Well before the recently foiled U.K. plot to blow up numerous U.S.-bound passenger jets on their way across the Atlantic, security-studies specialist Anthony Glees tried to warn the British public about the dangers of Islamism on British campuses. As quoted in 2004 by the Guardian, Glees prophesied that “[t]he extent to which radical Islamic ideas are brewing in UK universities will ‘come as shock’ [sic] to people in years to come.”

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In 2006, the Sunday Telegraph wrote that the recruitment of Muslim students at British universities to participate in terrorist acts was a crucial element of the scheme to destroy the airliners. Several of the 23 persons held in custody in the wake of the plot were described by the security services as having ties to universities.

A case in point: In investigating the involvement of a London Metropolitan University student suspected of ties to the alleged attacks, the Telegraph discovered materials in two LMU buildings advocating jihad and instructing how to finesse interactions with the security services. The student, Waheed Zaman, was studying for a biochemistry degree at the university and was president of its Islamic Society, an organization in part funded by the university. Cassette tapes produced by Al-Muhajiroun, an organization founded by militant cleric Omar Bakri Mohammed, and which celebrated the 9/11 terrorists as the “Magnificent 19,” were also found in university facilities used as a prayer room and library.

Al-Muhajiroun and its affiliate, the radical Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which preaches the establishment of a worldwide government ruled by Islamic law, were banned in Britain in 2004. However, citing terrorism expert David Capitanchik, the New York Times notes that both organizations operate covertly in British universities and mosques through a changing succession of front groups with seemingly innocent names, such as the Debate Society and the Muslim Women’s Cultural Forum.

British students with terror connections often have records of attending terrorist training camps abroad. The Telegraph reported that several of those arrested in the plot to bomb the airliners were suspected of attending such camps in Pakistan to learn how to use explosives as well as to have prepared “martyrdom messages” to be employed as al Qaeda propaganda. (Two of the four dead Islamists who carried out the London transit attacks on July 7, 2005, also trained in Pakistan, and two of them were former students at Leeds Metropolitan University.)

In a 2005 study published by the U.K. Social Affairs Unit, “When Students Turn to Terror: Terrorist and Extremist Activity on British Campuses,” intelligence and security authority Anthony Glees identifies 27 colleges and universities where terror and/or extremist groups (mostly Islamist) were detected over the 15-year period he examined. He stresses that terrorist groups typically aim to recruit better-educated persons and that the recruits have usually been educated in the West and have a professional background. Glees also meticulously documents numerous cases that demonstrate how individuals, both British nationals and foreigners, have matriculated at British campuses and then gone on to commit terrorist acts or become enmeshed in global jihadism. A number of the persons he tracks specifically characterize their higher education time as the period when they had contact with militant organizations and gained “access to extreme terror-justifying ideas,” thus reaching a “tipping point,” that is, moving from being religiously devout to being thoroughly radicalized and violent.

To grasp the magnitude of this problem of weeding out terrorist suspects not only on campuses but also throughout Britain, one need only consider the sobering comment of Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard’s antiterrorism branch, to the effect that “the number of people who we have to be interested in are into the thousands.” Speaking to the BBC, and quoted by Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, Clarke concludes that, while there may be numerous reasons why British terrorists turned to terror, one important fact about them is that many of them spent time at a British university. It is one red line that links a significant number of them to each other. He mentions other red lines — jihadist beliefs, attendance at radical mosques, even work-outs at specific gyms — but stresses that “the university dimension is without a doubt a key one.”

U.S. Campuses/Terrorism Connections
In the United States there are a number of similar reports that, to varying degrees, link foreign and “home-grown” students and professors to terrorism and/or terror-related activities. However, in a striking omission, there appears to be no study of American cases that, comparable to Glees’s, systematically tracks the process by which denizens of our campuses become involved in terrorist atrocities or become jihadists — and tells us where the tipping point into terrorist activity is most likely to occur.

As in Britain, so also in the U.S. it is all too plausible that there will be more, and more deadly, such events, with varying degrees of connection to American colleges and universities. It is plausible that they too are similarly infiltrated and may spawn a rash of dangerous terrorist cells.

Numerous terror-associated events on U.S. campuses should serve as a solemn alert:

Terrorism Focus has described details of the life of Syed “Fahad” Hashmi, an American citizen of Pakistani descent who held a student visa, and who in 2006 was arrested in London for his alleged role in aiding an al Qaeda plot to bomb targets in London as well as moving funds and military gear to terrorist camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Hashmi was raised in Queens, N.Y., and attended both Stony Brook University on Long Island and Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a degree in political science. He is known to be linked to the Queens-based Islamic Thinkers Society, one of the radical successor groups to the British-banned but Hydra-like Al-Muhajiroun. After 9/11, Hashmi invited a member of Al-Muhajiroun to speak at Brooklyn College, an inflammatory event that caused controversy. According to the New York Post, the Islamic Thinkers Society uses hateful extremist tactics and is thought to recruit second-generation Muslim immigrants to fight America. The Post notes too that Hashmi is an admirer of John Walker Lindh, the convicted young American Taliban fighter.

Hashmi is described as having an associate, believed to be Mohammed Junaid Babar, another U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, who had studied at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., and who pled guilty in 2004 to terror offenses in the U.S. The BBC reported that Babar was influenced by radical preachers such as the aforementioned Omar Bakri Mohammed, founder of Al-Muhajiroun.

Several of the 9/11 hijackers learned to fly on American campuses, such as Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, and as the Education Guardian reports, one of them, Hani Hanjour, entered the U.S. on a student visa. As Daniel Pipes points out, Hanjour (like Hashmi and Babar) seems to have had ties to Al-Muhajiroun.

In 2006, at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, an Iranian immigrant and newly graduated student named Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar ran his sport utility vehicle into a pedestrian zone filled with his fellow students, injuring nine of them. Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, notes that Taheri-azar admitted planning his eye-for-an-eye jihad for two years while attending the university. Pipes writes, “It’s not hard to imagine how his ideas developed, given the coherence of Islamist ideology, its immense reach (including a Muslim Student Association at UNC), and its resonance among many Muslims.”

Georgia Tech student Syed Ahmed and a friend, both U.S. citizens, were indicted in 2006 for allegedly filming potential targets in Washington, including the Capitol. The New York Post reports that the two had earlier undergone paramilitary training, including exercises with paintball guns, and had traveled to Pakistan to study with an Islamic extremist group. In his article “Osama U.” in The American Spectator, Christopher Orlet observes that Ahmed was majoring in mechanical engineering at Georgia Tech and that “the sheer numbers of Muslims studying in engineering departments [throughout the West] provide excellent recruitment opportunities for jihadists.” Citing authors Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in The Next Attack, Orlet claims that almost all al Qaeda’s top leaders have engineering backgrounds from Western schools.

In 2003, seven men of Yemeni descent who grew up in Lackawanna, N.Y., were charged with (and six later convicted of) providing material support to al Qaeda. All allegedly traveled to a training camp in Afghanistan. As reported on Frontline, three of the students were educated at local colleges.

Most notoriously on the professorial front, and as the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism notes, the University of South Florida in 2001 fired computer science professor Sami Al-Arian. He had been making extremist public statements(such as “Victory to Islam. Death to Israel”) without noting they were his own views and not representative of the University, which violated his contract. Al-Arian was later charged with using a university think tank for funding terrorist groups in Israel and the territories under its control. He had co-founded the think tank with another USF professor, Abdallah Shallah, whom the U.S. later designated as a terrorist. Al-Arian pled guilty in 2006 to engaging in a conspiracy to provide services to a designated terrorist organization during his years of service at the university.

Ali al-Timimi, a Pakistani-born U.S. citizen and Islamic scholar with a PhD from George Mason University, has been described as enjoying “rock star” status among a group of young Muslim men in north Virginia — a group of young men who would play paintball games by way of training for jihad. Shortly after 9/11, according to the Associated Press, al-Timimi urged his followers to join the Taliban and fight American troops; subsequently he was convicted for inciting people to war against the U.S. and to use firearms illegally. Some of his followers traveled to Pakistan to train with a militant group. Three of them testified that, as a result of al-Timimi’s inspiration, their intent (which was never realized) had been to use the training to fight in Afghanistan.

Clearly — and this is hardly a new phenomenon or one of which Islamists alone are guilty — on American campuses there are terrorist groups and individuals, as well as groups and individuals sympathetic to terrorism, intent on exploiting and subverting the principles of academic freedom and tolerance upon which our higher education institutions are founded. It is also clear that some of these radicals have already engaged in, or otherwise had connections to, terrorism. Although we do not know how extensively, our campuses are in fact entangled in the transnational extremist-terrorist web, precisely because of their open and liberal character. The university is fertile ground for such entanglement.

As unpalatable as it may be, the American academy and public must urgently consider what steps can be taken to make our campuses more secure while ensuring that they remain free.

Proposed Solutions to the University/Terrorism Nexus
A debate akin to the one raging in Britain about how to secure campuses against terrorism (initiated largely by Anthony Glees) is long overdue in this country. In “When Students Turn to Terror,” he calls for

a mix of serious security measures, including pro-active ones, and innovatory teaching and pastoral measures ... to enable universities and colleges to divert young radicals from extremism and terror into legal and acceptable modes of political expression.

Glees puts forth specific issues and policy recommendations that could serve as the starting point for a similar discussion in this country. Among them, interspersed with my own comments and suggestions, are the following:

Admissions procedures that fail to vet or poorly vet foreign students can give potential terrorists access to knowledge about cutting-edge weaponry, from nuclear-reactor technology to bomb-making with chemical fertilizer to information technology — all of which are available on British campuses. The American public, too, needs assurance that screening practices exist on campuses which will ensure that dangerous students and professors are excluded from U.S. campuses. How many campus individuals like Sami Al-Arian are currently being funded by the generous American taxpayer? What direct links are there between campus admissions officers and the governmental authorities who are responsible for our security, including immigration officers at ports of entry? In 2005, U.K. Home Secretary Charles Clarke pledged, regarding in part his government’s ban of the extremist Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun: “A full database of individuals around the world who have demonstrated the relevant behaviors will be developed, and will be available to entry clearance and immigration officers.” John Miller, assistant director of the F.B.I., writing in the New York Times, points out that since 9/11 the agency has created a database, called the “Investigative Data Warehouse,” that can search 700 million records from more than a dozen agencies. Does such a database systematically inform admissions decisions on American campuses? Should the “relevant behaviors” of which Clarke speaks include information on where students have traveled? Are there set procedures by which American security authorities inform campuses of suspect persons? Is every applicant to our universities, from inside the country or foreign lands, being required to provide proof of identity? Is there any process on U.S. campuses comparable to what in Britain is called “clearing,” which means: admission by weaker universities of applicants without hard evidence of identity, permanent address, and academic achievement, as well as without character references (a process used to attract sufficient students so as to stay in business)? If so, it must be eliminated.

Detection of potentially dangerous students (and professors) must extend beyond the admissions process — not a simple matter in an era of widespread student transfer from one campus to another. Accurate student records based on hard proof of identity should be maintained. Lists of all student organizations should be established, along with procedures for monitoring in questionable cases of membership, goals, and activities. Trusted faculty members should be included in student organizational committees, and non-extremist student groups (often the least nurtured on campuses) should be strengthened. At a time when students are being recruited to attend terrorist training camps, it is not unreasonable to track where students travel.

There is a need for a greater focus on whether the content of courses presently being offered on campuses are, in Glees’s phrase, “conducive to a culture of security.” The professoriate itself should review courses seeming to exalt violent activities or revolution. The academy should be encouraged to find ways to promote more actively liberal democratic objectives and knowledge of the duties of citizenship for all students, in order to integrate them into the American way of life. The campus needs to be reestablished as a community founded on trust and common values, regardless of race, gender, or religion. To achieve these ends, as U.S. higher-education reformers increasingly advocate, the current monopolistic and politicized faculty hiring practices on campuses must cease. If faculties fail in such ways to foster a higher-education “culture of security,” then campus governing boards must lead the way toward this cultural change.

Glees is somewhat vague about what he means by “pastoral” solutions to countering campus terrorism. However, he notes generally “that jihadists are more than simple criminals, they believe in something … their religion also seems to matter to them.” Presumably he would agree that academics, as well as moderate Muslim clerics, must teach the truth about, and counsel students against, Islamic fundamentalism and jihad. What is needed, says Middle East commentator Youssef Ibrahim in “The West Needs To Fight Islamofascists With Big Ideas,” is

a yardstick to define the dismantling of the infrastructure and software of terror at home – in mosques [and] in schools…the restructuring of religious teachings…the last vestiges of tolerance toward Islamic fundamentalism must be removed.

Glees stresses that “[t]he police and security agencies have more than once identified universities as a key area to help defeat terrorism [italics mine].” In word and deed educators as well as students should proactively support the law enforcement officials charged with protecting us from terrorists. Glees maintains that “[a] close relationship with police is key to the success of university security departments.” Is there such a rapport on U.S. campuses? British security forces believe that academics can provide assistance to the police by monitoring students and alerting the authorities to suspect behavior. Glees cites one security source as noting that since 2001 some faculty members have been responding to requests by authorities to identify problems, in one case resulting in the denial of entry to a student who turned out to be a member of al Qaeda. In 2001, the Education Guardian reported cooperation by the leadership of student unions in thwarting student recruitment by the militant Al-Mujahiroun. The question arises whether such assistance should remain completely voluntary or whether academics and students should be required to alert the authorities to suspicious activity.

Our universities should further be encouraged to serve as a primary venue for debate on security issues. They should lead the way in the discussion of the need for new laws in our democracies that strike a balance between civil liberties and national security. Former Secretary of Defense Richard Perle reminds us that the distinction between criminal activity and protected speech, so basic to our individual liberty, has been defined by the notion of a “clear and present” danger. He adds:

But combating Islamist extremism may require rethinking the idea of imminence in judging the dangers, and the appropriate response to them, of the insidious process leading ultimately to acts of mass murders. It is the act of recruitment into the swamp of a world divided into believers and infidels that may well be the more appropriate line dividing acceptable from unacceptable advocacy.

Obstacles to Countering University-Related Terrorism
Like their British counterparts, so also many within the U.S. higher-education establishment will not readily entertain such suggestions for enhancing campus security. Indeed, after the publication of “When Students Turn to Terror,” Glees reports that he was subjected to a “furious” campaign of harassment and intimidation, and that his work to expose terror on campuses was compared to “witch trials” and described as “hysterical” and “excitable self-promoting.”

What are the causes of such reticence and even active resistance by so many in higher education to measures designed to thwart campus-related terrorism?

The contemporary campus, permeated as it is with multicultural education as a substitute for education in liberal principles, is fecund ground for extremism of various kinds — the most threatening of which is Muslim extremism and the very real prospect of the metastasis of Islamist terror cells. The sense of alienation experienced by some young radicals can only intensify when it comes into contact with higher education’s obsession with narrow racial, ethnic, and sexual identity, its enshrinement of group identity-derived “self-esteem,” and its fostering of a sense of grievance in the face of unequal social or material outcomes. David French highlights the plenitude on campuses of those “who despise western civilization” and the fact that “universities are often hotbeds of opposition to even the most basic law enforcement measures.” Moreover, the multicultural university is likely to recoil from the forthright examination of Islam, and from fully recognizing the threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, out of the belief that to do so would be equivalent to maligning Muslims as a group.Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the outspoken critic of Islamism and Islam itself, calls this “confusion of Islam, which is a body of ideas, with ethnicity,” a “lethal mistake.” Stephens’s comment on this confusion applies especially to campus multiculturalists: “Liberals especially are reluctant to criticize the content of Islam because they fear that it is tantamount to criticizing Muslims as a group, and is therefore a species of racism.”

The tightening of security on campuses runs up against the reigning academic Zeitgeist, based frequently as it is on a self-indulgent and permissive interpretation of academic freedom, a freedom void of a sense of corresponding duties and accountability. In tones reminiscent of the current American debate on campus speech (and unaccountability), Glees scathingly defines the underlying motives of this “laissez-faire attitude”:

In the interests of maintaining…ill-defined concepts of free speech (ill-defined, because for many years speech has definitely not been free in Britain) and of sustaining apparently liberal attitudes to political events on campuses, many universities are plainly loathe to interfere with what their students do out of the class room. Cynics might add: they increasingly avoid interfering with what their students do in class room.

A similar response is unfortunately all too likely in the U.S. The legions of radical professors and students whom they have influenced — consider David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America — can hardly be expected to spearhead the needed security measures. These often anti-Western academics, and the administrators and trustees who truckle to them, have to date signaled disinterest in the question of the degree to which the danger before us is linked to, and must be dealt with in, our universities.

Financial incentives impede the security agenda. With some modest exceptions, and despite much ballyhoo about “performance-based funding,” most public moneys for higher education continue to be allocated on the basis of “seats filled” (students served) as opposed to “minds filled” (success in student learning). The race to fill seats, and thus university coffers, with ever more students, including perhaps poorly vetted foreign students, proceeds apace. To solve this problem would require campus administrators to screen foreign and American applicants much more carefully — and reject and discourage the admittance of some of them. Such a process is likely to have to be imposed on campuses

Most university education is of such massive scale that professors (and their myriad teaching assistants) get to know few of their students in any depth. This situation, although not entirely the making of higher educators, adds to the difficulty of screening out potentially dangerous students. (Indeed, in recent times US. academicians have resisted similar efforts to screen faculty for past criminal offenses.)

These factors militate against the institution by higher educators themselves of better processes for detecting extremism and terrorism in colleges and universities. Yet such changes must be made, even if doing so requires imposing them on these sanctuaries from without.

Some such defensive program must take hold in higher education, before more of us perish at the hands of terrorists who take advantage of our campuses and other free institutions. Given the evidence of terrorist and terrorism-related activities on British, American, and other Western campuses — and especially the growing threat of the use of weapons of mass destruction within our midst — it is hardly draconian to urge the careful consideration and adoption of means for creating a higher education culture of security.

— Candace de Russy, a Hudson Institute fellow and SUNY trustee, writes on educational and cultural issues.