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The Place of Department of Defense‐Sponsored Research at the University a

The title, which I have worded with special care, emphasizes the first of several important distinctions that I will make. Officials of the Department of Defense (DOD), staffs at their laboratories, and engineers at defense contractors, are perfectly capable of reading the scientific literature. Research sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health not only can be but has been used by the DOD. Neither the researcher nor the researcher’s institution can foresee whether a particular piece of research will find military applications. The event over which the researcher and the researcher’s institution do have control is acceptance of research sponsorship by the DOD. Therefore, the issue which I wish to address is the ethics of accepting such sponsorship. Before presenting my analysis of DOD-sponsored research in universities, however, I will include, for the sake of providing a full disclosure, some statements about my own institution. The University of Dayton Research Institute is entirely supported by external grants and contracts. It does not draw upon the University’s financial resources, but instead supplements them by paying for the use of the University’s facilities. In the last fiscal year, the Institute had an income of $30 million. These funds supported about 450 full-time staff members, including 250 professional researchers. In addition, they provided partial support to about 60 faculty members, nearly 200 undergraduate students, and nearly 100 graduate students. Thus, although the Institute has its own fulltime professional staff, it is also integrated with the University’s academic staff. Over two-thirds of these funds came from a single agency, the U.S. Air Force. No other single source provided more than 10% of the total funding. Thus, the dominant source of our funds is not even the entire DOD but only a part of it.