The University of Connecticut Board of Trustees has steadily increased the connection between UConn’s College of Engineering and the war industry throughout the past few years.
The board of trustees recently voted to rename the G1 Cleanroom in the Science 1 Research Center to the “RTX Research Center” at their Feb. 28 meeting, according to the Daily Campus. In 2022, the board also voted that the United Technologies Engineering Building be renamed after RTX subsidiary Pratt & Whitney. UConn has also historically hosted a yearly “Lockheed Martin Day” on campus wherein the connection between the two groups is celebrated, and students are shown the supposed benefits of contributing to the military-industrial complex. Currently, RTX is also de facto represented on the board of trustees itself by Bryan K. Pollard, the company’s Associate General Counsel.
The decision to dedicate the research center to RTX is largely the result of the company’s charitable donation to the university. Radenka Maric’s recommendation explicitly mentions “this gift,” referring to RTX’s manifold contributions to the UConn Foundation, the private, non-profit organization that manages UConn’s endowment. While the dollar value of RTX’s philanthropy is heretofore unknown, as the public is largely not privy to the Foundation’s finances, RTX subsidiaries have endowed at least eight faculty members, according to the Foundation’s website.
However, in her glowing praise of RTX, Maric provides a curious emphasis on the company’s “focus on diversity, equity and inclusion,” having “provided scholarship support to underserved students within the College of Engineering.”
RTX funds scholarships prolifically across the country. In 2020, the company launched a scholarship program with the Executive Leadership Council — an organization of “Black CEOs and senior executives at Fortune 1000 and Global 500 companies” — that promises $10,000 per year to sophomores and juniors studying business and engineering.
In 2021, the RTX — then Raytheon — also sponsored six scholarships to students in the National Society of Black Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, which the UConn Center for Career Development advertised. These scholarships appear to be opportunities for young professionals of color to launch careers in predominantly white fields, even if these fields happen to profit fromglobal violence.
The Daily Campus Editorial Board has written before about the gross moral and ethical failure that is the war industry at UConn. Maric’s cynical and lazy appeal to the company’s commitment to diversity whitewashes how partnerships with arms manufacturers go against the values and integrity of UConn by highlighting a small and shallow example of corporate “good” through DEI practices.
The problem is that RTX and all military contractors cannot reasonably be said to be promoting “diversity” or “equity,” when in fact, they are one of the largest contributors to global instability, violence, and human rights abuses. To put it simply, giving out scholarships to underrepresented students does not make up for wiping out the lives of people across the globe through the sale and use of their weapons. Mathematically, they are directly responsible for decreasing diversity by literally decreasing the amount of people on this Earth. It is a stain on the meaning and value of diversity itself that the word be used to describe war profiteers. Maric provides an embarrassing justification for this decision to further entrench this university with these companies, and her statement must be addressed.
UConn disappointingly seems to either entirely misunderstand one of the key values they claim, or are simply unable to defend their decisions from a moral standpoint and must resort to cheap tactics to justify their actions.
nice