War and Peace Studies

According to a report in The Guardian, the University of Bradford's Dept of Peace Studies, of which I'm a graduate, has taken money from the Ministry of Defence, some £650k, to put 600 officers through residential courses. Kind of a strange interpretation of the word "peace", I'd have thought. In my day, 84-87, a good third of the undergraduate intake, including myself, were peace and political activists, and the School of Peace Studies, as it was when founded by the Quakers and Adam Curle, was explicitly designed for activists to promote the cause of peace worldwide. It wasn't an ordinary academic department, it didn't take an 'objective' view of conflict (as the famous Dept of War Studies at Imperial College does), but rather was founded specifically to promote the cause of peace. The rot really set in when James O'Connell, a genial enough Irishman with a heart of stone, became Chair and decided to turn the School into a bog-standard academic department, causing major ructions with some (by no means all) staff and the activists in the student body. These inconvenient activist pains in O'Connell's arse were gradually weeded out over the years, leaving the compliant and the complicit and the occasional reactionary (step forward Tom Gallagher). It was inevitable that O'Connell would win in the long term, particularly given the then Tory government's view of Peace Studies as a "School for subversives" (oh, if only it were so), and his legacy is that now PS is no longer anything special, no longer promotes peace, but rather just promotes itself, with its various staff, in particular the telegenic Paul Rogers, regularly appearing on news programmes as talking heads, and its learned books and journals selling like hotcakes amongst the great and the good in public life.

To take money directly from the MoD, though, really is a step too far even for O'Connell's heirs. It's akin to Cancer Research taking the tobacco company shilling, or atheists being funded by the Vatican, or anarchists being funded by the cops. It's just plain WRONG at so many levels. It's also bitterly disappointing, although not surprising - academic departments will do anything these days for money.

Not that PS was all that great in its heyday, being full of self-righteous moralistic middle-class liberal peaceniks who espoused a moral orthodoxy that stifled any proper debate, looked down on 'ordinary people' with breathtaking contempt, and marginalised the non-orthodox, particularly those few of us who were socialists. No wonder the dream of Peace Studies students was to move to Hebden Bridge...