New, existing classes focus on 9/11 issues

In attempting to answer the tough questions raised by Sept. 11, students are now turning to new and existing courses that deal with terrorism and Middle Eastern relations.

Enrollment in both NES 240: The United States and the Middle East and NES 338: The Arab-Israeli Conflict — both originally one-time courses that are now being offered a second time — has increased significantly from last year, according to professor Michael Doran, who teaches both.

The courses, like the Middle Eastern conflict, however, are not new. "[NES 240] looks at the complexity and the difficulty of United States-Middle Eastern relations in the context of the historical crisis," Doran said, but added that the course's content has not been changed. In fact students discussed Osama bin Laden in the course last year.

Even without changing the syllabus, students found the course very relevant to today's situation.

Ingrid Fetell '02 said she would not have signed up for NES 240 had the events of Sept. 11 never transpired. "Given Sept. 11 and the war on terrorism, I felt that I should know more," she said. Fetell said she hopes to learn what role the United States had in triggering the attack and to gain an understanding of the conflict beyond the notion that terrorists are simply "evil."

One new Wilson School course will be addressing the attack directly. WWS 594H: Counter-terorism and Foreign Policy after 9/11/01, taught by visiting lecturer Michael O'Hanlon '82, "couldn't be much more relevant, especially for a Woodrow Wilson School curriculum," O'Hanlon said. "It's a fantastic opportunity to teach this," he added, because along with the students, he too will have an opportunity to learn about the subject.

But O'Hanlon is not new to foreign policy. He is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and working on a book on homeland security. "For me, it's as close to my job as anything one could imagine."

O'Hanlon's course lasts just half of the semester. The other half is filled by Robert Hutchings' course WWS 594E: The Atlantic Partnership.

Although WWS 594E was conceived by first-year Wilson School MPA students last spring, "When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 came up it gave a new kind of twist to these considerations," Hutchings said.

"NATO and the patterns of United States-European relations have been almost on automatic pilot since the end of the Cold War," he said. "But now this really brings home the core questions in light of the new kind of threats to American security."

Wilson School major Ryan Salvatore '02 is a student in HIS 380: The United States and World Affairs, in which an assigned book was replaced with another more closely related to the current Middle East crises. Salvatore said HIS 380 professor Paul Miles "likes to look at an international area that sometimes gets a little less attention than perhaps it should."

"Especially as it's something that comes every day in the newspaper, by e-mail, on TV, it's occupying so much of the press, it would be helpful to have some sort of background," said Salvatore.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Humanties courses have also been affected by last year's attack. Karen Beckman was ready to teach a new course this semester, ENG 401: Forms of Literature "Imagining Terrorism," but the course was cancelled because of a lack of interest, Beckman said. Beckman, very dissapointed, attributed the lack of interest to its scheduling — Friday morning.

"We were aiming to look at the way in which terrorism and the figure of the terrorist has been represented," Beckman said. The course, she added, actually came out of her own work on the subject, which started well before last September.

Beckman said she thinks some are suspicious of comparing Sept. 11 to an analysis of fiction. "In the context of 9/11, that might be to trivialze the question, whereas I think it is very important how we imagine terrorists as we figure out what we do with real terrorists," she said.

Comparative Literature Professor David Bellos agreed. "It is not trivializing it at all to look back and see how terrorism was imagined, how it was described, how it was coped with," he said. "It remains the case that people have been thinking and imagining the grounds for and the psychology of terrorists since roughly the 1860's when the phenomenon first arose."

As early as last semester Bellos changed the reading list of his Fall course COM 141: Modern European Writers to incorporate that line of thought. "The debate over whether the terrorist is a psychological type or the product of a particular polticial situation or a specific ideology of political action are issues that have been debated . . . And I think it's important to realize these topical debates aren't new," he said.

He added, "We can learn a lot from seeing how Conrad, for example, imagined the psychology of revolutionaries."

Another new course, ARC 497: Sign, Image and Representation in Architecture after 9/11, takes a different approach to examining the tragedy.

The University's curriculum will continue to incorporate responses to Sept. 11 through next year. In the fall, Doran will likely co-teach a new course, "The Historical Roots of the bin Laden Phenomenon," he said.

O'Hanlon said he hopes the Wilson School will continue to offer courses focused on narrower topics, especially full-length courses, such as one on military analysis.

"There's going to be a noticble shift in the curriculum of a number of courses," Associate Dean of the College Howard Dobin said. "We're all sitting tight to find out how much our world changed on a permanent basis," he said.