Jacob Howland speaks at Hillsdale: University of Tulsa, GKFF, and the surveillance state

Back on February 4, 2020, Jacob Howland, University of Tulsa professor of philosophy, and a leader in the fight against the corporate takeover of the university, spoke at Hillsdale College on TU's restructuring, on the influence of the George Kaiser Family Foundation, on GKFF's view of Tulsa as "beta city" -- a place to engage in social experimentation -- and the bigger connections to the surveillance state. Howland walks the listener through his process as he began to ask questions about the radical restructuring of the University, and began to find connections in ever-widening circles.

I spoke about this when I was last on with Pat Campbell, but neglected to publish the link. Unfortunately, there's no way to embed this video. Here is the video of Jacob Howland's speech at Hillsdale College.

Here is the report of Howland's talk in the Hillsdale Collegian student newspaper:

Corporate interests are taking over the University of Tulsa with the goal of turning its students into meek, interchangeable cogs to serve the new knowledge economy, said Jacob A. Howland, professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa. He gave his lecture "The Crisis of Liberal Education in America: Does it Have a Future?" on Feb. 4.

According to Howland, leaders at TU have one thing in common -- a connection to billionaire George Kaiser, the controlling shareholder of the Bank of Oklahoma. Interestingly, the Bank of Oklahoma controls half of TU's 1.2 billion endowment.

Howland said that this corporate takeover "was designed to extract value from TU for Kaiser, his trustees and administrators, and to promote Kaiser's progressivist causes."...

No matter what training they choose, however, the greater goal is to turn students into a new kind of human capital.

"Education is, in many ways, the new oil," Howland said. "The monetization and commodification of human capital requires a standardized product that will be pumped out in large quantities."

Essentially, the goal behind the restructuring of TU is to transform students into this standardized product. According to Howland, the ideal future TU students will be "individuals ground down smooth into workers and managers who will fit interchangeably into a globalized and digitalized system of production. This endeavor requires new levels of behavioral conditioning, which is quite adequately supplied by the imperatives of progressive ideology."

If this sounds dystopian, perhaps that's because Gerard Clancy, former president of TU and a close associate of Kaiser, sought to emulate the University of Beijing's branch campus in the city of Karamay, China. According to Howland, Clancy was particularly impressed by Karamay's heavy investing in the "knowledge sector"-- namely, technology information systems and information service industries from all over the world.

The city of Karamay has served as a testing ground for the newest security systems in China, including drones, wearable computing facial recognition, and predictive video that Clancy praises as "helping law enforcement fight crime and maintain public safety."

One of the intriguing facts Howland relayed dealt with a TU plan to turn parts of the Pearl District and Kendall Whittier neighborhood into a Cyber District. He managed to download a copy of the prospectus for the Tulsa Enterprise for Cyber Innovation,
Talent and Entrepreneurship (TECITE) Cyber District, which has since been removed from the web:

This proposal asks for the creation of a Tulsa Enterprise for Cyber Innovation, Talent and Entrepreneurship (TECITE.) The backbone of this enterprise is a set of co-located cyber centers of excellence that link industry, federal agencies and The University of Tulsa in a united effort in defense of our information systems. The proposal takes advantage of Tulsa's low cost of living, ability to recruit and retain young talent and the near downtown Tulsa Opportunity Zone along 6th Street. The proposal leverages The University of Tulsa's 20-year history as the lead supplier of Top Secret Security Clearance talent to federal agencies and as a national center of excellence in cyberdefense education and research. All of this is an effort to significantly grow additional cyber workforce and innovations in Tulsa.

Specifically, we propose four co-located Centers of Excellence; an Engineering Research Center at The University of Tulsa focused on cybersecurity, a Multi-Federal Agency Cybersecurity Center of Excellence, a Cybersecurity Insurance Institute to gather and analyze data on cyber risks, and a Consortium of Business Sectors in banking, energy, retail, health and transportation focused on cyber defense research and innovation. We propose the co-location of these centers of excellence along the 6th Street Opportunity Zone Corridor, linking downtown Tulsa with The University of Tulsa.

One wonders how this might dovetail with Tulsa Development Authority's redevelopment plans for these neighborhoods.

UPDATE 2024/02/19: Howland's speech is now also available on the Internet Archive and thus embeddable.