Author’s Note:
This essay is offered as a conceptual case for the deliberate reintegration of Canada’s universities and Armed Forces as a matter of strategic sovereignty and civic resilience. It is informed by the development of the Serving Scholar Program at the University of Guelph, an initiative designed to support students serving in the Canadian Armed Forces while pursuing higher education, and to re-establish structured institutional pathways between academic formation and military service.
The argument advanced here is not programmatic in a narrow sense, but architectural: that durable national defence depends upon upstream institutions capable of forming judgement, legitimacy, and civic responsibility in tandem. The Serving Scholar Program represents one practical expression of that broader institutional logic.
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Arma et litterae—“arms and letters”—has long described the recognition that military service and intellectual formation are not competing pursuits, but complementary ones. In classical and early modern political thought, the capacity to defend a polity and the capacity to govern it were understood as mutually reinforcing. Education was not conceived merely as professional preparation, nor military service as a technical function, but as part of a broader process of civic formation. Institutions tasked with cultivating judgment, discipline, and responsibility were expected to work in parallel, producing citizens capable of both reflection and action.
The sharp separation now taken for granted between universities and the military is a comparatively recent development. In Canada, these institutions—once aligned in their contribution to civic leadership and national capacity—have drifted into administrative and cultural isolation from one another. This estrangement is often treated as natural or inevitable, yet it reflects neither historical precedent nor strategic necessity. Instead, it is the product of a specific period and set of assumptions that no longer align with contemporary realities. In an era marked by strategic uncertainty, contested sovereignty, and declining public trust, the lack of coherence between institutions responsible for intellectual formation and those responsible for national defence has become a structural weakness. A state that trains thought and service in isolation from one another undermines its own capacity for effective self-government and credible sovereignty.
Strategic Sovereignty in a Fragmented Age
Sovereignty, once conceived primarily in terms of territorial control and kinetic dominance, must now be understood as a more complex, layered, and institutionally distributed phenomenon. In classical political thought, sovereign power was expressed above all in the capacity to make binding decisions for a political community, particularly under conditions of emergency. In the modern international system, that capacity remains essential, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. Sovereignty today rests not only on legal authority or material force, but on the ability of a state to sustain internal coherence, preserve legitimacy across generations, and act with unified judgment amid disruption.
From the perspective of international relations, sovereignty also depends upon recognition by other states: admission into the society of states, the acceptance of claims to authority, and the credibility to enter binding diplomatic and strategic relationships. Yet such recognition is not conferred in a vacuum. It is ultimately contingent upon a state’s demonstrated capacity for self-government—its ability to align its institutions, maintain social trust, and reliably translate decision into action. This argument concerns not the minimal threshold of juridical sovereignty, which can persist even under conditions of internal fragility, but the durability of sovereign agency among peer states operating within competitive and alliance-bound systems. In this sense, sovereignty cannot be reduced to the calculus of weapon systems or the arithmetic of defence budgets alone. It emerges from the continued alignment of the institutions that confer meaning, cultivate loyalty, and reproduce judgment across civil and military domains. Where that alignment weakens, diplomatic recognition becomes fragile; where it holds, recognition follows and endures.
These threats, though evolved in form, retain the same essential function: not merely to breach the defences of a state, but to fracture its internal architecture of trust, discipline, and civic continuity. Today, the arsenals of our adversaries include cyberattacks, contesting Arctic sovereignty, epistemic disruption, the instrumentalization of grievance, and the proliferation of narratives designed to erode public reason. These pressures are exacerbated when institutions tasked to safeguard our nation operate in isolation, or worse, in mutual suspicion.
The temptation, in the face of such dispersed aggression, is to respond in kind with dispersed solutions: to assign cyber warfare to technical specialists, disinformation to media studies, and supply chain fragility to econometric modelling. Yet this reflex toward institutional fragmentation reveals more than a deficit in strategic capability; it concedes that our nation’s conceptual architecture is insufficient. The gravest vulnerability of open societies lies not in their lack of surveillance or control, but in their failure to integrate the forms of judgement required to understand complex external threats in their entirety. Strategic sovereignty, therefore, cannot be secured through military preparedness alone, nor secured by proliferating bureaucratic apparatuses, without tending to the moral, intellectual, and civic capacities upon which effective statecraft ultimately depends. This is not to suggest that institutional alignment alone guarantees sovereignty, but rather that without it, other instruments of power lose coherence, credibility, and endurance. A state may indeed be armed, yet directionless; elaborately administered, yet culturally incoherent. History abounds with examples of nations that mistook material strength for institutional maturity—only to collapse under the strain of crisis when cohesion proved a mirage. If sovereignty is to possess any enduring meaning in our time, it must require a closer, foundational relationship between the institutions through which power, judgement, and responsibility are exercised.
The response to this reality is not to militarize civic life, but rather to infuse strategic thinking with a civic sensibility. The architecture of national resilience must include the universities—wellsprings of critical reason, historical memory, philosophical reflection, and civic imagination. It is strategically self-defeating to treat the university as somehow external to the infrastructure of national security. Within its walls, the moral frameworks of judgement are cultivated, the past is interpreted through the lens of the present, the meaning of the common good is debated and refined, and the habits of self-government are instilled. A state that acts without the university’s intellectual depth, without its cultivation of civic literacy and cultural foresight, may wield power—but it will do so without insight. Equally, the military—so often depicted within the academy as either a marginal subculture or an atavistic residue of hierarchy—must be recognized for what it truly is: not a deviation from democracy, but one of its indispensable institutions. The formation of military personnel is not merely tactical training; rather, it is a civic achievement, an education in responsibility, sacrifice, cohesion, and the moral burdens of command. The military, like the university, is a school of character. And when these two institutions remain divided by ignorance or suspicion, the nation is deprived of the vital opportunity to align service with thought, action with reflection, and duty with deliberation.
Recovering a Broken Compact
The estrangement between Canada’s universities and its Armed Forces, however regrettable, was not foreordained. It was not the result of any immutable law of institutional development, nor the necessary outcome of modernity. It emerged, rather, from a specific moment in Western political culture—a period marked by disillusionment with inherited authorities, by ideological contestation, and by the redefinition of civic virtue. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities across the democratic world became sites of protest, critique, and moral upheaval. In many respects, these transformations were salutary. They expanded participation, questioned dogma, and exposed structures of exclusion. But they also had unintended consequences—foremost among them, the withdrawal of the university from its older civic functions, and a turning away from the idea of duty as an educational ideal.
Military life, once seen as a legitimate expression of citizenship, came to be interpreted in many academic circles as compulsion, conformity, or imperial residue. The uniform, once a marker of national service, was recoded as a symbol of repression or reaction. Service itself, once honoured as a mode of public contribution, was displaced by a language of personal autonomy and expressive individualism. The Armed Forces, for their part, began to view the university not as a partner in the formation of the nation, but as a skeptical and often hostile observer—a place increasingly indifferent to the values of discipline, hierarchy, and sacrifice. What had once been institutions in dialogue—educating nation-builders, commissioning officers, commemorating shared sacrifice—gradually ceased to recognize each other as civic kin. This mutual suspicion calcified into institutional habit. Over time, the lines of communication between the university and the military narrowed, and the cultural distance widened. The separation was rationalized, normalized, and eventually forgotten. What had once been understood as a complementarity—arms and letters shaping a nation in tandem—was recast as a dichotomy, a division of incompatible worlds. In this environment, the very idea of a student who serves, or a service member who studies, came to seem anomalous, even suspect. Yet this fracture is not irreparable. What history has separated, governance may reunite. The task before us is not to resuscitate a romanticized past, nor to stage superficial gestures of unity, but to design institutions in which the civic compact between knowledge and service is made manifest once again. The repair must be architectural, not rhetorical. It must take the form of real places, real programs, and real practices in which the estrangement of recent decades is not merely lamented, but strategically and methodically overcome.
Sovereignty in the Balance: Outpacing Adversaries, Assuring Allies
The stakes of institutional reintegration extend well beyond the moral or pedagogical virtues often invoked in domestic discourse. At issue is not only the health of the civic body, but the standing of the political nation itself—its posture among allies, its credibility as a strategic partner, and its capacity to govern without leaning indefinitely on the scaffolding of more powerful states. In an era of strategic volatility, marked by fiscal constraint, ideological fragmentation, and the return of great-power rivalry, credibility within multilateral alliances no longer rests on declarations or symbolic alignment alone. It is assessed through the visible integrity of a state’s institutions and its demonstrated ability to generate leadership, continuity, and resolve from within.
This assessment cuts in more than one direction. States that appear unable to supply their own strategic judgment—those that rely on others to provide initiative, moral seriousness, or cultural ballast—are not merely regarded as unreliable partners. They are increasingly perceived as structurally dependent, and therefore vulnerable. The contemporary international environment is less forgiving of weakness than of disagreement. Allies who once extended indulgent patience may now adopt a colder, more calculating posture—not out of hostility, but because strategic competition rewards clarity and penalizes ambiguity. Where institutional coherence falters, formal sovereignty may persist, but practical autonomy begins to erode.
Recent strains within the transatlantic order underscore this reality. The behaviour of even longstanding allies demonstrates that recognition, protection, and goodwill are contingent, not guaranteed. States that cannot convincingly demonstrate internal seriousness—through aligned civil, military, and educational institutions—risk being treated not simply as unreliable contributors, but as spaces of leverage, pressure, or opportunistic influence. In such conditions, sovereignty is tested not only by adversaries, but by the shifting incentives of allies themselves. The lesson is not one of cynicism, but of urgency: a country that wishes to remain a sovereign actor must cultivate the institutional coherence that commands respect, deters opportunism, and sustains commitment—whether cooperation is freely offered or strategically withheld.
To embed a culture of service within higher education is, therefore, not a niche experiment or symbolic gesture. It is a concrete expression of national maturity. It signals that we are willing to govern ourselves with intention, to build the civic foundations of sovereignty deliberately, and to cultivate the kind of citizens who do not merely perform loyalty but understand its cost. This form of capital is not fiscal, nor can it be purchased. It manifests not in numbers, but in trust; not in spectacle, but in the quiet assurance that the state can act from within. And crucially, it does not appear on balance sheets or performance dashboards. It appears in the eyes of allies who must decide—often in moments of ambiguity—whether we are a partner to be counted on or a liability to be managed.
Although Canada may never rival the industrial scale or throughput of larger military powers, our sovereign strength lies elsewhere—in the architecture of our civic institutions and their capacity to function in concert toward a common purpose. We possess, in principle, a military that is professional yet not politicized, a globally respected system of public universities and a civic tradition not yet hollowed out by nihilism or performative despair. Yet possession alone does not confer advantage. What matters is the relationship among these institutions—their mutual intelligibility, their operational linkages, and the narrative coherence they offer to the public they serve. And, our adversaries do not merely scrutinize capabilities. They probe fault lines—structural fractures within pluralist democracies—that, if left unaddressed, can be widened into strategic vulnerabilities.
The first lies between universal citizenship and group identity, where the promise of civic equality is strained by the pull of cultural, ethnic, or ideological particularism. The second emerges between elite authority and democratic legitimacy, where institutions risk being seen not as guardians of the public good but as insulated actors removed from popular accountability. The third opens between cosmopolitan institutions and national allegiance, especially when centres of knowledge or culture adopt globalist postures that appear detached from the rooted experiences of the citizenry. These divisions are not theoretical. They arise as a consequence of the liberal democracy we rightly cherish. Yet they can also be operationalized by foreign actors who understand that a fragmented society is easier to mislead, manipulate, and neutralize. Thus, to leave them unbound is to invite manipulation. But, to address them seriously—through institutional alignment, civic education, and strategic coherence—is to restore the internal order upon which sovereignty rests.
Moreover, these fractures are likewise observed closely by our allies. They read the configuration of our institutions not in suspicion, but in expectation—looking for evidence of seriousness, coherence, and the capacity to lead. This is why the deliberate integration of civic, intellectual, and military life cannot be treated as a cultural nicety or a nostalgic gesture. It is a form of capital—earned, strategic, and distinctly Canadian. But like all capital, it requires renewal. Sentiment is not strategy. Ceremony is not structure. If we are to maintain both freedom and standing in a world where both are contested, we must design institutions that nurture and bolster Canada’s sovereignty. And, in this effort, the university has a critical role to play: as an instrument of strategic civic formation. It is one of the few institutions capable of preparing citizens to reason across difference, to distinguish freedom from self-interest, and to sustain pluralism without descending into fracture. When rightly governed, the university is not an alternative to the state, but one of its sovereign pillars, which supports the weight of the moral and intellectual architecture of the national narrative. In alliance with the Armed Forces—not in hierarchy but in mutual regard—it can help bind together the diversity of the nation into a common civic fabric. And in doing so, it helps secure not only what Canada stands for, but how Canada stands at all.
Arma et Litterae: a Nation Worth Governing
The lesson of history is neither sentimental nor ambiguous: institutions endure only when they are governed according to their nature—and that nature must include a principled resistance to the whims of fashion and the accelerations of political taste. Not every organ of civic life should be expected to pivot with the latest policy trend or reflect the prevailing mood. Indeed, those institutions tasked with shaping national character must be deliberately slow to change—not because they are reactionary, but because they are custodial. A democracy requires ballast as much as it requires momentum, and ballast is not found in novelty. It is found in those structures that are designed to outlast administrations, ideologies, and headlines.
The university and the Armed Forces occupy such a foundational tier in the architecture of Canadian public life. Neither ought to function as an instrument of ideology or a platform for partisan expression. In the Armed Forces, this principle is safeguarded by a professional ethic of political neutrality, enforced through clear codes of conduct and a command structure designed to maintain institutional integrity above faction. In the university, where freedom of inquiry and plurality of thought are vital, the absence of such structural guardrails can allow ideology not just to arise—as it should—but to become orthodoxy. This contrast reveals not only the institutional discipline that insulates the Armed Forces from political encroachment, but also the comparative permeability of the university, where the absence of such guardrails has, at times, allowed ideology to settle where inquiry ought to prevail. Yet this very asymmetry confirms the necessity of convergence. For where the military embodies the restraint of power, the university must cultivate the restraint of thought. And where one tests judgement in action, the other must test action in judgment. Their independence matters, but their estrangement cannot endure.
To think in these terms is to govern with the long horizon in view. The great challenges that define our age—Arctic sovereignty, cyberwarfare, environmental disruption, demographic transformation, and the quiet corrosion of civic trust—will not be met by agility alone. They will be met by nations that possess depth. By institutions that carry memory. And by citizens formed not by platform, but by principle. Canada must prepare not only for adversarial threats but for the unsettling fact that even long-standing alliances are no longer immune to volatility. In an era when strategic friendship can be tempered by economic coercion, rhetorical contempt, or episodic indifference, the burden of national coherence falls more heavily on domestic institutions. The strength of Canada will not be measured solely by budgets or deployments. It will be measured by the seriousness with which we sustain our own civic life, and by the trust we earn from allies who must see—now more than ever—that we are governed from within, that we can act without deferral, and that we do not wait for external permission to assert who we are.
Arma et Litterae is more than a phrase. It is a doctrine of institutional design—one that reminds us that Canada’s security rests not on uniformed service alone, nor scholars alone, but on their shared fidelity to the common good. When these institutions are governed diligently—when they are brought into concert, rather than kept in silos—the nation stands not only defended but composed. Not only free, but durable. The existence of a Canada whose sovereignty is not outsourced, whose leadership is not performative, and whose institutions are formed not to flatter the present, but to sustain the future.
Photo: Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario (circa. 1900-1920), author unknown via picryl.
Disclaimer: Any views or opinions expressed in articles are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the NATO Association of Canada.
