unlimited funding.
Preemptive warfare is disgusting and causes far more problems than it attempts to solve (much like the US government's tendency to try to overthrow other countries' governments for its own gain). Countless innocent people end up dead by our own hands, which certainly doesn't look good. We haven't had a legitimate war in quite a long time. Politicians also like to wage wars without calling what they're doing a war. The situation is screwed, and if you'll notice, rampant fearmongering has never worked or saved any collapsing empire.
The US government is far more of a threat to our freedoms than any foreign bogeymen. This is because the government is supposed to serve the people, so when it is corrupted, that is significantly worse than some random terrorist blowing people up.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday November 12 2015, @07:00PM
The military was important to Britain to keep others from taking their stuff. But they more often used it to take other people's stuff. Ask China about the Boxer Rebellion. "The sun never sets on the British Empire" can also be said "We steal all the way around the world".
Perhaps it was necessary. Perhaps it actually did, eventually, help the people they stole from. But I'm going to take a bit of convincing.
The problems with having a strong military are:
1) It's expensive, and
2) When you've got this big, fancy, expensive tool, those in charge want to use it.
Defense is necessary. Agression is evil. A strong military enables both.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 13 2015, @01:29PM
But how strong? We should slice the military budget in half, at the very least. The defense budget needs to go down significantly as well. Which doesn't mean no defense at all, since we'd still be spending more than any other country in the world. All of this nonsense is pure paranoia and wasteful. And I think that in many cases, a lack of resources breeds innovation. When you have lots and lots of money, you tend to be more wasteful with it.