Foreign Policy recently published a timely piece titled “The History Crisis Is a National Security Problem,” in which author Bret Devereaux explains that university cuts to history departments in the United States have left national security leaders at a disadvantage.
What the article appears to be missing is the more challenging story that this is true not only of history departments but of universities in general. As universities continue to cut departments and whole colleges shut their doors for good, the national security effects are just becoming apparent.
Last year, Forbes unhelpfully published an article titled “The College Closure Apocalypse That Isn’t,” claiming that the actual numbers of universities closing down in the U.S. due to the approaching “enrollment cliff” are so far overblown.
However, it is easy to prove the national security ramifications are already being felt. When Notre Dame College in Ohio announced last month it was shutting down at the end of this semester, one of the programs to shut down with it was its Master of Arts in security policy studies, a conventional intelligence studies program offering courses in “Strategic Intelligence and Warning,” “Terrorism & Counterterrorism,” and “Issues in Homeland Security.”
Having myself dropped out of the hiring process for a government national security job in the U.S., I can say that the nightmare of pursuing that career with a dead graduate degree, having gone into debt for credentials that many will not recognize or take seriously, has to be considered a real issue for how the national security community treats job seekers.
I am now so used to meeting people in former or failed national security careers who are stuck jobless and without income, unable to find work in a new field, that I have trouble believing it is not a more common problem than people let on. This problem is certain to be worsened by making a relevant degree in the field, on a graduate or even undergraduate level, a riskier bet if your college might close and render the degree on your wall just another obstacle. Or, in some cases, close while you are still a student, without a degree to show for it.
Many would scoff at the idea that universities are anything but oppositional to those in national security careers; I believe this is an oversimplification. In addition to ROTC programs, countless universities in the U.S. have research arrangements directly with the intelligence community.
This includes the Director of National Intelligence’s Intelligence Community Centers for Academic Excellence program, for which a map can be found on the DNI website showing a range of reputable universities across the country, from famously progressive Rutgers to North Carolina State University. Beyond just these schools, there are countless intelligence studies programs, and that is before the obvious need for foreign language departments, which are frequently among the first to be cut during mass layoffs.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
At this point, university closures may not yet be at crisis levels, but they are threatening to make intolerably toxic the process of job-seeking in a national security career. This problem is a microcosm for the struggles of students and graduates in other fields in some ways and a singularly nasty example of the challenges facing higher education in others.
The intellectual factory of the nation’s next generation of best and brightest national security minds is directly under threat and at risk of being gradually hollowed out.
Jay Heisler is a freelancer published in the Washington Examiner, Voice of America, CNBC, and Canadian newspapers. He teaches part-time at a university in Canada.