College of Engineering Claims New “Mega Civilian-Killing Laser 9000” Is Not Intended for Military Use
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In uncertain times, a country has to return to its core values to remember what it is. In America, we’ve been continuously beating that dead horse for three centuries, and that doesn’t seem to be getting us much of anywhere, so let’s try the University of Iowa College of Engineering!
Recently, a university engineering laboratory has embarked on a fascinating (and fun!) project for a classified corporate entity. After making daily freedom of information requests to the college for three weeks, they mercifully sent us a briefing on the project, which has 90% of the information redacted, but hey! At least we got the title! The unspecified object’s name is “MEGA Civilian-Killing LASER 9000-A.” A concerning title, perhaps, but most of the unredacted words include terms such as “peacekeeping,” “defense,” and “totally benign,” so evidently we have nothing to fear.
Curious and dedicated to journalistic integrity, we decided to ask the perspectives of the students and faculty working on the project. Here’s what we found:
“Oh, the laser?” one ethical, globally aware graduate student replied. “Sorry, we don’t really use the official name. We call it the Orbital Strike, haha. Like from Call of Duty? Anyways, we’re really dedicated to making the world a better place.”
“Getting grant money is always an issue, so we’re very thankful that [REDACTED COMPANY NAME] has been so generous in its donations to the Collins Aerospace Defending Our Country On-Campus Laboratory,” one faculty member told us.
“It’s been awesome. I had to fight tooth and nail for this, so I’m glad the professors and graduate researchers have been so welcoming. It’s a super fun workplace atmosphere. We played ‘Pin the Missile on the Enemy of Democracy’ for someone’s birthday last week,” an undergraduate intern working on AI research told us. “They’re only paying me five dollars an hour for the semester, but at least it’s in bills! They paid me in loose pocket change on the Lockheed Martin project.”
Alongside its projects, the college has been taking a new, revolutionary approach to ethics, replacing the old DEI-laden Cultural Perspectives, Values, and Society general education requirement and condensing whatever loose ethics they get taught during the first year classes into a new course. Formed in partnership with real business representatives from American Ordnance, Collins Aerospace, and Lockheed Martin, “ENGR:1666: Introduction to Cognitive Dissonance” lays out the five core values for our engineers of the future:
Accountability: Avoid it.
Appreciation: Appreciate the opportunities 100 years of imperialism has created for you.
Community: Your community here is all that exists. Don’t think about anywhere else. Your employer and country are morally righteous.
Respect: Respect your superiors and always follow orders.
Timeliness: Turn in your three weekly lab reports on time or we’re paying you less and shredding your letter of recommendation.
The curriculum includes engaging lessons such as “Relativism: Moral and Physical,” “How to Ethically Increase Profits (by any means necessary, according to Milton Friedman)” and a guest lecture from Northrop Grumman on “Sustainable Drone Warfare.”
These efforts, College of Engineering dean Ann McKenna says, help achieve the college’s mission statement of creating “graduates [who] are ethical, globally-aware citizens whose work while at the University of Iowa and throughout their careers make the world safer and our use of resources more efficient” and “undoubtedly improving quality of life for our Iowa community as well as for people across the United States and around the world.” This also helps the college reach its budget of 52 million in research expenditures, 80% of which comes from unnamed “external sources.” Very accountable.