From: Joel Matthew Young jmyoung AT UNM dot EDU
Subject: HOMELAND SECURITY TO DIRECT U.S. ACADEMIC RESEARCH

Dear colleagues:

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education reported the Department of Homeland Security's intention to fund a new research center at the University of Maryland to study how terrorist groups form and recruit members, what motivates such groups, and how they pick their targets. Former UNM faculty member Gary LaFree, who will direct the center, is quoted as characterizing the new center as "the social-science equivalent to the Manhattan Project."

I am writing to you because I believe that the Bush Administration has finally found a diabolically brilliant way to assert control over one of the last credible sources of solid, dispositive evidence bearing on its failed foreign policy: independent scholarly research. To my mind, this amounts to a pre-emptive surgical strike against a growing chorus of informed domestic dissent--much of which originates or at least echoes in the halls of academia--and thus amounts to a kind of intellectual-political Trojan Horse. I also believe that the plan would give terrorists a plausible reason to directly target American universities. I therefore submit that the collaboration must be stopped AT ONCE.

Sadly, LaFree's reference to the Manhattan Project is apt for at least one reason: scholarly brilliance is once again being conscripted by the U.S. Government in order to further empower a man already in possession of unprecedented power who, at least in George W. Bush, exhibits a prerogative to wage war unfettered by respect for either international or domestic law. (And, as was the case with the earlier President, moral culpability: the decision to drop atomic bombs on not one but two cities with little or no military value was neither the only option available, nor was it the most ethically defensible or logically consistent way to demonstrate the power of a weapon whose ostensible chief utility was and remains deterrence.)

This time, however, the coup has taken the form of the Federally funded hostile takeover of what has historically been largely independent social science research (as opposed to certain branches of the 'hard sciences,' whose research agendas have long been orchestrated by the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy and their interested civilian contractors). The substance and emphasis of what certain social scientists at UCLA, UC Boulder, U of Penn, U of South Carolina, and U of Maryland will now study will be decided not by the scholars themselves, but by the likes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, Ridge, and Bush--a man who, judging from his academic record at Yale, has a dismally poor grasp of the very disciplines whose research agendas he will now effectively be directing.

But isn't protecting innocents from attack legitimate? How else might these monies be spent? Of course we should endeavor to defend ourselves, but instead of allowing the Bush Administration to conscript university departments to study how terrorist groups recruit members and pick targets for attacks--which is unambiguously the realm of government intelligence officers--scholars at truly independent universities might well examine what government spies are never allowed to pursue: an understanding of why the American public continues to endorse fatally flawed U.S. foreign policies, which both indirectly and directly produced (and in the case of our occupation of Iraq, continue to spawn) the very terrorists who would be scrutinized in the current plan.

It is worth noting that those persons and groups identified by the Bush Administration as terrorist-affiliated, and thus forwarded to the participating universities for study, will be examined not merely in an attempt to thwart future attacks, but ultimately to further the ongoing effort to find and kill them--the explicit and unabashed aim of this Administration with regard to those labeled as terrorists.

This is, moreover, a logical outcome of the proposed collaboration between the universities and Homeland Security, for actively sharing information among U.S. intelligence agencies is one of the recommendations of the 9/11 report that was adopted by the Bush Administration. The only difference is that university professors, and likely their graduate assistants, will now be as culpable in this illegal and immoral activity as their government counterparts--and they will therefore predictably be identified by terrorists as legitimate targets.

Yet another alternative avenue of study that could not easily be used by the Administration to facilitate killing--and which, in fact, could conceivably help to avoid it--is that scholars might attempt to parse the few politically and morally compelling threads of terrorist-group complaints from the distorted theological fabric of their fearful declarations. Arising from this exercise could well be an unprecedented attempt to establish some sort of common ground upon which a fruitful, peaceful dialogue might be based. Ultimately (and I realize that this will appear to some to be a radical and even repellent idea), U.S. foreign policy itself might even be amended in view of such revelations, thus potentially avoiding the desperation and moral indignation that enables terrorist recruitment in the first place.

Is it that far-fetched or politically incorrect to suggest that the above kinds of avenues for scholarly research might be more legitimate and productive than turning independent social scientists into intelligence officers for the U.S. government? Is there no cause for alarm when the staff of the Department of Homeland Security becomes functionally indistinguishable from the faculty and graduate students at our universities?

What about the likelihood that the plan would expose our universities--which would become an active part of the Administration's War on Terror--to peril as legitimate terrorist targets? Would not this tend to legitimize Bin Laden's previously incredible statement that all Americans are equally guilty of supporting U.S. foreign policy, and therefore equally worthy of attack? Are we to have concrete, anti-bomb barriers at the entrances to our social science faculty office buildings? Armed National Guard soldiers attending lectures to 'protect' professors? Would not inducting ever-larger portions of American society into the 'War on Terror' effort complicate, rather than facilitate, the Homeland Security's already overwhelming task? Will LaFree and those academics who have blithely joined George W. Bush's crusade against perceived sources of evil in the modern world fail to reflect on the perhaps irreversible changes they will have wrought on American academia, on the maleable young minds with which they are charged, and ultimately on American society itself?

I call on academics everywhere to either draw a line in the sand and resist their conscription into President Bush's War on Terror, or to join the CIA and leave the rest of us out of it.


Joel M. Young
Part-time Instructor
Department of Sociology
University of New Mexico
jmyoung AT unm DOT edu