BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE

By definition, a military base, regardless of location, is a potential military target in a time of war. Adults, be they enlisted personnel or civilians, who work in such a place, a place dedicated to warfare, implicitly accept the risk of attack. The risk might be low and rarely discussed, but on a military base it could hardly be hidden or entirely forgotten.

People who work on university campuses, in contrast, should have no such nagging concerns. In fact, we ordinarily think of universities as humanitarian institutions par excellence, dedicated to creating and transmitting knowledge to serve the common good. Universities, as conventionally understood, are not military bases, and might even be seen as their antithesis.

Yet it is also true that academia in the United States is deeply entwined with the military. Hundreds of US universities collectively receive billions of tax dollars a year to conduct weapons-related research and development. This might not make universities military bases in the usual sense, but it does make them part of the nation’s military apparatus.

North Carolina State University, where I taught for thirty-four years and am an emeritus professor, likes to tout its top-ten ranking as a “military friendly” school. This might appear to be mere marketing rhetoric—meaning only that the university makes extra efforts to help veterans get into and through college. But NC State’s military friendliness goes much deeper.

For instance, the university has an eighteen-member “Industry Expansion Solutions Defense Industry Initiatives” board of directors whose mission is to “support and inform statewide efforts specific to strengthening state and federal collaborations that support military and defense infrastructure, military and defense industry, and public, private and social sector partnerships in all communities across the state.” Perhaps to amplify the martial resonance, this outfit is described as a “division” of the university.

An hour’s worth of googling turned up NC State military-related research in the areas of textiles, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, materials engineering, and computer science. The university also offers degree programs to prepare students for careers in military operations research. To call NC State military friendly is like calling Julius Caesar ambitious.

Yet when it comes to military-related research, NC State is a minor league player. The major leaguers include many of the nation’s top universities: MIT, Johns Hopkins, Cal Tech, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Maryland. In the larger scheme of things, all dollars tallied, NC State would hardly merit a mention.

Collusion between academia and the military is an old story, dating to the Merrill Act of 1862, which required land-grant universities to teach military tactics to male students. Ties between the research function of universities and the military were strengthened during World War II, before being challenged during the Vietnam War. After the war in Vietnam ended and the antiwar movement faded—and along with it the critique of academic militarism—those ties were gradually rebuilt.

Today, in the post-9/11 era, the military presence in academia is as strong as ever and perhaps even more pervasive, roping in more second-tier institutions like NC State. In the years ahead, fears of Chinese domination of semiconductor manufacturing and a desire for superior war-fighting AI and robotics technologies will yield a new infusion of military dollars into universities. Many fresh millions for military research are already set to flow into universities through the $280 billion CHIPS and Sciences Act of 2022.

What does this “remilitarization” of universities, as Michael Klare calls it, have to do with shared governance? Klare points out that while Pentagon-affiliated research projects have been “welcomed by university administrators with open arms,” there has been no serious debate among faculty, staff, and students “over the appropriateness of hosting war-oriented research and training on campus.”

This lack of debate can be seen as a failure of shared governance. As faculty, we have fought to preserve our right to shape courses, curricula, and degree programs. In the face of attacks on academia by right-wing ideologues, this effort is vitally important. Yet while we’ve had our eyes on academic affairs, politicians, defense officials, weapons makers, and money-hungry administrators have been turning universities into de facto branches of the military.

What this means, euphemism aside, is that universities have been turned toward the task of finding more effective ways to use violence to control other people around the planet. It also means that most of us—faculty, students, and staff—have been made potential targets of counter violence without our knowledge or consent. No matter our personal opposition to war, an enemy might not trouble to distinguish the English department from the adjacent hypersonic propulsion lab.

It seems fair to suppose that most faculty, students, and staff, if given the choice, would object to the militarization of their universities, embracing the belief that universities should serve to promote peace, democracy, and justice, not the US military’s avowed goal of global domination. If so, open discussion and debate about the militarization of universities might lead to significant change.

To get to that place, to remake universities as the humane institutions they ought to be, we need a less constricted concept of shared governance. Yes, we need to preserve faculty control over courses, curricula, degree programs, and so on. But in the long run, if there is to be a long run, this won’t be enough. We need democratic control over universities themselves, so we can redirect them toward creating knowledge for the benefit of all people, rather than for honing the profit-serving technologies of violence.

Michael Schwalbe is professor emeritus of sociology at North Carolina State University.