Fascinating article about Cornell-Technion partnership to build NYC tech campus. It’s going to be organized as a hub for interdisciplinary work, like the WW2 RAD labs Peter Galison and Fred Turner have written about.
Ido Aharoni, Consul General of Israel in New York, told The Jewish Week that Technion’s partnership with Cornell “is of strategic importance in terms of positioning Israel not only in America, but all over the world, as a bastion of creativity and innovation.” He added that “When Americans think of Israel, overwhelmingly the first thing that comes to mind is the association with conflict, the fact that Israel is in dispute with its neighbors.”
Technion is a top international university particularly strong in developing military technologies. Israel is a top exporter of drones. And Technion developed unmanned bulldozers.
Why would someone need an unmanned bulldozer? <pause> Hrm? Search Rachel Corrie just for a start.
Cornell faculty and students are angry that this partnership has gone through without even a debate among faculty who, by school bylaws, are to approve cross-school educational policy.
For those of us studying creativity and innovation cultures, the consul general is explicitly binding togetherinnovation economy diplomacy to Israel’s military actions and racialized exclusion of Palestinians. It’s not even entirely surprising, since a lot of the cultures of creativity we celebrate today, Fred Turner teaches us, came right out of military technology research into networks and ballistics systems.