Stryker Research at University of Western Ontario

In December of 2004 President Davenport announced that members of the UWO Faculty of Engineering had a four year contract with the corporation General Dynamics for research to improve its Stryker Light Armored Vehicles. General Dynamics, with revenues of some $19 billion and 70,000 employees, is amongst the world’s largest arms manufacturers, central to the US military industrial complex. The Stryker, manufactured by General Dynamic at its London plant and at another in Alabama, is an eight wheeled fighting vehicle that carries troops into battle, can operate under conditions of nuclear, biological and chemical war, and mounts a variety of weapons, ranging from machine guns to missiles to 105 mm cannon.

The Canadian government, which also contributes to the UWO grant, has ordered 66 Strykers. But the majority of the 2,131 Strykers General Dynamics will produce are for the US Army; it also sells other LAVs to states such as Saudi Arabia. The US vehicles are currently deployed in Iraq. Stryker battalions in combat in Mosul, Fallujah, Baghdad and the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys have a direct connection to the London General Dynamics plant, which recently won a $50 million contract for repair and maintenance of vehicles used in these theatres.

Those who support the Bush administration’s foreign policy and wish Canada more closely aligned with it may have no problem with the UWO-General Dynamics link. Those who believe the Iraq war an invasion without sanction of international law, launched on the basis of mis- and dis-information for reasons of realpolitik and waged with an devastating ineptitude that is itself immoral; who support Canada’s abstention from this conflict; who object to the devotion of so many global resources and technological talents to the perfection of ever-more sophisticated instruments of destruction; or who dissent from the torture practiced at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, and by the notorious Saudi Arabia security forces, will likely be aghast at this connection.

UWO administrators have replied to such criticisms by asserting the priority of academic freedom. According to this argument, the intellectual integrity of the academia requires researchers be allowed to pursue inquiries, regardless how perverse they appear, without constraints other than those governing the well-being of human and animal research subjects. Because academic freedom is indeed precious, this is a strong position.

To invoke it in the context of the Stryker research is, however, hypocritical. The claim to academic freedom rests on the university’s status as a place of independent intellectual activity, a sphere distanced from instrumental profit and power pursuits. Academia has always had links to business, and dependencies on the state. But academics’ assertion of specific rights and prerogatives nevertheless rests on the university’s standing as a distinct, scholarly, sphere. Arrangements such as UWO’s with General Dynamics collapse that distinction, making academia an extension of a military-industrial production line. They demonstrate, not academic freedom, but corporate freedom—the freedom of companies such as General Dynamics to utilize public resources while evading accountability.

When universities erase the boundaries that separate them from the private sector, they also erode their claim to academic freedom. A university laboratory ancillary to an arms-manufacturer deserves the heat its paymaster attracts. The Stryker project is, of course, not unique, only--forgive the pun--strikingly symptomatic of intensifying academic-business connections. These arrangements destroy the integrity of the university. The closer the connections to business, the less credible academic claims to an independent social role deserving special immunities. Such projects should expect both the criticisms, and the demands for regulation and limitation, that citizens make against corporations and states when they violate standards of international law and human rights.

One can envisage a process by which research contracts with known, direct military applications would be subject to an ethics review at which proponents and critics debated the merits of university involvement. But administrators are utterly averse to such a possibility, or indeed to anything that interferes with the current “take the money and run” attitude to corporate funding. Critics of such projects must therefore speak directly to the university community. To this end a group, “Counter-Stryker,” has formed to bring the university activities of General Dynamic under scrutiny, to make known our ethical and political objections to the Stryker project, and to raise wider issues of academic corporatization.