University in Chains

Confronting the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

Henry A. Giroux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594514227
• eBook ISBN: 9781317249801
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

President Eisenhower originally included 'academic' in the draft of his landmark, oft-quoted speech on the military-industrial-complex. Giroux tells why Eisenhower saw the academy as part of the famous complex - and how his warning was vitally prescient for 21st-century America. Giroux details the sweeping post-9/11 assault being waged on the academy by militarization, corporatization, and right-wing fundamentalists who increasingly view critical thought itself as a threat to the dominant political order. Giroux argues that the university has become a handmaiden of the Pentagon and corporate interests, it has lost its claim to independence and critical learning and has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. And yet, in spite of its present embattled status and the inroads made by corporate power, the defense industries, and the right wing extremists, Giroux defends the university as one of the few public spaces left capable of raising important questions and educating students to be critical and engaged agents. He concludes by making a strong case for reclaiming it as a democratic public sphere.

1
Arming the Academy

Higher Education in the Shadow of the National Security State

Terror becomes total when it becomes independent of all opposition; it rules supreme when nobody any longer stands in its way. If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian domination.

—Hannah Arendt

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

—Martin Luther King Jr.

Remembrance of Warnings Past

As part of his farewell address on January 17, 1961, President Dwight David Eisenhower recognized that in the aftermath of World War II and at the dawn of the Cold War, the United States faced a dire menace abroad in the form of the Soviet Union and a less visible but equally dangerous threat within its own borders, which he memorably referred to as “the military-industrial complex.”¹ Eisenhower viewed the military-industrial complex as an outgrowth of a growing and sinister relationship among government agencies, the military, and the defense industries, and he believed that it made a mockery out of democratic values while undermining the foundation of democratic institutions and civic society.² According to Eisenhower, the conditions for the production of violence, the amassing of huge profits by defense industries, and the corruption of government officials in the interest of making war the organizing principle of society had created a set of conditions in which the very idea of democracy, if not the possibility of politics itself, was at stake. Democracy was in the midst of becoming armed and in the process had entered into a new relationship in which the military and the war industries were bound together in a pact to militarize society and make the armed forces the center of both economic and political life.³ The nature of power in American life was undergoing a deep and fundamental shift. President Eisenhower, in retrospect, was far more prescient than even he may have realized when he warned:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience…. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.⁴

Eisenhower’s attack on the military-industrial complex was a dead-on prophecy, and because of it he has been rightly regarded as a statesman of heroic proportion.⁵ Yet what is often generally unknown about his speech is that he also warned about the rise of the “military-industrial-academic complex,” though he deleted the phrase before he delivered his talk.⁶ He did insist, nevertheless, that Americans had to be vigilant about the federal government’s potential for dominating the nation’s research universities:

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.⁷

Later in the decade, Senator William Fulbright took seriously Eisenhower’s alarming distrust of the military-industrial complex and extended its political and theoretical reach. He did so by situating Eisenhower’s comments onto a more expansive Hobbesian terrain by coupling the emerging power of an overly strong military-industrial complex with the province of higher education—including the latter’s longstanding commitments to academic freedom, civic engagement, and “pure” research guided by intellectual curiosity or social needs rather than by commercial or military interests. Recognizing that major universities had come increasingly to depend on Pentagon contracts, grants, and funds for their research laboratories, Fulbright retrieved Eisenhower’s cast-off phrase, the “military-industrial-academic complex,” to warn against the creeping influence of the federal government and a for-profit arms industry over America’s major research universities.⁸ Fulbright’s comments were blunt and to the point: “In lending itself too much to the purposes of government, a university fails its higher purpose.”⁹

Unfortunately, Eisenhower and Fulbright’s predictions about the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the military-industrial complex and its efforts to annex the university went unheeded as the Cold War unfolded and the university’s relationship with larger society underwent fundamental changes. No longer seen as an autonomous repository of truth, neutrality, disinterestedness, pure research, and professionalism, higher education became, in the words of Clark Kerr, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley in the 1950s and early 1960s, “a multiversity,” one that actively embraced multiple constituencies and forms of patronage provided by the federal government, military, and corporate interests.¹⁰ Kerr welcomed such a change, even as it enshrined a more practical and commercial role for higher education and fundamentally altered and instrumentalized the internal workings of universities. As Rebecca S. Lowen points out in her brilliant study of Stanford as an exemplar of the new Cold War university,

the postwar university was a wholly new institution, one that was uniquely responsive to the society of which it was now very much a part. Kerr recognized the significance of the cold war to American universities. Such military technologies as ballistic missiles, guidance systems, hydrogen bombs, and radar required the expertise of highly trained scientists and engineers. By the early 1960s the federal government was spending approximately $10 billion annually on research and development…. Universities and university-affiliated centers received annually about one-tenth—or $1 billion—of these federal research and development funds…. These universities, in turn, depended on federal patronage for over fifty percent of their operating budgets.¹¹

As the university’s relationship to the larger society changed in the postwar period, there was a decisive transformation in the way in which higher education traditionally operated. Lowen captures this change when she writes:

Large laboratories staffed with myriad researchers having no teaching duties and working in groups with expensive, government-funded scientific equipment became common features of the leading research universities after World War II. As the organization and funding of science changed, so did the kinds of knowledge produced and taught. Universities made room for new fields of study, such as nuclear engineering and Russian studies, which bore obvious relevance to the nation’s geopolitical concerns.¹²

During the 1960s, especially with the massive student resistance directed against the Vietnam War, the possibility of a powerful military state undermining the reality and promise of higher education as a democratic public sphere generated various protests on college campuses, which aimed at keeping the military and intelligence agencies as far away from university campuses as possible.¹³ Distrust of the military and government intelligence agencies reached a high point in 1975, when Senator Frank Church headed a Senate committee that investigated the Watergate break-in and uncovered numerous government abuses including secret CIA funding of student organizations, the agency’s attempts to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile, and clandestine plots to assassinate Fidel Castro.¹⁴ Once the Vietnam War ended, the dissenters went home and a fog of historical and social amnesia descended over the country, paving the way for an eventual return of the repressed, as the military-industrial-academic complex gained greater momentum from the late 1980s to the present—a momentum whose power is largely unchecked and whose perniciousness is unjustly ignored.¹⁵

While the rise of the military-industrial complex and its influence on higher education were of great concern during the 1960s and ’70s, they seem to have dropped off the map as we enter into the first decade of the new millennium. As Andrew J. Bacevich, former West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran and current director for the Center for International Relations at Boston University, insists, “Few in power have openly considered whether valuing military power for its own sake or cultivating permanent global military superiority might be at odds with American principles”¹⁶ as well as with the democratic values and public spirit that should be at the heart of higher education. The idea that “military is to democracy as fire is to water”¹⁷ has been ignored by almost all major politicians under the Bush presidency, and one consequence is that a creeping militarism has materialized into a full-fledged coup, fueled by a war on terror and the military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and resulting in endless cases of kidnapping, torture, abuse, and murder.¹⁸ Noam Chomsky has amply charted the rise of the United States as a warfare state and its implications for the rest of the world given America’s refusal to renounce war as a central tool of its foreign policy. He writes:

By now, the world’s hegemonic power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” with unstated bounds. International law, treaties, and rules of order are sternly impressed on others with much self-righteous posturing, but dismissed as irrelevant for the United States—a long-standing practice, driven to new depths by the Reagan and Bush II administrations.¹⁹

In the Shadow of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex

While there has been an increasing concern among academics and progressives over the growing corporatization of the university, the transformation of academia into what John Armitage calls the “hypermodern militarized knowledge factory”²⁰ has been largely ignored as a subject of contemporary concern and critical debate.²¹ Such silence has nothing to do with a lack of visibility or the covert attempts to inject a military and security presence into higher education. The militarization of higher education is made obvious, not only by the presence of over 150 military-educational institutions in the United States designed to “train a youthful corps of tomorrow’s military officers”²² in the strategies, values, skills, and knowledge of the warfare state, but also, as the American Association of Universities points out, by the existence of hundreds of colleges and universities that conduct Pentagon-funded research, provide classes to military personnel, and design programs specifically for future employment with various departments and agencies associated with the warfare state.²³

Rather than being the object of massive individual and collective resistance, the militarization of higher education appears to be endorsed by liberals and conservatives alike. The National Research Council of the National Academies published a report called Frameworks for Higher Education in Homeland Security, which argued that the commitment to learning about homeland security is an essential part of the preparation for work and life in the twenty-first century, thus offering academics a thinly veiled legitimation for building into undergraduate and graduate curricula intellectual frameworks that mirror the interests and values of the warfare state. Similarly, the Association of American Universities argued in a report titled National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative that winning the war on terrorism and expanding global markets were mutually informing goals, the success of which falls squarely on the performance of universities. This group argues, with a rather cheerful certainty, that every student should be trained to become a soldier in the war on terror and in the battle over global markets, and that the universities should do everything they can “to fill security-related positions in the defense industry, the military, the national laboratories, the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, the intelligence agencies, and other federal agencies.”²⁴ And in a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Challenging the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex After 9/11
• 1. Arming the Academy: Higher Education in the Shadow of the National Security State
• 2. Marketing the University: Corporate Power and the Academic Factory
• 3. The New Right-Wing Assault on Higher Education: Academic Unfreedom in America
• 4. Breaking the Chains: A Strategy to Retake the University
• Index
• About the Author