By Richard Ekman

What can American colleges and universities do to help prevent the rise of adolescent terrorists? Robert Pape of the University of Chicago has observed that most of the recent terrorists, including suicide bombers, are young, not from the lowest economic stratum, and appear to have already made something of their lives. Pape also points out that almost all are natives of countries that have friendly relations with the U.S. and are receptive to American cultural influences—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, for example—and not America’s ostensible enemies such as Iran. Moreover, most have had experience living in Europe. Indeed, Pape argues, terrorism is more readily incubated in places where Western culture is familiar than in countries ruled by Islamic fundamentalists.
     Perhaps the explanation is that while life is usually better for immigrants in London or Paris than in the home countries, the next step up the ladder to success in the new country remains elusive. The new generation of American college-goers, by contrast, includes large numbers of low-income and immigrant young people. For many, burgeoning community colleges offer the first rung on the ladder to success. These institutions are doing an outstanding job of providing initial access to college. But drop-out rates for first-generation and low-income students are very high. For those who make it to the second rung, the junior year—either as transfers from community colleges or as rising juniors in the four-year colleges and universities where they began as freshmen—the patterns are clear. Students with a variety of “at risk” factors in their backgrounds enter state universities and smaller private colleges in about the same proportions (although still at lower rates than more affluent and native-born students), but the ones who enroll at smaller private colleges have a much greater chance of completing their degrees. There is also evidence that, after graduation, the small-college graduates become more involved in their communities, vote more frequently, and engage in volunteer activities in greater numbers than graduates of other kinds of colleges and universities.
     What do small colleges do to produce these impressive results in civic responsibility? One of the mantras of liberal arts colleges and universities is that the study of the liberal arts prepares people for responsible lives in democratic societies. We try to foster the abilities of our students both to embrace great ideas and to challenge them. When our students dissent, they do not usually act on their ideals in ways that incite violence or cause the loss of bystanders’ lives.
     We teach our students the basic civics lesson that there is such a thing as “loyal opposition” and that it is critical to the workings of a democracy. Not until the 18th century in America could a critic of the state voice his or her view without risking arrest and possible imprisonment or worse. Now it is well established that the truth of an idea and the right to express it are more important than the idea’s alignment with state orthodoxy. From early days American colleges and universities have tried to develop students’ ability both to comprehend potent ideas, and also to challenge them, test their durability, try out their opposites—all in an effort to produce alumni who are capable of distinguishing cogent reasoning from ideology and clichés.
     Terrorists are not overly earnest idealists, engaging in adolescent protest activities. They believe that it is legitimate to kill one’s opponents, and even innocents who are only loosely associated with their opponents. To be sure, free speech on campus may be easier to sustain when the surrounding society embraces free expression, but the connection is not inevitable. Colleges must be vigilant about insuring an atmosphere of free expression.
     Social scientists have tried to explain why the 1960s student protesters behaved in ways that appeared oblivious to the material comfort, freedom of movement and expression, and upward mobility that they enjoyed. Kenneth Keniston’s Young Radicals (1968) offered the persuasive view that, in a long American tradition of middle-class revolution, the radicals of the 1960s were not members of a proletariat, but of a suburban-bred and well-educated generation whose rising expectations and level of affluence were sufficient to make acts of idealism more feasible. It is the level and type of education of the protesters that may best explain the relative non-violence of Vietnam-era clashes of opinion in comparison with terrorism today.
     To prevent the worldview of today’s terrorists from becoming more widely held among adolescents we need to do more than inoculate people with a dose of the liberal arts and four years at a small college. Mere exposure to Western, democratic culture—whether in the form of Aristotle, the Federalist Papers, or Hollywood films—will not be sufficient if campus freedom of expression and the larger society’s are both absent.
     Liberal arts colleges and universities are to be found in many settings—including rural and inner-city locations and immigrant communities. At present, about one third of CIC’s 544 member institutions are located in rural areas, one third in large metropolitan areas, and one third in small towns and cities. Most CIC colleges—indeed, most U.S. colleges and universities of all types—now draw their students primarily from their own and adjacent states. As each college comes to understand better the make-up of its newest generation of students, it will recognize distinctive opportunities to educate those from particular backgrounds. For those colleges that enroll the low-income and immigrant students who have the most to gain from college, the stakes for our country in the outcomes are especially high. We should be optimistic that smaller, private colleges and universities will do a superior job of preparing these students for lives of civic responsibility.