The University of Maryland will create a research center to study how people become terrorists, what motivates them to strike and how communities cope with their threat, using a $12 million grant to be announced today by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
The university, which emerged from a field of 27 applicants, will lead the fourth Homeland Security Center of Excellence, making the College Park institution part of a growing network of university-based programs devoted to aspects of the homeland security mission.
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The University of Southern California leads a center for research on targets and minimizing damage. Texas A&M and the University of Minnesota head separate programs that involve protecting agriculture and the food supply.
Ridge will solicit applicants to lead a fifth center, which would study preparation, recovery and resilience in the face of large-scale natural and human-made disasters.
The University of Maryland's site will be called the Homeland Security Center of Excellence on Behavioral and Social Research on Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism. Scholars from across the disciplines at the university and from other colleges will study the forces that create terrorists; how terrorist groups recruit; how they choose targets; and ways to lead converts away from terrorism.
"An interesting question for us is: Are there sociological or religious issues that can come to bear to cause someone to go down that path?" said Charles E. McQueary, undersecretary for science and technology at the Homeland Security Department. "I think there's a great deal left to be learned."
Scholars will look for patterns among thousands of acts of terrorism and terror attempts in more than 20 nations. They will study terrorist groups the way criminologists dissect hate groups and gangs, looking for what motivates them and trying to predict their next move, said Gary LaFree, who will be the center's director. He said he hopes to conduct face-to-face interviews and polls in nations where terrorists spawn.
"It's amazing how little criminology has been done in the area of terrorism," said LaFree, a criminology professor at the university and director of its criminology department. "It's clear that terrorism is different from other types of violent acts, but it also shares some similarities."
The center will offer classes and eventually will award diploma certificates at the bachelor's and master's levels, signifying that a student has concentrated in terrorism study within a traditional academic major, LaFree said. The scholars typically will not work with classified information, and most or all the work they produce will be publishable in scholarly journals, said Melvin Bernstein, a Homeland Security Department official who oversees the university programs.
Close study of terrorist groups could help the government predict when, where and how the next attack might come, department officials said. The researchers will work closely with Homeland Security and other academic centers when they produce knowledge that could thwart an attack or lead to capturing a terror suspect.
Any such advantage would help a U.S. counterterrorism effort that too often bogs down in data that are too vague to prompt action and yet too dire to ignore, department officials said.
"Think about how we play this game with al Qaeda: Are they going to strike on a holiday or not strike on a holiday?" said Maureen McCarthy, research and development chief under McQueary. "What you wind up doing is cleaning up after they attack, if you don't learn what their motivation is."
A second focus will be how the public deals with the terrorist threat; how best for the government to convey that threat; and how to strengthen the community's resilience when the threat is ongoing, officials said.
Part of the goal will be to improve how the public learns of terror alerts. Neither the government nor U.S. residents were prepared for the system of color-coded terror alerts that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, LaFree said. The system undoubtedly needs refining, he said, adding that perhaps the answer is as simple as adapting lessons learned in preparation for hurricanes and earthquakes.
After today's announcement in a ceremony at the College Park campus, the university and the federal agency will have a 90-day period to negotiate terms of the contract. The $12 million grant is awarded over three years. The center will open after the 90-day period, officials said.
The University of Maryland will work with five major academic partners: UCLA, the University of Colorado, the Monterey Institute of International Studies, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of South Carolina.
