Universities and the Military
how does your university tie in?

The University-Industrial-
Academic Complex:
Institutional and Interpersonal Links

University Profiles

According to historian Richard Abrams, "As the war neared its end, Edward L. Bowles, science advisor to the secretary of war Henry Stimson, called for 'an effective peacetime integration' of the military with the resources of higher education."

The Office of Naval Research quickly took to this task of integration, and by 1949 it was funding thousands of research projects, at hundreds of universities nationwide5. Founded in 1946, it remains the largest distributor of DoD funds.

Soon after the ONR's chartering, the other services got involved with the commandeering of academia for the purpose of war. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research (1952), the Army Office of Scientific Research (1958), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (1959), later called DARPA, all established linkages between the military, universities, and corporations. In the interim of the ONR's establishment, and the coming of the other military research offices, the government chartered the National Science Foundation. The NSF's primary goal was to provide civilian, or non-military research funds, but it remains unclear as to how much this agency falls under the control or influence of military goals.

In addition to funding many areas of interest to the DoD, the NSF can be interpreted as an outgrowth of the military's relationship with academia. In fact, the first director of the NSF was Alan Waterman, who came directly over from the Office of Naval Research to administer the new agency: The NSF's foundational years were led by the same men who constructed the vast university-military relationship. Parallel to these developments was the growth of the DOE labs, managed by the University of California, and constituting the core of the military's nuclear weapons infrastructure. These labs provided a shining example of what became he nation's Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDC), funded by the military or proxy agencies, and managed by universities, drawing from their superb human resources, and using their prestigious names as an effective legitimation of the work carried on inside.

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