Reviews of "Al Qaeda Goes to College"

On Jan. 23, 2009, Adjunct Prof Blog announced that James Ottavio Castagnera, a well known lawyer and professor at Rider University, just wrote an exciting new book entitled “Al-Qaeda Goes To College.” Professor Castagnera was kind enough to provide me with an advance copy and I could not put it down.
The book starts off by detailing how Professor Castagnera world began to change on 9-11. It then goes on to discuss the Anthrax scare that occurred at the Hamlton New Jersey Post Office, just a few miles a way from Rider University.
The book’s research is excellent and it is full of detailed footnotes that others will undoubtedly find helpful. Professor Castagnera central thesis, however, is on the impact 9-11 had on higher education. He views 9-11 as a double edge sword. On the one hand universities lost their innocence at great cost (increased governmental regulations, security costs etc.), but on the other hand universities also got a windfall because now they offer more programs and research on national security. Professor Castagnera believes that American universities have met the challenge of 9-11 and we are better off because of it. He compares 9-11 to WWII and states that America became a super power because of WWII.


Al-Qaeda Goes to College
23 April 2009
No such thing as a free lunch

Anthony Glees says this book fails to consider the threat to academia posed by terrorism's side effects

This is a fascinating book, but it isn't about al-Qaeda attacks on any US university, or even its sympathisers in American higher education. As the author explains: "So far, no jihadist terror attacks have been directed at US universities." What Castagnera writes about are the ways in which the "War on Terror" has affected what universities do and how they do it.

His thesis is as simple as it is cheering. "The war on terror", he writes, "has been a double-edged sword as far as higher education is concerned." It has led "on the one hand (to) a loss of innocence", owing to "the inexorable, irresistible demand for ever-tighter security measures". But on the other, it has provided "an enormous windfall for many colleges and universities", defined in terms of better campus security, large amounts of government funding for terrorism-related research and generous gifts to academia from Saudi Arabia.

Castagnera properly defines terrorism as being not only Islamist in nature, but also including the activities of animal-rights activists, Bruce Ivins (an anthrax expert for the US Government alleged to have killed five people with spores from his workplace), as well as - less convincingly - deranged students.

He is right to point out that, thankfully, academics have not been attacked with weapons by Islamists, even if animal-rights terrorists have used repugnant violence. But it does not follow that there isn't a problem. Universities can be (and have been) hiding places for terrorists - for example, Mohawk Valley College in New York, where convicted terrorist Dhiren Barot was enrolled, and Brunel University in Uxbridge, where Jawad Akbar, one of the bomb plotters caught by Operation Crevice, studied.