University Times

Aftershocks of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings, recent anthrax attacks and the war in Afghanistan are being felt in Pitt classrooms and research facilities.

Some examples:

* More than 30 undergraduates have enrolled so far in Pitt's new certificate program in global studies, more than twice the number that planners of the interdisciplinary program had expected at this point.

* Engineering faculty have begun brainstorming about how their research might contribute to the fight against terrorism, and how their school can attract federal and private funding for that research.

* The religious studies department has renewed its effort to recruit an expert on Islam.

* School of Information Sciences faculty are putting the finishing touches on an "implications paper" examining how Sept. 11 and America's anti-terrorism war are impacting such areas as knowledge management, workplace design, and data recovery and preservation.

* This spring, the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA) plans to introduce a course, "New Issues in Security Policy," revive a course on "Politics of the Contemporary Middle East" and add another section of its undergraduate course on "Terrorism," offered through the administration of justice program. Next fall, GSPIA will introduce another new course, "Islam in World Politics."

In contrast to some other campuses nationwide, Pitt has not seen a surge of interest in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) or study of the Arabic language, although instructors in those areas say it's too early to know how enrollments will look next fall.

'I haven't seen this much student interest in an issue since the Vietnam War.' Given the timing of the Sept. 11 terrorist hijackings — several days after Pitt's add-drop period had ended, and well after fall course offerings and syllabi had been set — the University could not respond with a slate of new classes this term focusing on subjects such as Islamic fundamentalism, bioterrorism and Afghan history.

But that hasn't stopped professors from re-evaluating what they teach and how they teach it.

GSPIA professor Louise Comfort has incorporated this fall's terrorist attacks in the two graduate courses she's teaching.

"In my 'Managing Emergencies and Disasters' class, I'm using the terror attacks as examples of challenges that government officials face when they encounter urgent problems that they've never seen before, and yet have to respond to," Comfort said.

At her students' request, Comfort has structured her "Policy and Analysis" seminar around the anti-terrorism war. "In the seminar, I look at policy analysis at four levels of government operation: local, state, national and international," she said. "At the national level, for example, we're examining bioterrorism. At the international level, we're looking at disaster assistance in the refugee crisis."

Comfort is working on a National Science Foundation-funded study of inter-organizational coordination in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. She shares her research findings with her students.

"I've been shuttling back and forth to Washington, D.C., almost every week, interviewing decision-makers," Comfort said. "For my students, it has been educational because they see their faculty actually engaged in doing the kinds of things they teach about. It helps students to understand, especially in the area of policy analysis, that government agencies really do worry about how to define problems, gather information and develop reasoned strategies of action. Students are discovering that the theories in their textbooks apply to the real world."

Comfort finds her students to be "intensely engaged" in classroom discussions of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. "They are also meeting by themselves in groups, they're doing much more outside research, they're searching the web, watching CNN, reading newspapers," she said. "Just the other day, I met with a student who wants to do an independent study on disaster management. In the wake of the events this fall, she's thinking of building a career in that field."

Lee Weinberg said students in his undergraduate "Criminal Law" and "Introduction to Legal Studies" courses are paying much closer attention to the anti-terrorism war than to 1991's Operation Desert Storm — or any other issue in recent memory.

"I started teaching in 1969, and I haven't seen this much student interest in an issue since the Vietnam War," he said. "This is close to home. Students know about New York City. Somerset County is nearby. They have friends who were affected one way or another.

"I've spent time in each of my courses talking about events as they unfold every day. Sometimes, students will know more than I do about some unfolding story because they were watching CNN during the hour before class, when I was in my office.

"From my point of view," Weinberg added, "the one frustrating thing is that students expect their professors to have answers to their questions. I feel like: If the President of the United States, the U.S. Attorney General and all of the brilliant commentators on CNN don't have the answers about what's going on in the world today, it's hard for me to provide them. But at least I can try to explain why no one can answer a particular question."

Political science professors said they are striving to incorporate Sept. 11 and its aftermath into their courses without straying too far from their syllabi or indulging in touchy-feely discussions.

Assistant professor Michael Goodhart said: "During the first week or so after Sept. 11, I tried to guide my 'Introduction to Political Theory' class away from the specifics of 'How do you feel about it?' I figured there were other opportunities outside of class, in the dorms or social situations, to get into personal reactions.

"Before Sept. 11, I did promise my class that reading Plato and Aristotle would have a contemporary payoff, and we were able to discuss how their theories help us make sense of today," Goodhart said. "I've also found that many, many points made in class refer to these events, but I didn't feel compelled to alter the syllabus as a result."

Goodhart said the anti-terrorism war is directly affecting his current course on "American Political Thought" and will come up in his spring course, "Topics in Political Theory: Human Rights."

He cited one concern: "From a pedagogical perspective, because things are so recent, there really is no scholarly foundation to study them."

Associate professor Jonathan Harris said he and students in his "Introduction to World Politics" course have discussed alternative responses the United States could have taken to Sept. 11. A section on Middle Eastern politics, including the role of Osama bin Laden, already had been built into the course prior to the terrorist attacks.

Harris teaches the intro course on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. "Usually, Friday is death," he said. "But I found more students showing up and, generally speaking, showing more interest in the course. I don't sense that they were really having an emotional response. It was much more, 'What do we do about this?'"

In his "Russian Politics" course, Harris devoted one full day to discussing the anti-terror war. "But you can't really work it in too much as a subject in Russian politics," he said.

Carol Stabile, director of the women's studies program and an associate professor of communication, said non-credit events such as teach-ins offer helpful alternatives to classroom discussions of Sept. 11 and its aftermath.

"It's difficult to talk about this in a class when emotions are so raw," Stabile said. "I've had colleagues say, 'I just can't talk about this in the classroom.' There's no space to talk about it if you're anti-military, for example, which is currently an unpopular opinion."

To encourage a more inclusive dialogue, women's studies will sponsor a Nov. 13 discussion of "Women in the Current Crisis" as well as a teach-in in January.

"I think it's important to have get-togethers where there are more experts than just one teacher, where people can ask a whole range of questions and have experts there to respond," she said.

In her courses on media studies and feminist theory, Stabile teaches about media coverage of the war. "But my expertise is limited," she acknowledged. "I don't know much about the history of Afghanistan, or the history of fundamentalist movements, or the history of a particular region of the world. In a vigorous intellectual community, we need to protect the various positions, whether they are unpopular or not."

A number of Pitt units, including women's studies and GSPIA, have sponsored special forums, workshops and seminars about Sept. 11 and its aftermath. Perhaps the most serendipitous session involved a visit by John Frohnmayer, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to Pitt's Honors College. (Frohnmayer gained fame — or notoriety — when Sen. Jesse Helms blasted him for supporting a controversial exhibit by artist Robert Maplethorp.) On Sept. 11, Frohnmayer was scheduled to give an Honors College presentation on the First Amendment. "His talk ended up being canceled, and he was stranded here for four days because he couldn't get a flight out of Pittsburgh," said college Dean G. Alec Stewart. "Basically, he got adopted by the students in the Honors College residence hall. A bunch of them went shopping on Centre Avenue, came back with some chicken and cooked up a dinner" for themselves and Frohnmayer.

"They wound up having a four-day, continuing seminar and discussion on the implications of terrorism on the First Amendment," Stewart said.

'We don't, in fact, do Islam.'

The University of Pittsburgh is a world leader in international studies, with nationally designated centers devoted to scholarly research and teaching about Asia, Latin America, Russian and Eastern Europe, and Western Europe.

But Pitt is comparatively weak in Middle Eastern studies, courses on Islam and instruction in Arabic — shortcomings that became glaringly obvious in the wake of Sept. 11.

"It's something this center has been aware of for some time," said William Brustein, director of the University Center for International Studies (UCIS). "What these terrorist attacks have done is to put a fire underneath us to move quicker in strengthening our offerings on the Islamic world and world terrorism."

Like many other scholars, Brustein emphasizes that terrorism and religious fundamentalism are not limited to Muslims or the Middle East. "That's why our global studies program is ideally suited for these subjects," Brustein said. The new program focuses on issues that transcend cultures and continents.

Pitt's religious studies department has been without an Islamicist since its last expert on that faith retired three years ago, said department chairperson Ted Edwards.

"We don't, in fact, do Islam — there's a kind of passing reference to it, I believe, in one of our courses — and that's because the University has never made a large-scale commitment to the study of Islam in terms of supporting related courses in other departments such as foreign languages," he said.

"The University of Pittsburgh, in my perception, tries to emphasize certain things and lets others go to enhance its strengths, which is understandable. But as a result, we [religious studies] haven't pursued a position in Islam because we don't think we could keep a really first-rate scholar of Islam here.

"We've been aware of the gap in our offerings relative to Islam for quite some time, but we've decided to focus where our strengths already were: Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and Hinduism," Edwards said.

Last year the department tried, unsuccessfully, to recruit for its faculty an alumnus who teaches about Islam at Dickinson College, according to Alexander Orbach, the department's director of undergraduate studies.

"He told us he was quite happy at Dickinson, but we plan to make another concerted effort to recruit him," Orbach said.

Recent events have made the department acutely aware of the gap in its course offerings. "People call us all the time from the media and from local organizations, asking for someone to speak to them about Islam, and we just can't do it in a credible way," Orbach said.

This semester, 16 students are enrolled in the Arabic 1 course being taught by Hanan El-Halawany, an Egyptian native who is Pitt's only Arabic instructor. During the three years she has taught Arabic here, enrollments have ranged from 15-18 students in Arabic 1 to 2-5 students in Arabic 4, she said.

Dawn McCormick, interim director of Pitt's Less Commonly Taught Languages Center, said it's too early in the spring term registration period to tell if the demand for Arabic classes will increase at Pitt, as it has at other universities.

"We're scheduled to offer one section each of Arabic 2 and Arabic 4 in the spring. If the demand is there, we could add sections of Arabic 1 for next fall," McCormick said.

The Less Commonly Taught Languages Center (which also offers classes in Welsh, Hindi, Swahili, Vietnamese and other languages not taught through Pitt language departments) encourages students to request additional courses and sections. So far, students have not requested courses in Pashto (the principal vernacular language of Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan) or Parsee (an Iranian dialect), McCormick said.

'What I'm doing is right.'

Throughout the United States, officials have reported a surge of interest since Sept. 11 in Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs.

At Pitt, ROTC officers say they've likewise seen increased interest in their programs — but they attribute it more to improved marketing than to patriotism.

"I think we've been doing a better job of getting the word out to students and their parents about ROTC scholarship opportunities," said Lt. Gary Arasin, special assistant to the commander of Pitt's Department of Aerospace Studies (Air Force ROTC).

Lt. Col. John Richerson, a professor in the Department of Military Science (Army ROTC), said: "We're getting more inquiries, but my guess is that our enrollment is going to stay about where it would have been if Sept. 11 had never happened."

Currently, about 120 students are enrolled in Army ROTC and 86 in Air Force ROTC at Pitt.

Interest in ROTC often fades once students learn that training takes at least two years and that they must commit to active duty in the military upon graduation, Arisin and Richerson agreed.

They said Pitt cadets seem concerned but not apprehensive at the prospect of serving in a real war after they graduate. "These are all dedicated men and women who have chosen to pursue military careers," Richerson said. "If anything, the events of Sept. 11 reinforced their belief: 'What I'm doing is right. I'm willing to fight against this sort of [terrorist] threat.'"

'How do these recent events impact on our teaching and research, and the students we're turning out?'

School of Information Sciences (SIS) professor Richard Cox had mixed thoughts as he watched TV news coverage of the World Trade Center disaster.

"As I saw those images of records blowing all over lower Manhattan, I thought: Beyond the human tragedy issues, this is a huge case study in the issue of disaster preparedness and the recovery of records, archives and information systems," said Cox, an archival studies specialist.

"I began to think about how I might incorporate aspects of the terrorist attacks in my own teaching and research. Gradually, it dawned on me that so much of what we do in SIS has potential relevance for the post-Sept. 11 world."

Seeing an opportunity to focus SIS's diverse faculty on a subject of common interest, Cox convened lunch meetings of interested faculty members to discuss possible changes in the SIS curriculum in response to America's war on terrorism, and how the school might contribute to national debates about privacy, cyber-terrorism, data preservation and other information age issues.

The result is an "implications paper" that Cox hopes to submit next week for publication in an e-journal. The paper details 10 issues, including:

* Workplace design and location. Cox said, "There's a patriotic feeling, 'Let's rebuild the World Trade Center towers.' But we need to consider, do we really need to rebuild them? And if we do, what should they look like? Because technology has changed so much in the 30 years since those things were designed.

"Some of our faculty said: 'Of course they should be rebuilt.' Others said, 'No, this is an opportunity to consider different types of organizational facilities, such as people working from their homes in a networked environment, using telecommunications and video conferencing.'"

* The human dimension of technology. Before Sept. 11, many people saw cellular telephones as necessary evils at best, their distracted users causing car accidents and boring bystanders with details of their petty comings and goings.

"But on Sept. 11, thanks to people in the midst of terrorist events calling outside, cell phones provided documentation and a glimpse of what was happening on those planes that would not have been available to us with any other technology," Cox said.

"The Smithsonian and other institutions are trying to obtain and preserve tapes of those cell phone conversations, to document Sept. 11."

* Knowledge management. Cox noted, "Even organizations that had finely tuned and comprehensively backed up their information systems, mostly because the World Trade Center had been a terrorist target eight years before, lost virtually their entire professional staffs on Sept. 11. So, many of the people who were in place to understand these systems were gone.

"This brought to the fore the issue of knowledge management, which is another thing this school has been working on."

q Last month, Vice Provost for Research George Klinzing called a meeting of engineering faculty to brainstorm about how their research might be employed to counter terrorism.

"Civil engineers, for example, might be studying how to design buildings that would be more resistant to attacks," said Eric Beckman, the engineering school's associate dean, who attended the meeting. "[Professor] Alan Russell has been working for a while now on polymer sponges that indicate the presence of certain chemical nerve agents. Electrical engineering might look at better sensor detectors.

"But the question is, as in all research: Is there money for this? The answer right now is: No. Aside from the Army and Navy, there is no special agency looking at [anti-terrorist technology]," according to Beckman.

He said engineering faculty are waiting to see if agencies issue calls for research funding proposals (RFPs) that match the school's research expertise.

Beckman worries about Pitt faculty being seen as trying to take advantage of a national tragedy, in seeking external funding. SIS's Cox shares that concern.

"We're not trying to cash in or be opportunistic," Cox said. "We're mostly interesting in answering the question, How do these recent events impact on our teaching and research, and the students we're turning out? We need to equip them to deal with what, in the aftermath of Sept. 11, is essentially a new working environment."

–Bruce Steele & Peter Hart