Dr Tilley on a "School of Homeland Security": why its not a good one

 Dr Tilley presented this to the Board of Trustees meeting on December 13

From:     Professor Virginia Tilley, Department of Political Science

Re:           Proposal to create a School of Homeland Security

Note: the following comments are my own views and, although developed in consultation with other faculty, do not necessarily represent the views of anyone else at SIU.

Homeland security may seem like a good thing. No one here argues against the mission of keeping American citizens safe from terrorism or natural disasters. Then why are so many people at SIU not only opposed to this proposal but alarmed by it? The Political Science faculty voted unanimously to reject it. Our national organization, the American Political Science Association – which leans right on the political spectrum – wrote the Chancellor a special letter expressing worry about it. The whole campus is discussing it with concern.

We agree that a BA degree program in Homeland Security could be of value and we’d be glad to discuss this. But no other university in the country has done what the Chancellor proposes to do: that is, create a school and transfer whole departments into it, placing them all under its rubric. Blaming this on other universities’ being unimaginative, or stuck in nineteenth-century thinking, misses the real reasons this hasn’t been done..

I’ll touch briefly on just three of several reasons why.

1. First, while some SIU students may indeed want to major in Homeland Security, the Chancellor has provided no survey data indicating how many. In our early reports, we’ve found that our Political Science majors not only dislike the idea of being associated with a Homeland Security school but are upset about it. Particularly African American students, a growing and crucial constituency whom we are bound to serve, are scandalized because Homeland Security is associated in their perception – and their communities’ perception -- with policing and surveillance they do not trust. I’ve been alarmed to hear my students tell me that they would leave Political Science and even SIU if it created such a school. (By the way, contrary to the Chancellor’s suggestion on WSIU, there is no national accreditation program for Homeland Security degrees.)
2. Second, moving whole departments into a School of Homeland Security would suggest to our students that we are actually experts in this field. The faculties that are now supposed to join the School of Homeland Security mostly have no experience whatever in this subject. Placing unqualified faculty in charge of a degree program would manifest very badly to IBHE and would certainly fail our students, who rightly expect qualified teaching at SIU.

3. Third, the same misfit of training and expertise would damage SIU’s research networks, because the school faculty’s research would be viewed very differently by our research communities if it is perceived as having been designed to serve the Federal Government's Homeland Security agenda. I cannot overstate the seriousness of this factor for our faculty’s scholarly image on the national and international stages, a factor vital also to student recruitment, particularly graduate recruitment.

Based on these and other serious factors, I hope the Board will reconsider whether creating a School of Homeland Security is in the best interests of SIU. We do have alternative proposals that we consider exciting and would be glad to share.

Thank you.