By William D. Hartung, a TomDispatch regular and a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of that institute’s forthcoming issue brief, “Inside the ICBM Lobby: Special Interests or the Public Interest?” He is also the author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Originally published at TomDispatch.

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew

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