But all of them grew up in a post-9/11 world. And it will be their job to help America prepare for whatever comes next, from enemies abroad to natural disasters at home.
Ramsay is the coordinator — and first faculty member — of the new Homeland Security program at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester.
The “brave souls” who have signed up for this first fall semester of classes, he said, will graduate in four years with the critical thinking and problem-solving skills needed across a broad array of careers, such as law enforcement, risk analysis, emergency management and cybersecurity.
They'll know how to work independently or in groups; conduct comprehensive emergency management and security assessments; write intelligence briefs and engage in strategic planning, he said.
The program culminates in a senior “capstone” project that sends students out to real companies to identify risks and propose cost-effective solutions.
Ramsay spent the last 10 years building a similar program at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida; today that department has 17 staff members and 1,400 students.
In New Hampshire
Now Ramsay wants to do the same here. He said he was thrilled to come to UNH, which he calls “world-class.”
“We're going to build something really, really cool, and it will be of national repute,” he said.
The idea for the new major came from Mike Hickey, the former Verizon president who is acting dean at the school. Hickey spent more than six years in Washington, D.C., as vice president for national security policy for Verizon before he retired from the company in 2010.
As part of the company's response team for Hurricane Katrina, Hickey said, he got “a bird's eye view on policy related to emergency response and critical infrastructure protection and national security.”
And that was the spark that inspired him to launch the new major this year.
It won't be a stand-alone program, but will intersect with other departments at the university, including politics, engineering technology and computer science, Hickey said.
Good Overview
Ramsay's Introduction to Homeland Security course gives students an overview of what's to come. The topic for last Thursday's class was “patriot or traitor.”
On the board was a quote from George Washington: “If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
“Nobody who's fighting for democracy and liberty wants you to be quiet,” Ramsay tells the class.
Students had been assigned to research individuals who could be considered traitors or patriots, including Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, and to produce a “compelling case” for both sides of the argument.
To the British, Ramsay pointed out, John Adams and Ben Franklin were traitors. “One man's terrorist is another man's founding father,” he said.
They've only been in class a few weeks, but the students were ready for the debate. They argued cogently about the balance between protecting secrets that could jeopardize America's national security or its relationships with allies, and exposing evidence of government wrongdoing.
Mark Tollick of Litchfield volunteered to go first, taking the case of Bradley Manning, an Army private who was convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to Wikileaks.
“If war crimes are being committed, you should know about it,” said Tollick, 25, a Navy veteran of the Afghanistan war. On the other hand, he said, revealing classified operations can put lives at risk.
Marion James of Manchester, 23, argued that Manning (who now goes by the name Chelsea) took responsibility for her actions, unlike Wikileaks' Assange, or Snowden, who left the country to avoid prosecution.
“War is dirty,” said Isaiah Hutchinson, 19, of Colebrook. A lot of Americans opposed U.S. military action in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. “To go and create even less support is not going to help anything,” he said.
Took Snowden to Task
They were even tougher on Snowden, an NSA contractor who revealed top-secret documents to the press.
“I can understand why you'd want to get rid of things you think are illegal,” said T.J. Rapson of Manchester, who is 19. “But to let that out to our allies does more harm than good.”
Snowden could have taken the information he discovered about secret domestic spying to authorities, such as the FBI, Rapson said. “He didn't have to go and tell the whole world.”
Ramsay encourages the students to explore topics deeply, challenging their assumptions and pushing them to defend their points of view. He wants them to consider groups and individuals in the context of the era and society in which they emerge.
“The need in our industry is to get into the mind of your target,” he tells the class. “We need to understand what they're thinking...”
Because the United States didn't understand Japanese culture, he said, the nation was vulnerable to the Pearl Harbor kamikaze attacks. “We didn't know our enemy and we sat here naked.”
Pressing Issues
But the new Homeland Security studies program is not just about tracking bad guys. In his Fundamentals of Emergency Management class, Ramsay talks about how ill-prepared most communities and states are for threats that are far more likely than terrorist attacks: natural disasters.
And he said, “Mother Nature's disasters tend to be extremely expensive.”
The time to mitigate risks, he tells students, is before the storm, not after.
So this semester, these students will work with real companies to develop risk assessment and mitigation plans.
Hickey said the Millyard campus, surrounded by high-tech companies, offers plenty of internship and capstone opportunities for homeland security majors.
“All these corporations have a substantial interest in securing their property and their employees and their cyber-assets,” he said. “We expect a good amount of corporate interest in the work that we're doing.”
Ramsay also wants his students to understand politics and how it can affect the work they'll be doing in the future.
What's Ahead
Future classes will explore environmental and human security, looking at such issues as climate change and population dynamics, and how those can create security risks.
“Climate change is real,” he tells his class. “Know how I know it's real? Because the Russians are floating in what used to be ice just a few years ago.”
And that has opened unprecedented national security policy discussions, Ramsay said. “We've never had a hostile (nation) float off our shores before.”
Melinda Negron-Gonzales is an assistant professor and coordinator of the politics and society program at UNH-Manchester.
Her Political Violence & Terrorism class is a requirement for the new homeland security major. And some of her students will be taking Ramsay's courses.
When she started graduate school in 2001, Negron-Gonzales said, some people thought her interest in studying terrorism was “a bit strange.”
Not anymore.
She is struck by a difference in these students who came of age after 9/11. Compared with previous generations, she said, “It seems like they are more comfortable with the idea of the government doing whatever it needs to do to protect its citizens.”
But when she asks, many of her students know very little about the 2001 attacks.
“So they live in fear but they're not even exactly sure what it is they fear,” she said. “They don't really know a lot about Al Qaeda and they don't really know a lot about 9/11.
“But they're very, very eager to learn.”
©2015 The New Hampshire Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
