Standing room only

Only about 50 colleges and universities nationwide have truly comprehensive Middle East studies programs, says Anne Betteridge, executive director of the Middle East Studies Association of North America at the University of Arizona.

She says colleges may soon find themselves in salary battles to lure the best of the long-ignored Middle East faculty.

"On all the campuses I'm aware of, experts on Islam or Mideast studies are holding pubic forums and giving extra lectures," Dr. Betteridge says. "I think we'll see enrollments up in these areas next semester."

In contrast, Islamic studies, though still small overall, has grown enormously in the past decade. It will get a boost of student interest because of the recent tragedy, says Wake Forest's Kimball. His "Intro to Islam" class next semester would normally be limited to 25 students, but will be open to 75. "I think we'll get them - easily," he says.

Perhaps the most neglected of all the disciplines seeing heightened student interest is terrorism studies. Using the term "studies" may even be a misnomer because so few universities offer classes on terrorism.

Perhaps two-dozen institutions offer such classes, says Yonah Alexander, who heads the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va. Not pursuing terrorism as a legitimate field of study has been a tragic, short-sighted mistake, he says.

Duke University historian Martin Miller agrees. "I teach about the historical roots of terrorism," he says. "But I couldn't name one other historian in the United States today that's doing this. It's appalling."

Funds are flowing to schools that offer practical counterterrorism training, however. Louisiana State University's academy of counterterrorist education, developed in 1998, expects an increase in federal funding to train firefighters, police, and paramedics to respond to terrorism. About 30 of its graduates were lost Sept. 11. LSU is part of the National Domestic Preparedness consortium, a group of five universities with counterterrorism programs funded by the federal government.

The University of South Florida was awarded $4 million last week by the Department of Defense to fund its center for biological defense.

Yet terrorism's causes and structures have to be analyzed from an intellectual as well as a tactical standpoint, Dr. Alexander argues. For decades, he lectured and gave seminars on campuses across the country with only modest gains for the discipline. Now, he is getting e-mails from a few institutions wanting to know how to start programs.

"People were blind," he says. "They treated terrorism like a nuisance that will go away. Now, after all these years, we needed this terrible tragedy to wake us up. While we in academia slept, the terrorists were planning their next attack. We didn't study this according to our intellectual traditions."

William Moomaw, a professor of international environmental policy at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, says his graduate classes will examine in more detail "environmental security" - patterns of resources and environmental degradation visible from satellites that can be used as potential signs of where political instability, future conflicts, sources of refugees, and terrorism could develop.

"Universities all have been slow on the uptake," Dr. Moomaw agrees. "But this time, I anticipate new courses, one or two by next semester."

At Northeastern University in Boston last week, Irm Haleem polled students in her introductory course on international affairs. Did they want to continue the course's general focus or zero in on terrorism? Terrorism study was voted in by a landslide.

All of which gives Alexander hope - along with a flood of e-mails from one-time students now asking him, "What can we do?" One undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin wrote that she plans to do antiterrorism studies full time. Because of what happened Sept. 11, she wrote, "Now I know my goal."

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