Drawn Out From the Shell -- Castagnera Says Terrorism has Sharpened Academic Focus on Campuses
Ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States by the radical Islamic group al-Qaeda, many Americans feel what they claim is the pinch of bolstered security laws and procedures. The Patriot Act, signed into law by President George W. Bush less than two months after the attacks, continues to be a controversial and oft-debated piece of legislation. Giving law enforcement agencies the authority to search telephone, e-mail communications, medical, financial and other records, the Patriot Act is just one of a number of adaptations American citizens adjusted to since the most deadly homefront security breach in American history.
What has been the net effect, however, of the last decade’s worth of terror incidents on the campuses of American colleges and universities? A trip to Israel got James Ottavio Castagnera thinking about it, and it became a topic he explores in his forthcoming book, Al-Qaeda Goes to College, due to be published by Greenwood Press in Spring 2009.
Castagnera, the associate provost and associate counsel for Academic Affairs at Rider University, says that although the terrorist episodes of the past decade, particularly those of September 11, were a heinous and tragic affront to humanity, their aftereffect on campuses across America seems actually to be an increase in the level of academic freedom and the ability of scholars to explore the issue of terror. “Strictly in an academic sense, the war on terror has had a stimulating effect on higher education,” said Castagnera. “What has happened in the Middle East, and with September 11, has really reinvigorated many academic programs in certain ways.”
In spite of the title, Al-Qaeda Goes to College, Castagnera says the book’s scope extends far beyond the 9/11 attacks to take an extensive look at a phenomenon he calls “campus crazies,” people who have single-handedly wrought havoc at institutions over the years. In particular, he mentions people like Charles Whitman, who killed 14 people and wounded 31 others in a shooting rampage from atop a 32-story administrative building at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966, and Seung-Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Tech who shot 32 people to death on the Blacksburg campus in 2007 before turning his gun on himself. Both cases were instructive, Castagnera says, in terms of learning how to identify potentially dangerous students.
“I don’t think there is any doubt that we have safer campuses today because of some of the things that have occurred,” he explained. “We have begun to pay more attention to troubled students – and they are out there. There is a better support system in place now to help them function.” Cho had been under previous treatment for a severe anxiety disorder, and an autopsy performed on Whitman – one he specifically requested in his suicide note – revealed the presence of a deadly brain tumor, the symptoms of which he had complained about to the University of Texas Health Center.
In 2007, Castagnera was selected to travel to Israel on an academic fellowship on terrorism, sponsored by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies for 10 days to study the Middle Eastern nation’s approach to defense. There, he investigated Israeli military bases, prisons, and the situation on the country’s politically charged West Bank, the site of near constant Israeli-Palestinian hostility.
“It really sparked my interest in the impact of terror in the United States, particularly on our college campuses,” Castagnera said. What he found was interesting. “After the Cold War ended, many graduate programs in security studies dried up, but after 9/11, funding for these kinds of programs came flooding in.”
Demand for graduates who had training in the Arabic language, and social scientists who had studied anthropology were suddenly in extremely high demand, fueling the need for additional sections – and the requisite funding – on campuses from coast to coast. The money found its way to campus, sometimes from unlikely sources.
“Perhaps in a somewhat penitential way, given that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals,” Castagnera said, “the Saudi Arabian government has contributed significant sums of money to universities like Georgetown to establish programs in Islamic studies.”
The concept of academic freedom has been scrutinized in the post-9/11 era as well, with the spotlight trained closely on the case of Ward Churchill, a former professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado who was ultimately fired from the institution after publishing an essay sympathetic to al-Qaeda within 24 hours of the attacks that killed 2,974 people. Churchill celebrated what he believed to be richly deserved deaths of those employees inside the World Trace Center, those he disparaged as “the technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire – the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved.”
Though Churchill ultimately lost his job, Castagnera insists that he was not a victim of his ideology, but rather, structural flaws in the foundation of his scholarship. “Regardless of the public relations spectacle, there was extensive due process regarding Churchill’s employment at CU,” he said. “It was a long and tedious process whereby he was researched by multiple groups of his peers and colleagues, and at the end, they turned up too many holes in his scholarship.”
While the Churchill issue was a hot-button topic in academia, the side effect of it and the United States’ War on Terror was a heightened and enlivened interest in public affairs. “All of this helped reinvigorate debate on college campuses,” Castagnera explained. “We had been complaining for years about how disinterested and disaffected students had become, but now, we are seeing a surge in activism.”
Castagnera’s own studies and career have taken him to a number of campuses that have experienced tragedy. After earning a B.A. in Government at Franklin & Marshall College and a subsequent stint in the U.S. Coast Guard, he enrolled at Kent State University in January of 1971, just eight months after national guardsmen shot four students to death during a Vietnam War protest. “There was still a palpable feeling of anger on campus when I got there,” he recalled.
After receiving a master’s in Journalism, Castagnera accepted a position at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, where he worked for a time as the director of University Communications. While employed there, Castagnera completed all the requisite work for his Ph.D. in American Studies except for his dissertation. “My adviser urged me not to be an ‘ABD,’ and so I forged ahead,” he said. “But, by that time, I had developed a greater interest in law, too.”
Castagnera finished his doctoral dissertation and then immediately entered law school at Case, where he earned his J.D. in 1981. He spent the next two years teaching business law at the University of Texas before returning to his native Pennsylvania in 1983, when he accepted a job with the Philadelphia law firm of Saul, Ewing, Remick & Saul.
Since 1996, Castagnera has been at Rider, where his background in labor law, combined with his academic experience, made him a natural fit for his current post. He recently completed his 16th book, a companion publication to his 1988 Employment Law Answer Book, now in its sixth edition.
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