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Parallels Between Homeland Security
and Area Studies, International
Relations, and Science Policy
To provide further insight into possible roles for homeland security
education, it is possible to draw lessons from the past. Just as educational
programs in homeland security emerged in response to the events of Sep-
tember 11, educational programs in area studies flourished in response to
the Cold War. Official authorization and funding were first provided by
the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and continue under Title VI
of the U.S. Code to this day. (A precursor effort to area studies programs,
the U.S. Army Specialized Training Program, was initiated during World
War II but discontinued after the war's end.) International studies began
even earlier, before World War II.1
In both area studies and homeland security studies, the national edu-
cational response was to a perceived threat and a corresponding national
need. In both cases, the subject matter of the new coursework drew from
multiple disciplines. Also, in both cases, there was at least one identifiable
federal agency whose recruiting needs would be well served by students
graduating from the new programs. For area studies, the perceived fed-
eral customers were the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Depart-
ment of Defense (DOD), and the Department of State.2 For the scientific
programs launched around the same time (post-Sputnik), the National
1 On the history of international studies as a discipline, see Robert A. McCaughey, 1984,
International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning,
New York: Columbia University Press.
2 Ibid.
9
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10 FRAMEWORKS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN HOMELAND SECURITY
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the main benefi-
ciary.3 For current homeland security programs, the perceived federal
customer is primarily the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). This
perception persists despite homeland security-related career opportuni-
ties in the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Transportation, Housing
and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Treasury, Defense,
Justice, and Commerce; as well as opportunities in the Postal Service and
the Internal Revenue Service; and despite numerous nonfederal opportu-
nities in port/airport security, urban planning, city/regional governance,
public health, and virtually all forms of engineering.
Evidence supporting the public perception of DHS as the primary
customer can be seen in educational programs that specifically claim that
they will train students to become "homeland security specialists"4 and
in university websites that reference solely the Department of Homeland
Security in their introductory material5 or provide direct links only to
DHS, among all the federal agencies.6
At this point, the course offerings and programs in homeland security
are still in their infancy, and it may yet be possible to apply some caution-
ary lessons learned from the nation's experience with area studies. The
primary concern voiced in the breakout session on area studies was that it
is a mistake to link an educational program too strongly to a single federal
agency.
The danger to programs appears to be that public or political percep-
tions of the agency can transfer easily to the educational program in ques-
tion, regardless of their factual basis. Examples in support of this view can
be found in news commentaries, discussion boards, and written docu-
ments on area studies programs. For example, the Chronicle of Education
Colloquy Debate, "Tarnished as a Spy?,"7 considers whether area studies
scholars should boycott the National Security Education Program, which
provides fellowships to students in area studies. The rationale in favor of
the boycott is that the program is "tainted" by its funding source. Another
example of the perceived conflation of agency objectives and an educa-
tional program is the open letter distributed by Michigan State University
to its undergraduates considering enrolling in the National Security Edu-
3AAAS, 2004, "Trends in Non-defense R&D by Function, FY 1953-2005," February, http:
//www.aaas.org/spp/rd/histda05.pdf.
4http://www.directoryofschools.com/Homeland-Security.htm.
5 http://ptesrv.apl.jhu.edu/04_5_catalog/homeland.html.
6http://homelandsecurity.osu.edu.
7"Tarnished as a Spy?," The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 8, 2002. Colloquy Dis-
cussion: http://chronicle.com/colloquy/2002/spy/.
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11
PARALLELS
cational Program (area studies fellowships). The letter states: "In areas
where mistrust of the U.S. Government exists, there are concerns that
scholars and students who accept the funds may be perceived as either
current or future employees of U.S. Government security and intelligence
agencies (i.e., CIA, NSC, Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA], etc.)."8
The actual extent to which area studies students are seen by their host
countries today as anything other than area studies students is unknown,
and "mistrust of the U.S. government" can readily be transferred to any
American abroad, regardless of academic specialty. Yet, as shown by the
quotation above, at least one university has the perception that in the case
of area studies, the funding source is publicly identifiable with the stu-
dent and with the academic program. Anecdotal evidence from at least
one federal agency represented at the workshop was that the aura of "CIA,
NSC, DIA" involvement in area studies limits enrollment by skewing the
demographics of program applicants. The biasing of the applicant pool
occurs in accordance with the uneven partitioning of political views ac-
cording to gender, ethnicity, income, and other demographic factors.
At home, educational programs in area studies are also subject to
evaluation on a political basis--specifically, whether they are overly sym-
pathetic, or obstinately unresponsive, to the needs of their "affiliated"
government agency. This debate on the "usefulness" of the area studies
curriculum to political goals has emerged in congressional testimony on
Title VI.9 The consequence for the university is that the debate both puts
federal funding for area studies programs at risk and calls into question
the field's inherent academic legitimacy. Area studies is perhaps the only
discipline to have Congress attempt to impose a mandatory external advi-
sory committee upon it (HR 3077, in 2003).
More broadly, there is a long history of concern within academia
about possible alliances between researchers and U.S. military and intelli-
gence agencies, with documented negative effects. For example, some
Latin Americanists from the United States have confronted lingering sus-
picions on the part of host countries due to Project Camelot, a U.S. Army-
funded social research enterprise into the problem of counterinsurgency
in Latin America in the 1960s.10 ,11 Controversies within cultural anthro-
8http://studyabroad.msu.edu/scholarships/nsep.html.
9Testimonies of David Ward before the House Subcommittee on Labor, HHS and Educa-
tion Appropriations, April 23, 2003, and Terry Hartle and Stanley Kurz before the House
Subcommittee on Select Education, June 19, 2003.
10Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., 1967, The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Rela-
tionship Between Social Science and Practical Politics, Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press.
11 Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, ed., 1991, Ethics and the Profession of Anthropology, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
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12 FRAMEWORKS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN HOMELAND SECURITY
pology over the professional ethics of intelligence gathering (World War
I) and conducting counterinsurgency research (Thailand, against the back-
drop of the Vietnam War) have threatened academic careers and created
rifts within the discipline about government contract support of ethno-
graphic research.12,13
Further examination of the literature by the committee showed, and
participants in the area studies breakout session pointed out, that there is
a cautionary lesson to be learned from the area studies experience. Many
of the programs supporting area studies and its students are, in them-
selves, well constructed and well liked by participants. An example is the
National Security Education Program, which gives scholarship funding
in exchange for career service at one of the federal security-related agen-
cies. The problem is not the program itself, but the cultivation of a few
such programs to the point that they dominate the field's source of stu-
dents and funding. The Department of Homeland Security will need to
secure public support for education in homeland security without allying
itself so closely to homeland security programs that the agency and the
educational objectives become intertwined in the public perception. For
this reason, it would be helpful for the mandate for such educational pro-
grams to be as broad as possible.
From a practical standpoint, this means that financial support for such
programs should come from an array of sectors (private as well as public;
perhaps even international) and an array of providers within each sector.
Should DHS choose to provide financial support for new academic pro-
grams, its initiatives can be guided by principles articulated in the Na-
tional Academies report Evaluating Federal Research Programs:
1. selection of performers by competitive merit review set against
clearly stated program objectives and selection criteria;
2. systematized external assessments of project, performer, and pro-
gram performance; and
3. systematic opportunities for recompetition for multiple-year
a w a r d s . 14
These principles have been found to provide for the most effective
12 Ibid.
13Eric Wakin, 1992, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in
Thailand, University of Wisconsin: Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
14COSEPUP (Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy), 1999, Evaluating Fed-
eral Research Programs: Research and the Government Performance and Results Act, Washington,
D.C.: National Academy Press.
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13
PARALLELS
use of the nation's investments in knowledge-creating undertakings,
to ensure the continuing vitality of awardee performance, and to allow
for the regularized introduction of new innovative programs and
p e r f o r m e r s . 15
Just as funding paradigms may affect educational paradigms, so too
may communication paradigms. To obtain the broadest public support,
the communicated expectations of the academic programs should be that
they prepare future employees for a wide range of employment, across all
sectors, in a broad array of locations and job titles. Considering the breadth
of the definition of homeland security given earlier, this should not prove
difficult.
As discussed above, homeland security shares similarities with area
studies in its close relationship to a national security need. However in
the half-century intervening between the establishment of area studies
and the dawn of homeland security studies, the educational landscape
has changed. New opportunities have arisen. For example, there is now
the opportunity to educate workers and the public in preventing threats,
not just responding to them. Workshop participants with backgrounds in
hazards assessment indicated that this is possible because there is greater
understanding of many natural and (to a lesser extent) human-initiated
phenomena, leading to better predictive models and potentially better
decision making now than in the past. Furthermore, universities have
made great progress in establishing mechanisms for interdisciplinary
work (centers, interdisciplinary degree programs, joint faculty appoint-
ments, etc.).16 Many of these were not in place when area studies was
established as a field of inquiry. Finally, to come full circle, some of the
educational forays made by then-new interdisciplinary "fields" such as
area studies, national security studies, and even bioengineering can now
provide content to the evolving educational studies in homeland security.
15Ibid.
16DBASSE (Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education), 2003, Evaluating
and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math, Washing-
ton, D.C.: The National Academies Press.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
security studies
