ABSTRACT

This chapter adds universities to, and problematizes them within, the military-industrial complex. The three interrelated sections below offer both description and explanation of the role played by professors, some examples from the social sciences included, in helping reproduce the status quo arrangements of a militarized economy. The first section provides a brief historical examination of the growth of the corporate university in the US, emphasizing the transition from a classical to a vocational curriculum along with the prominence of a research-funding orientation among professors that together help sustain a permanent war economy. The second section underscores how current professorial practice, the professors’ adherence to a consultant-grantee role model and their ability to successfully play the game of switching reference groups, forms the cornerstone of a hidden curriculum regarding acceptable professional practice favored within the university bureaucracy. It is a practice useful in serving to further the career upward mobility of professors but, unfortunately, it also blocks fundamental social change while reproducing the war footing upon which the military-industrial-university complex rests. A third section, then, offers some suggestions for how professors might begin to change their practice. These include greater circumspection regarding the sources of our research funding, a closer inspection of our role in manipulating the canons of professionalism and the dictates of bureaucracy in a less-than-transparent fashion, and a renewed attention to the content and structure of the university curricula we oversee, especially with reference to issues of nationalism and cultural diversity. These suggestions taken together might be helpful in beginning to shift our priorities away from an engagement toward war to a more tangible posture that embraces peace.