Latest Trend in Academia: Security

As soon as he heard about a new class on terrorism and domestic security, Boston University senior Aksel Chernitzky knew he wanted to sign up.

“This class, basically it’s about our future as a country,” said Chernitzky, a 21-year-old from San Diego who nearly missed out because the seminar filled up so fast.

The popularity of a course called “Intelligence and Homeland Security” came as no surprise to associate professor Arthur S. Hulnick, a former intelligence analyst who came to Boston University 14 years ago as the “CIA officer in residence.”

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, “this class would not have existed, because we did not have homeland security,” Hulnick said. “But now, suddenly, we have created this whole new system and students feel they should understand it.”

Hulnick’s weekly, three-hour class is part of a wave of courses dealing with domestic defense emerging around the country. Curry College, a small, four-year school in Milton, Mass., this year introduced a seven-course certificate program for people who want to work in homeland defense.

Fairmont State Community and Technical College in West Virginia this year launched an associate-degree program in homeland security. Purdue University in Indiana is designing an institute that will focus on the same topic. Classes intended to help students understand terrorism range from a course called “Theology of Terror: Osama bin Laden and the Taliban,” at Arizona State University, to a class at Rice University with the cheery title “Jihad and the End of the World.”

The subject is evolving course by course, said Juliette Kayyem, a specialist in domestic preparedness at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“There is no intellectual or academic history in this field,” she said. “For the most part, the only things that existed before 9/11, 2001, were either training classes for people who were already professionals or some specialized look at spying in World War II or some other moment in history.”

Like the very phrase “homeland security” -- a term that scarcely existed two years ago -- “the intellectual enterprise around homeland security is still a work in progress,” Kayyem said. “This has got to be equivalent, I would assume, to the burst in engineering classes after Sputnik,” the Soviet satellite whose 1957 launch raised fears of an American education system ill-equipped to win a space race.

By the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, Kayyem noted, more than 100 books dealing with the event had been published. The universities, she said, “are following suit.”

In a second-floor seminar room overlooking the Charles River, Hulnick spent the first half of one recent class diagraming the various agencies that formed the Department of Homeland Security. Bureaucratic chaos ensued, Hulnick said, because of conflicts in training and missions.

“It is a real management headache when you try to integrate all these people scattered all over the country in different offices, and with different jobs,” he said.

Lacing his lecture with anecdotes culled from 35 years as an intelligence analyst, Hulnick said: “At the CIA, one thing we understood was that you needed a gatekeeper, or you wouldn’t get any work done.”

Hulnick told his students that the central issue his course addresses is, “What is the proper trade-off between freedom on the one hand and security on the other?”

Matthew Galston, a student from Long Island who is focusing on foreign policy and national security, is taking Hulnick’s course. “I think this is kind of like a new technology happening in government,” he said. “I feel this business of homeland security is going to reorganize government -- and to get in on the ground floor is wise.”

Galston said he wanted “to familiarize myself not only with the way the intelligence community works now, but how that is going to lead to future changes.” After all, he said, “this is not going to be a problem our parents deal with. It is going to be our problem -- and we are going to be dealing with it for the rest of our lives.”

With topics taken from the headlines -- and from experiences that the students have lived through themselves -- “this course is very current,” said Alissa Brodie, 21, a senior from Palos Verdes.

Already, she said, she has learned that homeland security is a giant national gamble: “No one knows if it is going to work or if it is not going to work.”

Before dismissing his students for the evening, Hulnick reiterated another theme of the course: What is terrorism?

Hulnick stressed that his definition -- “the use of violence to create fear, panic, economic dislocation, death and destruction” -- encompasses troublemakers from “19 guys armed with box cutters” to members of the Earth Liberation Front who set fire to SUVs.

“This is something the students should understand,” Hulnick said. He paused for a moment, then added: “Everyone should understand this. And I don’t think they do.”