University loses bid for Homeland Security grant

The University lost out yesterday on the chance to receive part of a $12 million grant from the Department of Homeland Security to study the economic risks associated with terrorist threats and events.

Professors at the University's Bendheim Center for Finance added proposals to a consortia application led by the University of Pennsylvania.

DHS visited Penn recently in a final review process but announced yesterday that the University of Southern California would receive the $12 million over three years.

The DHS grant is one of a growing number of initiatives in higher education that aim to grapple with terrorism. Universities around the country, including Princeton, have been part of this effort — with varying degrees of success.

The USC site, named the first Homeland Security Center of Excellence by the grant, will consider both the targets and means of terrorism and examine how best to protect electrical, transportation and telecommunications systems.

The University professor of civil and environmental engineering who led a group of about 10 faculty members associated with the Bendheim Center yesterday charged that political motivations ultimately got USC the final nod after tough competition.

"It was made — quite frankly — on possibly political grounds. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger's state," said Professor Erik VanMarcke. "The president and the administration want to reward and favor California."

USC had backing among influential congressmen. U.S. Rep. Christopher Cox, a Republican from California, chairs the House Homeland Security Committee.

Seventy consortia of universities applied for the grant, VanMarcke said, and the Penn group made it to the last round of four consortia to receive visits by DHS officials.

Since all four of the final groups had the technical and scientific background to do the research, he said, "the decision gets made on possibly other grounds."

"It was tough competition," he added. "That's the way it goes nowadays. There's relatively limited research funding."

Columbia University, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon were also part of the Penn consortia, meaning that each of the five schools would have received around $800,000 per year if their grant proposal had been successful.

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The University also applied for a grant with a consortia led by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

DHS officials yesterday praised USC.

"We are confident that the cooperative efforts of the first Homeland Security Center of Excellence will greatly enhance our ability to combat terrorism by empowering the best scientific minds at our nation's universities to tackle the challenges we face," said Charles McQueary, DHS's under secretary for science and technology.

Despite yesterday's setback, the University may still get significant amounts of funding through a N.J. referendum slated for November 2004 that will issue bonds to pay for job-producing research at universities.

The bonds will raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and some limited portion of those funds will be available for homeland security research at New Jersey universities.

Prosperity New Jersey, a group of university, government and business officials, is organizing the bond proposal. President Tilghman is one of the chairs of Prosperity New Jersey.

Already this year, University received a $149,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to study biological and nuclear weapons, bringing the total of grants received by the Wilson School's Program in Science and Global Security to over $2 million this year.

"The government is giving billions of dollars into research and development to protect the country against biological attack," Frank von Hippel, co-director of PSGS, told The Daily Princetonian in September.

In addition, Wilson School Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 is working with the Ford Foundation to create a new research office at the University to study the "post-post cold war" world.

The expansive new research comes on top of increased classroom focus on terrorism.

This term, for example, Wilson School lecturer Frederick Hitz '61, a former inspector general of the CIA, is teaching WWS 488: Terrorism and the Role of Intelligence.

He has updated the course from previous years, now not only focusing on intelligence efforts during the cold war.

Next term, there are courses on cyber security, defense politics and biological and chemical weapons, among other topics.

These courses notwithstanding, some experts believe it will be hard for universities to effectively study the causes of terrorism, in part because of the resistance they might encounter from the government.

There are around 660 suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay that academics would like to interview to research terrorist backgrounds. Gaining access to them for research will be tough.

"I think the government, at this point, doesn't have the will to collect those data," said Jessica Stern, whose book, "The Ultimate Terrorists," was one of the first formal studies of terrorism, in an October interview with the 'Prince.'

"They're fighting fires. They're trying to prevent the next terrorism attack, and they're not availing themselves to this goldmine of information," she said.

Without that kind of information, she added, it will be hard to assess the causes of terrorism.

"The topic seems very important," she said. "But the tools of political science don't get you very far [in studying terrorism] . . . It's not something a criminologist can assess with their tools."