Institutes of higher education (IHEs) are valuable partners in law enforcement’s shared strategy to understand and deter domestic terrorism. Those who commit acts of terrorism are often young, educated, and vulnerable. “Young people are a vital source of support for many terrorist groups.”1 Understanding this vulnerability and where radicalization may occur, points to a need to strengthen the connections between IHE and law enforcement officials. By serving as trusted, connected hubs within their communities, IHEs provide educational, enrichment, and cultural opportunities for learners of all ages, backgrounds, and abilities and are therefore well-positioned to embrace and share the responsibility for reducing harmful ideologies and actions. For the purposes of addressing the local domestic terrorism threat, a Brookings report authored by Madiha Afzal states,
Extremism and terrorism are twin problems: extremism can lead directly to violence and it also gives terrorist groups oxygen by providing them with an environment for survival, in terms of logistical and financial support, potential recruits, and most broadly, ideological space.2
By fostering a whole community approach to education and training, today’s IHEs have established partnerships with law enforcement leaders, other public safety sector agencies, business leaders, nonprofit, faith-based, social, and disability community leaders; colleges and schools; and local, state, and federal governments. It is through these services and relationships that IHEs become valuable partners in the local war on terrorism. As a part of this shared responsibility, consider the contributions toward education and empowerment, connecting individuals and agencies, and systematically producing change. Local law enforcement leaders are encouraged to expand their view of partnerships with IHEs and consider the following areas.
Educate and Empower Individuals
Education empowers individuals to think critically and is a clear tool to establish the foundational knowledge to improve the understanding of and to prevent extremism, violence, and domestic terrorism.
Recommendation: Law enforcement leaders are encouraged to expand curriculum advisory relationships.
The core responsibility for IHEs is to enable individuals and communities to act in their best interests, and ultimately, in the best interests of all. Afzal’s Brookings report continues to promote with some urgency that “formal education is key to addressing extremism—it can foster it, and conversely, is the key tool to counter it.”3
Reliable Information: Information empowers individuals. As the use of social media flourishes, there has been a wealth of opportunities to propagate misinformation, and disinformation. Often, social media is used to incite extremism and violence. IHEs serve as trusted information sources and have the ability to educate their staff and learners on the ways to critically evaluate information sources and content.
Culturally Responsive Curricula: In many cases, curricula and the attitudes of instructors shape the attitudes of their learners and their communities:
The education system can also be a clear venue and indeed the tool to address the roots of extremism and violent extremism, by promoting tolerance and teaching critical thinking….
…One way that extremism can be countered is if individuals are able to identify such misinformation when they receive it.4
Connect Individuals, Agencies, and Resources
Colleges are centers of opportunity and address the challenges facing communities across the globe.
Recommendation: Law enforcement leaders would benefit from increased awareness of social services provided by IHEs and opportunities for external, collaborative funding.
Social Connections: IHEs provide valuable social connections and club affiliations on campus or as a part of campus life that help defend against the isolation of individuals. Through trusted advisors and professors, IHEs also offer a network of mentors, which is a valuable deterrent to isolation.
International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (IACLEA): IHEs organize and deliver safety and security functions in a variety of manners. The individuals who work at IHEs also present education, training, and service capabilities that are vastly different. One unifying organization for IHEs’ safety, security, and special police workers is IACLEA.5 By connecting with this leading authority for campus public safety, participants actively engage in discussions, trainings, and awareness events related to a wide range of campus hazards, including domestic terrorism.
Public-Private Partnerships: By connecting individuals, agencies, and resources, IHEs leverage academic expertise in closing the education and outreach gaps; creating and sustaining new social norms; and establishing an enhanced model of Private-Public Preparedness Partnerships to advance prevention and resilience-based actions. The partnerships surrounding IHEs could issue a bold call to action to educate, leverage support, change minds, and develop a culture of prevention against extremism and domestic violence to align with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention (TVTP) Program.
Collaborative Funding Opportunities: The TVTP Grant Program provides funding for U.S. state, local, tribal, and territorial governments, nonprofits, and IHEs with funds to establish or enhance capabilities to prevent targeted violence and terrorism. Developing local prevention capabilities is a key element of Goal 3 of the Strategic Framework to Counter Terrorism and Targeted Violence. The TVTP Grant Program provides assistance to implement that goal and develops innovative solutions to prevent terrorism and targeted violence.6
National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment (NABITA): Institutional policies, initiatives, and agreements with external bodies promote student welfare for the betterment of the institution, learners, and community. NABITA is the leading professional organization among IHEs when it comes to behavioral intervention teams (BITs) and risk assessment.7 This organization has valuable resources that IHEs’ BITs utilize in their work, along with training opportunities and resources.
Systematically Produce Change
IHEs are called upon to systematically produce positive change and promote continued growth, awareness, and improvements within the communities they serve.
Recommendation: Law enforcement leaders are inspired to collaborate with educators in the creation of relevant campus policies, procedures, and positive actions on college premises.
Evidence of positive change can be viewed in a variety of policies, procedures, and actions happening on community campuses today.
Build and Sustain Trust: Colleges have a clear understanding and sense of shared duty to build resilient individuals. Through active engagement of senior campus leaders, IHEs demonstrate good practices to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and represent one of the most important arenas for challenging extremist views and ideologies.
Operationalized Prevention: IHEs have adopted a variety of models to provide early warning of harmful behaviors and emotional responses. These teams, with a variety of names such as behavioral and emotional response teams, are a vital part of the campus risk assessment process. Through the use of robust procedures for sharing information internally and externally about vulnerable individuals, concerning behaviors, and emotional responses and actions, these models have been operationalized to alert support systems for intervention. In fact, in the 2010 Tucson, Arizona, active assailant incident, the local college was the most aggressive support service in the recognition of behavioral indicators and its attempt to seek outside help.
Internet Technology (IT) Policies and Procedures: As a part of an overarching safety protocol and a way of preventing harm, IHEs embrace IT policies with a way of filtering and restricting access to harmful content. These policies and practices are one way to prevent people from being drawn toward terrorism.
Use of Facility’s Policies and Procedures: IHEs embrace peaceful student gatherings and guide discussions on emerging topics of violence with trusted faculty members to ensure an understanding of incidents inciting misinformation, disinformation, and unrest. By having protocols in place that assess risk for how campuses are used by students and visitors and for hosting events, IHEs instill safeguards to prevent the use of their campuses as platforms for extremism.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiatives: In 2021 and beyond, IHEs are embracing college-wide goals addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion, which strive to educate faculty, staff, and students and establish healthy attitudes, behaviors, and environments.
Student Welfare Initiatives: The pandemic showcased the areas of struggle in the lives of college students. Insecurities were found in food, housing, finances, health care, mental wellness, pastoral care, and more. Vulnerable young people are more likely to be drawn into groups with extremist and violent tenets. By developing on-campus programs to address these vulnerabilities, IHEs produce stronger individuals and support healthy behaviors and attitudes.
Individuals recruited for violence often present a variety of vulnerabilities, including substance abuse. IHEs offer substance use prevention and training, especially regarding opioid use and abuse.
Collaborate on Strategic Framework to Counter Terrorism and Targeted Violence
IHEs remain powerful players in combating recruitment and radicalization and violence in Maryland. However, gaps remain in the shared strategy to prevent domestic terrorism.
Recommendation: Law enforcement leaders are encouraged to involve academic leaders in a variety of action committees, councils, and initiatives related to countering domestic terrorism.
“Academic leaders stand ready to enhance the capabilities of local law enforcement agencies to understand, prevent, mitigate, respond, and recover from acts of domestic terrorism.”
Domestic Terrorism and Extremism Content: Maryland IHEs, particularly Frederick Community College and its Mid-Atlantic Center for Emergency Management & Public Safety (MACEM&PS), already share in the strategy to prevent domestic terrorism by educating the task force and local communities regarding the nature of domestic terrorism and extremism and its potential targets. The targets at risk are the community lifelines or critical infrastructure that if attacked would degrade the continuity of operations for survivor-centric assets. Obviously, knowing the vulnerable potential targets provides the opportunity to implement preparedness measures and bolster the resilience of the particular entity.
In October 2021, the MACEM&PS participated in the Task Force on Preventing and Countering Domestic Terrorism. The task force recommended the inclusion of IHEs in a comprehensive strategy approach to preventing, detecting, and responding to domestic terrorism. IHEs are great strategic partners for research of emerging issues, benchmarking best practices, and acquiring knowledge as the basis for training and policy.
IHEs Provide Enhanced Activities for Tomorrow: IHEs are educating the future professionals who will combat, mitigate, and deter domestic terrorism. From classrooms to college clubs to local public safety to special operational public safety positions, IHEs are supporting individuals who will one day be involved with investigations related to terrorism.
IHEs Faculty and Staff Awareness Training: IHEs can promote faculty and staff awareness training that could help relevant individuals recognize students who are vulnerable and prevent them from being drawn into terrorism.
Resilience Initiatives and Affiliations: The Academic Resilience Consortium is an association of faculty, staff, and students in higher education who are dedicated to understanding and promoting student resilience.8 Through this affiliation, IHE leaders can amplify their resources to instill academic resilience programming for their student groups. “Academic resilience” can be broadly defined in terms of capacities such as persistence, creativity, emotional intelligence, grit, thriving, cognitive flexibility, agency, flourishment, adaptation, addressing social justice and equity, learning from failure and success, and overcoming adversity. In developing these capabilities, IHEs can also communicate awareness of and techniques to avoid ideologies that cause harm. Students will learn to question their own ideas and motives as well as others they follow. Techniques to withstand group pressure, reflect upon beliefs and actions, and embrace truth and reality would be included. Changing harmful mindsets and behaviors requires individuals to come to terms with what is real and what is not—a growing challenge today.
Focused Community Prevention and Support: IHEs could take the lead in major efforts to interrupt racist or violent group affiliations and activities. For example, a project in Europe called “Exit” is having some success; it incorporates three objectives: (1) establish local networks to support the parents of young people who are embedded in racist or violent groups; (2) enable young people to disengage from these groups; and (3) develop and disseminate methodological knowledge to professionals working with youths associated with violent groups.
Conclusion
There is much work to be done to address the ongoing threat of terrorism. Academic leaders stand ready to enhance the capabilities of local law enforcement agencies to understand, prevent, mitigate, respond, and recover from acts of domestic terrorism. By fulfilling their core mission to prepare students for success in life not only in the workforce but also within communities, IHEs are already key partners in the violent terrorism prevention mission. Through the recommendations in this article, law enforcement is encouraged to expand its relationships with local IHEs to educate, empower, and connect individuals, agencies, and resources; to systematically produce meaningful and sustainable change; and to advance the shared, strategic prevention framework.
Appreciation is extended to the many groundbreakers within the public safety sector who systematically work to create safe, prepared, and resilient communities and who continuously uplift, support, and value the contributions of academia.
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Kathy L. Francis, Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Emergency Management & Public Safety at Frederick Community College, has dedicated her career to public service. She combines over 20 years of educational experience with more than a decade of public safety practitioner service at the municipal, county, state, and federal levels. Ms. Francis has served in leadership roles in K-12 education, higher education, municipal law enforcement analysis, and emergency management. She serves as an adjunct instructor at Mount St. Mary’s University teaching Executive Crisis Leadership and a member of the faculty at Frederick Community College teaching Criminology. She also serves as a mentor, multi-level curriculum reviewer, and Maryland emergency management professional credentials assessor. |
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Mark F. Hubbard currently serves as the Deputy Director of the Maryland Governor’s Office of Homeland Security. He started his career in public safety in 1981 serving in fire, EMS, and emergency management/homeland security response and executive management roles. He holds an MBA from Loyola University in Maryland where he also serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Sellinger School of Business and Management. He also teaches at the University of Maryland, Global Campus. He also holds a JD from the University of Maryland School of Law. |
Notes:
1 Jessica TrisKo Darden, Tackling Terrorists’ Exploitation of Youth (American Enterprise Institute, 2019).
2Madiha Afzal, A Global Effort to Counter Extremism through Education (Brookings Institution, 2021).
3Afzal, A Global Effort to Counter Extremism through Education.
4Afzal, A Global Effort to Counter Extremism through Education.
5International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, “About IACLEA.”
6U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), “Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention Grant Program,” updated May 10, 2022; DHS, Strategic Framework to Counter Terrorism and Targeted Violence (Washington, DC: September 2019).
7See the National Association for Behavioral Intervention and Threat Assessment (NABITA) website.
8See The Academic Resilience Consortium website.
Please cite as
Kathy L. Francis and Mark F. Hubbard, “Partners in Prevention: The Role of Institutes of Higher Education in Combating Violent Extremism,” Police Chief Online, July 13, 2022.
