Militarized or utilized: Does having a military influence at BU benefit us?

We ranked higher than MIT and Northeastern as a militarized university

This week Vice released the “100 Most Militarized Universities in America” with BU taking the spot at #34.

It’s no secret our school has very close relationships with the government and the United States Armed Forces.

The fact we have a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, means there is a lot of top secret research and employment at BU.

The ROTC gives a college education and military training to those students who want to be a part of the armed forces in the future.

The ranking says “The Multimedia Decision Making Lab does IARPA-funded human subjects research” and “The Center for Information and Systems Engineering conducts classified research” within campus.

This is definitely a logical step the armed forces is taking.

Where better to conduct significant research for military protection than one of the best research universities in the world?

As far as other top universities go, BC isn’t even on the list, Northeastern is well below us with a #58 ranking, MIT with #47 and Harvard two spots above at #32.

That the military chose a university to do research – and employs students for substantial jobs on our campus – definitely means BU is strongly educating us to become the future.

The Pardee School of Global Studies will even conduct a lecture on Careers in Intelligence, where the Director of Intelligence Policy Center at RAND Corp, John Parachini, will join students to talk about future options in the intelligence.

An IR student in Pardee, Ibrahim Rashid, says he finds it “very interesting that there’s a poster on Comm Av. that says ‘donate a class gift so that I can give back to the ROTC.'”

Our school is definitely trying to promote support for the US military, which may seem strange for an international student.

“I’m not bashing on the military or anything, I just find that poster a bit peculiar,” adds Rashid.

BU has a strong bond of trust and agreement with the military, and hence the government will not only benefit those in the ROTC, but also economics, IR, public policy, and politics students.

Although there is a strong bias towards the American military, I never felt like the school gave us a biased education, since its sole principal is based on having a “common ground.”

More
BU