In light of Republicans’ newfound fear of Islamic studies programs in American Universities, I want to highlight this old piece by Benjamin Popper about an academic discipline that poses an unparalleled threat to freedom:
A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.
Despite this, several New York based universities continue to teach engineering in Manhattan, despite the fact that the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta, was an engineer. They are nothing but victory schools, symbols of engineering’s greatest triumph against the West.
