Securing the Home Front by Degree

The first students to earn master’s degrees in homeland security from San Diego State University have faced a lot of curious questions about their eclectic, even controversial, academic discipline.

“The first thing they ask me is: ‘Are you a spy?’ I tell them no, I’m the furthest thing from a spy,” said student Steve Price, who was among those receiving the new diplomas Sunday and is considering becoming a cyber-security consultant for healthcare firms. “There is a novelty factor. People are incredulous.”

Conceived as a response to 9/11, the program and others like it around the country include the study of the history and tactics of terrorism but often also look at technology, surveillance, pandemics, drug trafficking, and society’s problems during earthquakes, hurricanes and bombings.

“What we are trying to do is education, not training. There is a distinction,” said Eric Frost, a geology professor who is co-director of the master’s program, which began two years ago.

For example, the classes do not teach how to set up or read chemical contamination sensors but might consider motives and consequences of a sarin nerve gas attack and how to prevent and respond to one.

“There is not a specific outcome that we want you to do,” Frost explained. “It’s that we want you to think. And people are going to wind up thinking in lots of different directions. Our society really needs that.”

Nationwide, the field itself is still emerging, buffeted by skeptics who question whether it is a coherent academic discipline or a trendy repackaging of courses to boost enrollments. There are disagreements too over whether to include, as San Diego State has done, such disasters as the 2003 wildfires that devastated nearby neighborhoods.

A study last year by the National Research Council of the National Academies noted that homeland security studies “could be stretched to include almost every discipline and topic area imaginable.” The authors could offer no definitive list of campus offerings on the topic. Still, the report said that experimentation, as with Soviet studies during the Cold War, was “a strength rather than a weakness.”

Many schools have begun or expanded courses in terrorism since 2001, but others -- such as the University of Denver, the University of New Haven in Connecticut and Virginia Commonwealth University -- have taken a further step and recently established master’s or bachelor’s degrees.

USC is getting a master’s program off the ground in connection with the school’s status as one of the nation’s six centers of specialized research funded by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. USC has received $4 million annually for three years for assessing the risks and economic results of terrorism.

The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and the University of Connecticut offer a master’s for law enforcement and emergency response officials.

Many community colleges sponsor certificates in forms of homeland security. And proprietary trade schools have jumped on the bandwagon, sometimes facing skepticism that they are merely training security guards for shopping malls.

Laura Petonito, acting director of university programs for the Department of Homeland Security, said some academic subjects take 10 years to jell.

“Homeland security may be one of those areas that is constantly evolving as we get new information,” she said.

Meanwhile, she added, colleges should ensure that students are “employable as a result of going to any institution. Do they have the skills and competencies necessary to make them successful?”

At San Diego State, students say they think so.

Angela Fanucchi, 36, an officer for the San Diego Harbor Police Department, said the classes helped her grasp terrorism’s roots and methods.

“As a beat cop, we might inadvertently run into the person who has the capacity to hurt the masses.... In order to combat something, you have to understand what it comes from,” she said.

Lance Larson, 24, a reserve police officer in Laguna Beach who runs a website firm, said he liked the mix of high-tech and policy topics: “This is a perfect degree to merge all those skills together and make me a more marketable person.”

His graduation project examined the vulnerability of downtown San Diego’s fiber-optic network.

Tiffany Campbell, 33, a former art teacher, had lived in Yemen, where her husband, a Marine, was a defense liaison officer. When she tells people about earning a homeland security degree, “it does raise eyebrows.... They think of law enforcement and the military. People don’t think of it as diplomatic interactions.”

She recently took the exam to join the Foreign Service.

Depending on students’ thesis completions, 15 or so were set to receive the pioneering degrees Sunday. Thirty others are enrolled in the master’s program, which often takes two years of such classes as “Science, Technology and Homeland Security,” “Organized Crime” and “Photogeology and Remote Sensing.”

The degree is in the interdisciplinary studies division and is expected to be upgraded soon to a stand-alone program in the College of Sciences. That will be a sign that the San Diego program has come into its own.

One of the strongest connections between the university and the outside Homeland Security world is a room known as the visualization center. Packed with computers and big projection screens, the campus facility has powerful fiber and wireless connections to process large amounts of data and imagery on mapping and sensor tracking. It helped in recovery efforts in tsunami-ravaged Indonesia and post-Katrina New Orleans.

The research units located there recently received $563,000 in federal funds through a regional disaster response council to coordinate emergency communications and mapping systems in San Diego County. Master’s degree students are hired to work in the “viz center,” but the master’s program itself does not receive funds directly from the Department of Homeland Security, Frost said.

One degree requirement at San Diego is a class taught by criminal justice professor Jeffrey McIllwaine, program co-director.

That class includes an unusual but popular assignment: to assume the guise of a terrorist group and plan a theoretical local attack. McIllwaine warns students not to break the law “or even come close to its boundaries” in their research. (“Do not smuggle a fake gun into Petco Park,” for example.)

McIllwaine wants students to grasp the details behind such attacks: “We are trying to train a cadre of very well-informed decision-makers to prepare and prevent these kinds of things.”

Mike Berns, 24, was in a group that imagined a Hezbollah bombing of Israel Independence Day celebrations on San Diego campuses, with the terrorists hidden in catering trucks.

“We had to get into their mind-set. I found it very useful and insightful from a security view,” said Berns, who has a bachelor’s in religious studies from Brandeis University and has written his San Diego thesis on Wahhabism, a fundamentalist form of Islam. Berns may pursue a State Department career in intelligence analysis.

Given the controversy over domestic surveillance, Berns jokingly added that he was surprised that class e-mails about imaginary bombings did not attract official notice.

Frost’s course about sensor networks looks at various forms of surveillance and their use in policy decisions, including legal and ethical issues. In an assignment, one student recently proposed a counterterrorism measure to secretly photograph all boats in San Diego Harbor and match license numbers to owners. That led to a debate about possible privacy invasions.

“Just because it is technologically possible doesn’t mean it is possible,” Frost warned his students.

The program emphasizes internships at law enforcement, fire and health agencies. Some students are involved in an upcoming conference in San Diego on responses to a possible avian flu pandemic, and some participate in mock terrorism exercises.

Justin Carter played a victim in a bomb and chemical attack scenario last fall and realized that he would have been dead in a real incident before rescuers got to him. That reinforced lectures about challenges in fighting terrorism, said Carter, 25, who works as a fraud investigator for a sporting goods store and hopes to join the FBI or Treasury Department.

He and many others in the program said that studying terrorism had made them less worried about it.

But most also say they now automatically ponder security gaps and exit routes at public gatherings. And many seem to have stockpiled more emergency supplies than the average Californian.

The philosophy of his classmates might be, in Carter’s words, “how to prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”