Just 24 hours after Mayor Lisa Brown gave her State of the City Address — where she touted her “efforts to attract a more robust aeronautics sector to the Spokane area,” — Gonzaga University students held a walkout to demand the university pull out of the Inland Northwest Consortium, a partnership of aerospace and tech manufacturers and educational institutions.
That is the same organization that filed the application for Spokane to receive its Tech Hub designation, which Brown recently highlighted on social media. It also marks the city for heightened development of the aeronautics sector — which includes many corporations that manufacture weapons of war that Israel uses in its ongoing attacks in Gaza. That bombardment and invasion has killed more than 31,000 people, including more than 10,000 children.
Besides Gonzaga, other members of the consortium include Boeing (which has recently made news for failing aircraft and the deaths of two whistleblowers), Lockheed Martin and Raytheon/Collins — all of which also manufacture a large portion of the country’s weapons.
Organizers from the student group GU Community for Justice in Palestine held a walkout at noon on May 1, at the same time as the university engineering department’s Senior Design Expo. The protestors called for Gonzaga University to withdraw from the consortium, end study abroad programs in Israel, cut ties with Boeing (which sent representatives to the Senior Design Expo) and divest from arms manufacturers.
Student organizer Juliana Maucione said that by leading the consortium, Gonzaga is partnering with “defense contractors who are overly complicit in the mass murder of Palestinians,” including two of the top arms manufacturers in the US for the last few years — Lockheed Martin and Raytheon/Collins.
“Gonzaga’s connections to Boeing and arms manufacturers make the university directly complicit in the killing of over 34,000 people,” wrote organizer Kevin Pinkelman in a press release. “The hypocrisy of GU administration is glaring, and students, faculty and staff are furious.”
RANGE asked Brown if she had concerns with tying the future of Spokane’s economic development so closely to the military industrial complex.
Over a week later, Brown responded, stating, "I appreciate and support the rights of students to raise questions and advocate for their beliefs. I want to hear from them and discuss their concerns, and so I have requested a meeting to do so."
Pinkelman said Brown had reached out that week, via her communications director Erin Hut, to set up a conversation. He wasn’t sure when that meeting might happen, as many students finished their finals this week and are headed for home — Pinkelman included — but he was optimistic that conversation might happen during the summer or next semester.
A back-and-forth conversation between student organizers and campus officials is also still developing, though as of May 8, there has been little progress toward an agreement between protestors and the administration.
