When he arrived to teach his first class on "Global Conflict" last week, Mark Juergensmeyer found himself stepping around students who were spilling onto the stairs and stage of his lecture hall - while other hopefuls waited in a line snaking out the door.

It was the sort of raging popularity that professors yearn for. But it was the Sept. 11 terrorist disaster that drew 550 students to the 220-seat hall. "I've never seen this kind of student interest before," says Dr. Juergensmeyer, a sociologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. "I thought there might be a rise in enrollment. I had no idea how much. You could hear a pin drop."

Early signs of the impact the attacks have had on colleges and universities include professors adapting courses on the fly and student stampedes to relevant courses. As students try to make sense of the tragedy, they are targeting any class that might offer insights - including long-ignored Arabic-language courses, Islamic-religion classes, and Middle Eastern and terrorism studies.

At Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., some students were reportedly shuffling classes during the September "shopping period," angling to get into small seminar-size classes with names like "Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East" and "The Future of War."

At other schools, where course selections were already locked in, students are trying to audit such classes, and showing up by the hundreds for open-forum discussions with faculty specialists.

Juergensmeyer likens the phenomenon to Vietnam era teach-ins, "when students showed up just because they wanted to learn." At his Santa Barbara campus, special symposiums are popping up on "Islam and the politics of terror" or "Roots of Islamic militancy."

Likewise, at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., 700 students showed up last week for an informal evening forum discussing Islam and Pakistan. "I definitely see and feel something very different than I've ever experienced before on campus," says Charles Kimball, an Islamic scholar at Wake Forest.

Just how sustained such interest will be is uncertain. A surge of interest in Middle Eastern studies mostly fizzled after the Gulf War. But Dr. Kimball and others who have labored in these niche disciplines for years sense a longer-term shift this time.

"We've moved to a different level," he says. "This attack was on American soil, and my guess is there will be a lot more interest for years [in Middle East and Islamic studies] on campuses. People are really trying to make sense of a whole variety of images coming at them."

Back at UC Santa Barbara, about 300 students managed to squeeze into Juergensmeyer's lecture, but he was still forced to turn away 250 students - including Megan Marron. But she hasn't yet given up trying to get in.

"This class means a lot to me because my cousin lost a close friend ... and I have been trying to comfort her," Ms. Marron wrote in an e-mail to Juergensmeyer. "I have such an eagerness to learn about the ins and outs of this war and why so many innocent people have to die."

Such emotion and intellectual hunger are part of a larger pattern on the campus. Dwight Reynolds, director of the Center for Middle East Studies there, reports a 20 to 25 percent increase in Arabic-language course enrollments. Religion professor Juan Campo, a specialist in Islamic studies, says his "Islamic Traditions" class doubled from 25 students - the normal limit - to an overflow 50 students last week.

Still, it's difficult to gauge whether career-minded students will have a long-term interest.

The Princeton Review website tells would-be Middle Eastern studies majors that they can expect to earn about $24,000 a year as an anthropologist, antique dealer, or archaeologist.

But demand in the intelligence and diplomatic communities seems likely to drive wages up. The FBI is reportedly paying about $40 an hour to translators. And one observer says the US intelligence agencies probably pay $40,000 to $60,000 or more for top language specialists.

Serious students clamoring for Middle East majors nonetheless may have their work cut out for them finding classes to take. On the Princeton Review site, more than 1,100 schools list Middle East programs. But just 55 institutions also offer Middle Eastern languages and literature.

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