“Whole-of-society” has become the sort of phrase that looks great in a strategy document and sounds faintly absurd when you say it out loud in a committee room. But the UK is now using it a lot in defence and security.
With the government signalling it wants to accelerate defence spending, the question is no longer whether universities will be pulled closer into the defence ecosystem, but how. If the flagship mechanism – the Defence Universities Alliance – is built as something done to universities rather than with them, it will fail on the only metric that really matters: legitimacy.
On paper, the Defence Universities Alliance sounds sensible: a structured relationship between defence and higher education, rather than a scatter of contracts, one-off announcements, and informal networks. Done well, it could align skills provision, research pathways and national resilience planning in a way that is currently missing.
But here is the problem. If the alliance is built as something done to universities – a procurement wrapper with a comms strategy – it will fail. If it is built with universities – through consultation, shared governance, and genuine partnership – it could close a serious gap in UK readiness. Too often, the sector is invited to deliver, not to design.
That gap is simple: we are building a defence skills pipeline at speed, but we still do not have a serious framework for universities in national resilience.
A fast-moving pipeline
The government has announced an £80m investment, delivered via the Office for Students, to expand capacity in computing and engineering with “defence-related skills” in mind. The guidance is explicit about additional student places over the next three academic years, alongside capital funding for facilities.
This is not abstract. In early February the minister chose to make the announcement at the University of Portsmouth, explicitly linking defence industry needs, regional growth, and skills pipelines. That is policy theatre, yes – but it is also policy direction. The government is signalling that higher education is part of the defence industrial base, whether institutions like the framing or not.
The pace matters because it changes the order of operations. When money is on the table, activity accelerates. Governance, legitimacy, and consent often come second.
That is exactly why the Defence Universities Alliance cannot be a late-stage branding exercise. It needs to be the place where the awkward questions get answered up front.
Overlooked resilience assets
If you stop thinking of universities as lecture theatres with branding, their role in readiness becomes obvious.
Universities are geographically distributed, often centrally located, and have large estates that can be repurposed quickly. They have laboratories and specialist equipment, expert staff, and deep links into local economies and public services. They host large student populations who, in a crisis, are not just “learners”, but a community with housing, welfare, and safeguarding needs.
They can also convene. In many towns and cities, universities are among the few institutions able to pull councils, the NHS, police, third sector and employers into the same room quickly. That convening power is a form of resilience – and it is not talked about enough.
And yet recent commentary on UK wartime readiness planning makes the point bluntly: universities are overlooked. Not because they are irrelevant, but because nobody has properly joined up the policy and governance that would make their role legitimate and workable.
So we end up in an odd position. Universities are being asked to help deliver “defence-related skills” and defence-adjacent research outputs, while their broader resilience contribution remains largely unplanned. They are treated like a supplier, not a partner.
The funding context
This is where the sector context matters. The financial fragility of UK higher education is increasingly being framed as a national resilience, if not security, issue. If providers retrench hard – closing courses, cutting capability, shedding staff – the loss is not simply fewer graduates. It is the thinning-out of skills and institutions that underpin security in the widest sense.
In that context, defence-linked funding can look like a lifeline. There is an emerging narrative that defence research and defence-aligned skills investment might help universities stay afloat, especially as other income sources wobble.
But when money is tight and geopolitics is hot, mobilisation tends to happen quickly and unevenly. If institutions are pulled into defence activity through ad hoc pots, quiet partnerships, and hurried decisions, even socially useful work will start to look like stealth militarisation. And that is how you manufacture backlash.
The uncomfortable truth is that the main constraint on “whole of society” defence in universities is not capacity – it is legitimacy. If universities lose trust, they lose the very qualities that make them useful in a crisis: autonomy, credibility, and convening power. A Defence Universities Alliance that ignores this will not just be unpopular. It will be strategically self-defeating.
A transparent alliance
If the Defence Universities Alliance is going to be more than a logo, it needs to answer three questions that are currently being dodged.
First, define “defence-related”. If the alliance is only about producing more engineers for industry, it will feel like a narrow pipeline project. If it is about national resilience, it must also include cyber resilience, AI assurance, information integrity, languages, logistics, health capability, and the ability to reason under uncertainty. A credible taxonomy matters because it shapes what gets funded, what gets celebrated, and what gets quietly deprioritised.
Next, share governance. An alliance without shared governance is not an alliance. Universities will not accept – and should not accept – a model that bypasses academic freedom, campus ethics processes, or public accountability. If government wants universities to play a resilience role, it needs to treat them as institutions with their own legitimacy, not as delivery arms.
Finally, set transparency as the default. Not a press release – a register. Who funds what, to do which kind of work, with what ethical review, and what is withheld on genuine security grounds. Secrecy-by-default is an accelerant: it turns legitimate disagreement into suspicion, and suspicion into mobilisation of a different kind.
These are not “nice to haves”. They are the operating conditions for stability.
The alliance should also do something more basic: connect universities into resilience planning properly, without coercion.
If we want institutions to contribute in a crisis, there should be pre-agreed protocols and relationships, not frantic phone calls and unclear expectations. That means formal integration into local and national resilience structures, with clear boundaries that protect institutional independence. It also means planning for the student population itself: welfare, housing, safeguarding, and communications are not side issues in a national emergency.
And it means acknowledging that readiness is not just kit and contracts. It is also trust. Universities are one of the few national institutions that still retain a measure of public credibility across diverse communities. If government squanders that credibility by rushing engagement without consultation, it will make readiness harder, not easier.
The choice we are drifting into
The UK is moving quickly: money for defence-related skills, a strategy that casts defence as an engine for growth, and an emerging mechanism in the form of the Defence Universities Alliance.
But “whole of society” cannot just mean “whole of provider”.
We can build an alliance that treats universities as a convenient subcontractor – and be surprised when legitimacy collapses and campus contestation becomes the story.
Or we can build a Defence Universities Alliance that universities actually own: consultation up front, shared governance, transparency by default, and a readiness role that protects academic independence rather than undermining it.
The next steps are not complicated. Before the Office for Students allocates the bulk of the new funding, and before the alliance architecture hardens, publish draft terms of reference, run a time-limited consultation with providers, students and staff, and be explicit about the transparency default. That is how you turn a slogan into a settlement.
If government wants universities in the defence ecosystem, it also has to take responsibility for the governance that makes that ecosystem legitimate.