Warwick’s BAE deal is shameful and unethical

Enlightenment is the human race’s emergence from self imposed immaturity, or so Immanuel Kant was fond of telling friends at dinner parties.

Our universities are supposed to be the vanguard of this intellectual emancipation, sprawling bastions wherein one is granted access to the culmination of humanity’s quest for knowledge. Living and breathing testaments to one mammal’s determination to identify and explain all the secrets of reality using only its relatively poor instruments of sensory perception and its not inconsiderable capacity for reason. In laying out all the accumulated wisdom of history and allowing our younger generations to revel in it, like pigs in proverbial mud, we pave the way for the continuing maturation of our burgeoning species.

British universities, in particular, like to count themselves amongst the best in the world and, as a Brit, it gives me no small amount of pride to see people coming from all four corners of the globe to learn from, and to contribute to, our fine pillars of academia.

The powers that be at the University of Warwick should be deeply, deeply ashamed of themselves.

The revelation last week that Warwick Manufacturing Group (WMG) has signed a so-called ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with BAE Systems is as odious as it is unfathomable. BAE Systems, for those who don’t know, brazenly supplies weapons to questionable governments in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Israel, Indonesia and just about any other despicable and repressive regime you can think of.

They also produce, among other things, Unmanned Ariel Vehicles, more commonly referred to as ‘drones’. These ‘drones’, such as the ones the American military are so fond of, are unmanned aircraft which can be packed with explosives and flown at the target of your choice from a remote location half way around the world. They tend to draw criticism for their habit of causing – that lovely Orwellian phrase – collateral damage.

WMGs ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ with BAE seems to amount to little more than a corporate sponsorship deal whereby our friends at BAE will generously fund postgraduate courses which will offer students the chance to development new technologies for them.

This is wholly unacceptable. The tendency to profit from death, destruction and misery is a nasty anachronism. Such notions belong to the infancy of our species and ought to be banished to the annals of history along with the primitive idea of a flat earth that is orbited by the sun.

Defenders of such a project will undoubtedly point to the amount of postgraduate places being created and the amount of funding being bought in. Shameful. The mere suggestion that a human life can be exchanged for such trivialities is deeply offensive and anathema to the principle of enlightenment.

Student protest group ‘Weapons out of Warwick’ have staged a number of peaceful demonstrations at careers fairs with the aim of questioning the university’s links to unethical companies such as BAE Systems and to help fellow students to make better informed decisions when choosing a course or a career. Shamefully, however, their protests are often swiftly dispersed by campus security and police.

The Careers Service, meanwhile, is conspicuously quiet about the record of companies like BAE. That’s no coincidence. In fact, all of this is grossly irresponsible on the part of the University of Warwick, an institution which is normally highly prized for its good reputation for business links with innovative companies.

If universities are supposed to be the vanguard of intellectual evolution then I join the members of ‘Weapons out of Warwick’ in calling upon our university to renounce this barbaric pact with BAE and continue its otherwise sterling work – assisting its students in advancing scientific and philosophic understanding to a point which will hopefully see BAE Systems, and other companies like it, relegated to obsolescence.

Unfortunately, I fear our arguments will find only ears already deafened by the sound of ringing cash registers.