I was working with a university on how they communicate their research work.
An academic remarked to me that they simply couldn’t understand why the university didn’t talk more about the leading work they were doing in defence research.
At the time, I thought talking about research into the things that kill people would be an obvious and enormous error. I now think I may be wrong.
Missiles have a PR problem. They are not the soft embrace of a civic university which wraps its arms around their places. They are not the technician helping to solve the pandemics and global disasters of our time. And they are not the lofty ideals of pushing forward the shared understanding of the human experience.
Conducting research into defence is to acknowledge that universities are part of the unsavoury end of geo-politics too.
Universities have generally followed the lead of the government on the international research front. This is to say universities work with people, even where they may disagree with them, if it furthers a common cause of research. In an era of sharpening geo-political divides, increased defence spending, and pressure on the moral mission of universities highlighted by what they choose or choose not to cut, this feels untenable.
Strategic ambiguity is possible where the strategy is clear and the policy is not. The government has now made its spending policy for defence clear.
Defence and its detractors
There are plenty who have made the moral case against UK universities being involved in research into lethal weapons. Open Democracy carried out work in 2023 where they drew the line between weapons manufacturers, university research, and global conflicts, to make the case that
“Responding to Freedom of Information requests, 44 universities told openDemocracy they had taken a combined total of at least £100m in funding and donations from eight of the biggest UK and US defence firms: RTX, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce.
All are listed in the top 100 arms and military services in the world, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.”
And there are a constellation of left-wing blogs that have sought to make the same arguments. Novara Media, for example, have sought to bring to attention the links between university weapons research and the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. It is not that universities are undertaking research directly for difficult and despotic regimes and demagogues directly. It is that they are undertaking research with companies where their technologies may either be used directly, or through their dual applications, in the defence of nations and by extension the killing of people all over the world.
This attention is likely only to grow as the government increases investment into defence technologies. The 2020 Spending Review committed to an extra £6bn of defence R&D over four years. In 2024, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised a further uplift in defence spending with a significant proportion dedicated to R&D. Keir Starmer has now promised that defence spending will reach 2.5 per cent of GDP, with an ambition to reach 3 per cent, and further increases to R&D in defence.
This includes a further £2.9bn of spending in the coming financial year compared to 2024–25. This is a big increase but in context BAE systems alone spent £1.45bn on R&D in 2022 as a combination of their own and government money.
This presents a challenge for universities. The flows of R&D spending are increasingly toward defence but they have, collectively, not found the language which sets out the moral case for doing the work.
Re-arm for Britain
Today’s piece from Jess Lister makes it clear that a plurality of citizens in the UK are in favour of increased defence spending. A majority of the public also agree it would be better to invest in R&D in new defensive technologies. Of course, this presumes there is always a clear and practical difference between the use of weaponry for defensive and offensive purposes, and the reasons for research are as important as the actual mechanism through which research is deployed.
There are the universities that undertake research which makes the country safer but isn’t directly involved in the business of lethality. The examples of universities building partnerships, engagements, projecting the UK across the world, making the UK a better place to live, are numerous. In an era of constrained funding and increasing concerns about defence spending, the ability for universities to talk about national safety, the tolerability of living in the UK, and national security, the freedom to live free from the threat of harm or death from a foreign power, may end up moving closer together. The decision to cut Oversees Development Assistance, funding used to promote social, economic, and welfare capacity, to fund defence spending is in this regard an absurd political decision in making the UK less safe on the one hand while making it, potentially, more secure on the other.
And there is the business of the production of the UK’s defensive capabilities. There are a range of regulations which cover this work. In particular, the rules on dual use technologies which place extra restrictions on the exports of research that could have both civilian and military applications. There are specific cases which have come under scrutiny particularly under the use of technologies which could be used for drones. As a minimum, if universities are going to increasingly grow their R&D and defence budget they will need the internal capacity to navigate what has been a difficult and changing world.
Narrative interventions
Aside from the regulation there is a real narrative problem on defence research. There are generally three explanations used when a university is asked about defence research. The first is that we follow all of the rules. The second is that we work directly with companies and what companies choose to do beyond our due diligence isn’t within our control. And the third is that even where projects are within the rules we continually monitor them. The problem with all of these responses is that they are the minimum of procedural compliance not explanation of work.
In his acceptance speech newly appointed Chancellor of the University of Oxford and once foreign secretary William Hague stated that
We do not need to agree on everything, indeed we should not. I am pleased to say we do not need a foreign policy: we are not a country. Nor do we need a view on every daily occurrence: we are not a newspaper. The concern of a university is that opinions are reached on the basis of truth, reason and knowledge, which in turn requires thinking and speaking with freedom.
This is the same William Hague who suggested in 2015 that
In the 21st Century, foreign policy is no longer the preserve of governments speaking behind closed doors. It’s also about that web of connections between individuals, groups, companies and all kinds of organisations, on social media and international travel.
The William Hague of 2015 is correct and the William Hague of 2024 is mostly wrong. The frustration with university work into defence isn’t because the public believe what they are doing is illegal – in fact the public support what they are doing. It is that universities are trying to pursue an amoral approach to defence (as in, without a moral position, as opposed to immoral or evil), which leaves them open to charges of hypocrisy.
The reason for this is a refusal to commit to bright red lines. It would be totally legitimate for universities to state there are certain partners, certain countries, and certain contexts in which they will not work. It also would be totally legitimate for universities to say they work with anyone regardless of their politics, but universities have done neither.
The one unilateral intervention in refusing to work with Russia was the morally correct step, and has of course opened up the charge of hypocrisy. The line seems to be that universities will work with foreign partners irrespective of what they do unless they are legally barred from doing so and/or said foreign partners undertake a full scale invasion of a neighbour.
The age of strategic ambiguity is over because ambiguity cannot be funded, supported, or made consistent to a public who don’t always appreciate the value of universities. Universities are not a country but they are a global network that allows for the movement of people, ideas, and technologies. The basis on which these things are allowed to move is the moral mission of our era for universities.
