Universities participating in Canadian militarization: the case against

This article is part of our Prof v. Prof summer debate series, where academics take opposing viewpoints on hot topics in higher education. Read all the articles from the series here. 

Long before Prime Minister Mark Carney’s calls for expanded military investment and intensified partnerships between Canadian universities and the defense sector, former U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the dangers posed by the “military-industrial complex.” In an earlier draft of his famous 1961 farewell address, he explicitly included universities in that warning, referring to a “military-industrial-academic complex” and recognizing that universities could become deeply entangled with military power, corporate interests, and state security agendas in ways that eroded their autonomy and weakened their democratic mission. 

At a moment when militarization is reshaping global politics, the Canadian government has unveiled a Defence Industrial Strategy tied to a broader C$81.8 billion expansion of defence spending announced in Budget 2025. As federal agencies deepen their ties to universities through investments in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and military research, higher education is being reorganized around the imperatives of war, systems of social control, technological control and permanent security.  

As University of California professor David Theo Goldberg argues, militarization increasingly shapes culture, technology, governance and everyday life. This shift raises a crucial question: What happens to higher education when institutions dedicated to critical thought increasingly align themselves with military-industrial priorities and organized violence? The question is especially urgent as authoritarianism resurfaces across the globe, waging war not only on democratic institutions but on truth, memory and independent judgment itself. Universities exist to nurture informed judgment, civic courage and the capacity to hold power accountable, not to train military personnel or develop the machinery of war. At stake is nothing less than whether higher education will defend democracy or become complicit in its unraveling. 

The militarization of the university is not simply a matter of research contracts or funding priorities. It is pedagogical, cultural and deeply political. Universities do more than train workers; they shape civic identities, ethical sensibilities and democratic agency. When higher education embraces military partnerships and defense-driven research agendas, it legitimates a worldview in which security eclipses justice, technological efficiency displaces ethical reflection, and dissent is treated as a threat instead of a civic necessity. 

Militarization also alters what counts as legitimate knowledge. As research priorities become increasingly tied to defense funding, security imperatives and technological competition, universities risk sacrificing their autonomy along with the core academic values that sustain democratic inquiry. Questions of democratic governance, historical responsibility, social justice and the public good are steadily displaced by the language of risk management, defense, monitoring and control. The deeper question is whether knowledge serves the public good or the demands of war and empire. Militarization does more than redirect research priorities. It reshapes historical memory, civic identity and even the language through which democracy is understood. In such circumstances, education is less concerned with cultivating critical citizens than with producing expertise geared toward managing populations, securing borders and advancing military objectives. 

Yet under neoliberalism, this democratic mission has steadily eroded. Education is reduced to job training, students to consumers, and learning to instrumental outcomes. Militarization intensifies these regressive instrumental tendencies by aligning research and institutional priorities ever more closely with geopolitical competition, the security apparatus, technological acceleration and the priorities of the national security state.  

Read also: Canadian universities and the new defence imperative: the case in favour

Equally troubling, militarization reshapes the culture of the university itself. Militarized institutions reward conformity, secrecy, technocratic thinking and managerial efficiency. Ethical questions about violence, disposability, colonialism and state power are often pushed aside in favor of strategic competition. Students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, settler colonialism, genocide, or state violence have been met not with dialogue but with institutional monitoring, administrative repression and policing. In such cases, the university ceases to function as a space for critical engagement and becomes instead an extension of a broader authoritarian culture.  

Militarized values now permeate North American culture. They are visible in sporting events, military recruitment campaigns, popular films, gun culture, social media spectacles and state propaganda that glorify aggression, cruelty and war. Universities do not stand outside this culture. They now participate directly in it through artificial intelligence research tied to predictive policing, digital systems of control and automated warfare. Such developments raise urgent ethical questions about higher education’s role in designing technologies that expand state violence, erode civil liberties, promote a global arms trade and facilitate killing in distant conflicts. 

Militarization functions as public pedagogy. It teaches citizens to see the world through the lens of permanent threat and militarized masculinity, normalizing war as inevitable and dissent as dangerous. Universities should challenge such assumptions, not reproduce them under the banner of security, innovation and strategic competitiveness. 

At the same time, enormous intellectual and financial resources are being diverted away from urgent public needs such as climate justice, public health, democratic education, and social welfare toward military technologies and security infrastructures. Universities risk becoming laboratories for violence instead of institutions dedicated to civic responsibility, ethical imagination and the public good.  

Defenders of militarized partnerships insist that universities must remain pragmatic and “neutral” in securing funding and advancing national interests. But neutrality in such cases is largely a myth. Universities cannot claim to defend democracy while aligning themselves with industries and state policies organized around war, systems of repression and the production of violence. Universities cannot serve democracy while functioning as a research arm of militarized power. 

The issue is not whether universities are political, but what kind of politics they embody and in whose interests they function. In an age marked by rising authoritarianism, widening inequality, climate catastrophe and endless wars, higher education must decide whether it will serve democracy or militarized power.  

Higher education remains one of the few public spheres where critical thought, historical memory and ethical imagination can nurture civic responsibility, critical agency and educated hope. The struggle against the militarization of Canadian universities is also a contest over what kind of society we inhabit: one that defends universities as spaces of independent inquiry serving humanity, or one that normalizes their transformation into instruments of military power and organized violence. Universities must be defended as public goods because authoritarianism fears what they nurture: an educated public capable of questioning power, holding authority accountable and imagining a more just future.