Arms link to university funding
£83 million in funding for universities from the arms industry
In the past three years leading British universities have received at least £83 million of funding from UK arms companies and government military agencies. The funding has been for research, courses and other activities.
Diana Rickman, of The Huffington Post, submitted Freedom of Information requests to the twenty-four Russell Group universities, which jointly claim around two-thirds of all research funding.
Of the twenty-four universities, six refused or were unable to supply relevant information: Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, University College London (UCL) and Warwick. The London School of Economics (LSE) said that it did not get any military funding and Durham had only £67,000.
The universities with the highest amounts of funding were Imperial College with £15.2 million, Sheffield with £13.7 million, Cambridge with £13.7 million and Oxford with just over £9 million.
Beth Smith, universities network coordinator for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) said: ‘Arms companies fund research projects partly to ensure that certain research gets done.
‘By partnering with arms companies universities provide them with a veneer of respectability and help them to continue their devastating work.’
By far the largest company funder was Rolls-Royce, which totalled at least £36.8 million. Rolls-Royce focused very large grants on selected universities, including Sheffield, where it paid £11.1 million, Cambridge almost £7.5 million, Oxford £6.7 million and Nottingham £4.9 million. Rolls-Royce also made large grants to Imperial with £2.9 million and to Southampton with £2.3 million.
BAE Systems funding totalled £10.6 million. In three universities it reached over £2 million: York at £2.9 million, Imperial at £2.3 million and Sheffield at £2.1 million. BAE also paid almost £1.3 million to Cambridge, £936,000 to Southampton and £716,000 to Oxford.
Stuart Parkinson, executive director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, said: ‘The point is that the military funding makes up a large fraction of the funding received by the engineering departments of the universities in question – and so has far greater influence than implied by the universities.’
Scientists for Global Responsibility is an independent, UK based, organisation of scientists, architects, engineers and technologists promoting ethical science, design and technology.
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