SIU may not plan on waging a war in the near future, but a recent study says the university is among the most militarized in the nation.

A recent ranking from Vice lists Southern Illinois University as the 23rd most militarized university in the U.S.

Much of the development of militarization stems from living in a post-9/11 world, reported Vice.

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Vice defined the militarization of colleges as a “measure of university labs funded by U.S. intelligence agencies, administrators with strong ties to those same agencies, and, most importantly, the educational backgrounds of the approximately 1.4 million people who hold Top Secret clearance in the United States.”

SIU outranks the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern, MIT, Harvard and many of the nation’s other elite schools.

Together, the 100 schools that made the list “produce the greatest number of students who are employed by the Intelligence Community (IC), have the closest relationships with the national security state and profit the most from American war-waging,” according to Vice.

The rankings only report three traditionally conservative universities, indicating that more liberal schools play a larger role in what Vice describes as militarization. 

Vice reported none of the top-100 liberal arts universities in the country made the list. 

A total of 17 of the universities on the list are located in the Washingtion D.C. area.

Cory Ray can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @coryray_DE

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