The University of Sheffield received a combined £4.4m from six aeronautical companies, engineering researchers, and defence contractors in the past financial year, as well as direct funding from the UK and US governments for defence and security research, an activist group has found.
Rolls Royce, Boeing, BAE Systems, GKN, Cobham, and QinetiQ contributed to the University’s revenue last year. Freedom of Information requests by the Demilitarise Education group also detailed financial contributions from some of those companies in the past ten years:
- GKN – £4.1m
- BAE Systems – £8.5m
- Boeing – £13.6m
- Rolls Royce – £42.7m
- A joint US Army/UK Ministry of Defence grant of £1.2m was also awarded to the University for an ‘intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance’ engineering project in 2020.
This comes to a total of £70.1m. FOI disclosures obtained by Councillor Minesh Parekh last year found the University of Sheffield had received at least £72m from arms trade since 2012; the figures received by Demilitarise Education may account for some of that total.
Demilitarise Education said: “While resistance against the militarisation of the University of Sheffield from groups like the Sheffield Action Group, who occupied the Diamond last year, University leadership continues to ignore student voices. [We] are calling for the University to end all ties to the arms trade, and to sponsor peaceful, sustainable innovation instead.”
The group has also highlighted the extent to which the arms industry is embedded into the University’s institutions; the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre has connections with and conducted research for Boeing, Airbus, Atomic Weapons Establishment, BAE Systems, Raytheon, GKN, and Rolls Royce for the production of combat vehicles and arms, they pointed out.
The group aims to ‘build the most extensive database on university partnership with the global arms trade and build a movement of creative activism.’ Their database found almost £620m of university investments in militarised partnerships across the UK. They have created an online petition to push universities to sever ties with arms companies and reinvest in sustainable and peace-seeking sectors.