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ABSTRACT
Despite living in a nuclear-weapon state, young Americans are generally ill-informed about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their means of control. The result is both widespread apathy toward nonproliferation and disarmament decision making among the general public and a looming personnel crisis within government sectors that enact policy in these domains. Considering that 67 percent of high school graduates in the United States go on to pursue a bachelor’s degree, exposing more undergraduates to nonproliferation and disarmament issues could contribute to addressing both of these challenges. The present study analyzes how these issues are already being taught at select US colleges and universities and explores ways to introduce them to more students that align with current priorities in higher education, such as interdisciplinary learning, digital humanities, and data-science learning. It also proposes concrete steps that the WMD policy community can take to help institutions of higher education integrate these topics more broadly into their curricula. The anticipated result is greater support for education in this important issue area across different stakeholders in academia, as well as increased engagement with these critical issues among a more diverse population of young people.
Acknowledgments
The author is grateful to Lucy Nussbaum and Annelise Plooster, who provided invaluable assistance in both gathering and analyzing the data on which this report is based. She also thanks Leonard Spector, who led two previous surveys on undergraduate nonproliferation education, for his guidance in carrying out the research underlying this report. While every effort has been made to report accurate data, any errors are the sole responsibility of the author.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), “United Nations Study on Disarmament and Nonproliferation Education,” A/57/124, August 30, 2002, <www.undocs.org/A/57/124>.
2 Ibid.
3 Hans Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, “United States Nuclear Forces, 2018,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 74, No. 2 (2018), <https://thebulletin.org/2018/03/united-states-nuclear-forces-2018/>
4 It is beyond the focus of this article to determine why so little attention is paid to these issues at the secondary-school level, but there are a host of possible explanations. These include the absence of a common curriculum for history or civics at the 9–12 grade level which requires, or tests on, these topics. (The Common Core State Standards initiative covers only mathematics and English language arts.) The CNS Critical Issues Forum contributes to filling this gap by promoting awareness of nonproliferation and disarmament issues among high school students and teachers in the United States, Japan, and Russia. Critical Issues Forum (CIF), <http://sites.miis.edu/criticalissuesforum/>.
5 Erin Connolly and Kate Hewitt, “American Students Aren’t Taught Nuclear Weapons Policy in High School. Here’s How to Fix That,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 11, 2018, <https://thebulletin.org/2018/06/american-students-arent-taught-nuclear-weapons-policy-in-school-heres-how-to-fix-that-problem/>.
6 Karen Theroux, “Facing the Nuclear Truth,” Carnegie Reporter, January 11, 2019, <www.carnegie.org/news/articles/facing-nuclear-truth/?utm_source=Carnegie+Corporation+of+New+York&utm_campaign=8177a79659-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_04_02_08_18_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4a9f3be626-8177a79659-270580401>.
7 National Nuclear Security Administration, “NNSA Workforce Diversity Statistics Report,” September 30, 2018, <www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2019/01/f58/201809 percent20NNSA percent20workforce percent20diversity percent20statistics percent20report.pdf>.
8 Office of Resource Management and Organization Analysis, “Five-Year Workforce and Leadership Succession Plan Fiscal Years 2018–2022,” US Department of State, Washington, DC, February 2019, <www.state.gov/documents/organization/262725.pdf>, p. 36.
9 Daniel Lippman and Nahal Toosi, “Interest in U.S. Diplomatic Corps Tumbles in Early Months of Trump,” Politico, August 12, 2017, <www.politico.com/story/2017/08/12/trump-state-department-foreign-service-interest-plummets-241551>; Dan De Luce, “Fewer Americans are opting for careers in the State Department,” NBC News, February 25, 2019, <www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/fewer-americans-are-opting-careers-state-department-n973631>.
10 Bureau of Labor Statistics, “College Enrollment and Work Activity of Recent High School and College Graduates Summary,” US Department of Labor, Washington, DC, April 2018, <www.bls.gov/news.release/hsgec.nr0.htm>.
11 John Field and Natalie Morgan-Klein, “Studenthood and Identification: Higher Education as a Liminal Transitional Space,” paper presented at the Annual Standing Conference on University Teaching and Research in the Education of Adults Conference, University of Warwick, July 6–8, 2010, <www.leeds.ac.uk/educol/documents/191546.pdf>.
12 Bethany Zecher Sutton, “Higher Education’s Public Purpose,” LEAP Challenge Blog, June 20, 2016, <www.aacu.org/leap/liberal-education-nation-blog/higher-educations-public-purpose>.
13 See “Nonproliferation Education in the United States Part I: Undergraduate Education,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 9, No. 3 (2002), pp. 9–30; Richard Sabatini, Deborah Berman, Lisa Sanders Luscombe, and Leonard S. Spector, “Undergraduate Nonproliferation Education in the United States,” Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2011), pp. 263–95.
14 This list included the top twenty-five most highly ranked national universities, public universities, and liberal arts colleges, as well as the four military academies, as identified by US News and World Report in 2017 (“U.S. News & World Report Releases 2017 Best Colleges Rankings,” U.S. News & World Report, September 13, 2016, <www.usnews.com/info/blogs/press-room/articles/2016-09-13/us-news-releases-2017-best-colleges-rankings>). Some of these institutions appear in multiple categories, which is why there are seventy-five and not seventy-nine distinct institutions. See Appendix for complete list. It is worth noting that, in addition to the 524 courses that clearly addressed WMD-related issues, the research team also identified sixty-five courses offered at these institutions between 2016 and 2018 which did not explicitly reference WMD issues in their descriptions but likely touched upon them nonetheless. These included general courses on international-relations issues and US national security, the history of technology and war, and nuclear science and engineering, among others. Because it was not possible to determine with certainty whether these courses met the criteria for inclusion in the study, they were not counted in the totals above.
15 The percentages of African-American students at top private and public universities are roughly the same. Even in instances when this was not the case (for instance, only 2 percent of freshmen in the 2019 class at University of Wisconsin Madison were African-American compared with 9 percent at Columbia University), the overall numbers of African-American students were virtually identical owing to the vast discrepancy in the number of enrolled students at these institutions. See Jeremy Ashkenas, Haeyoun Park, and Adam Pearce, “Even with Affirmative Action, Blacks and Hispanics Are More Underrepresented at Top Colleges than 35 Years Ago,” New York Times, August 24, 2017, <www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/24/us/affirmative-action.html>.
16 Emily Forrest Cataldi, Christopher T. Bennett, and Xianglei Chen, “First-Generation Students: College Access Persistence, and Postbachelor’s Outcomes,” Statistics in Brief, NCES 2018-421 (February 2018), p. 7 <https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2018/2018421.pdf>.
17 Victoria Yuen, “New Insights into Attainment for Low Income Students,” Center for American Progress, February 21, 2019 <www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-postsecondary/reports/2019/02/21/466229/new-insights-attainment-low-income-students/>.
18 Bonnie Jenkins, “Grand Challenge: Bringing a Diversity of Perspectives to Nonproliferation Policy,” Brookings, June 8, 2018, <www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/06/08/grand-challenge-bringing-a-diversity-of-perspectives-into-nonproliferation-policy/>.
19 Michael Mitchell, Michael Leachman, Kathleen Masterson, and Samantha Waxman, “Unkept Promises: State Cuts to Higher Education Threaten Access and Equity,” (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, October 4, 2018, <www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/10-4-18sfp.pdf>.
20 Nuclear Science and Security Consortium, “NSSC Metrics Overview,” n.d., <https://nssc.berkeley.edu/metrics/>.
21 North Carolina State University, “About CNEC,” <https://cnec.ncsu.edu/about-cnec/>.
22 Fifty-two (12.8 percent) of the 404 emailed professors responded with details on sixty-eight courses, a sample size that afforded a margin of error of just under 10 percent at the 90-percent confidence level. A sample size of seventy-two would have given a 9-percent margin of error.
23 Stanford University, “Thinking Matters,” <https://undergrad.stanford.edu/programs/thinking-matters>.
24 According to the faculty respondents, the vast majority of undergraduate WMD-related courses (sixty-three) focus almost exclusively on nuclear weapons. Less than 50 percent (twenty-seven), meanwhile, address chemical weapons, and an even smaller number (twenty-three) address biological weapons.
25 Institute of Education Science, “Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred by Postsecondary Institutions, by Field of Study: 1970–71 through 2015–16,” Digest of Education Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, August 2017, < https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_322.10.asp?current=yes>.
26 When asked, “Was there a specific event or international development that prompted you or your department to offer this course?” respondents cited the SS-20/Pershing missile crisis in 1983 (University of Illinois), the seventy-fifth anniversary of the first nuclear reactor experiment (University of Chicago), and the need to offer a science course to university undergraduates that was both interesting and useful (University of Maryland). Several respondents identified the increased focus on WMD issues resulting from September 11, 2001, as a motivation for offering courses on this topic, but, considering that most college undergraduates today have no memory of a pre-9/11 world, this event can hardly be considered a new development. Only one instructor, from Hamilton College, identified the 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the elimination of Syria’s chemical weapons as the reason for offering his course.
27 American Political Science Association. “Undergraduate Enrollments in Political Science,” 2017–18 APSA Departmental Survey, November 2018, <www.apsanet.org/Portals/54/APSApercent20Files/Datapercent20Reports/Charts/2018-November-cotm.pdf?ver=2018-11-27-090838-727>.
28 Carol Cohn, “Sex and Death in the Rational World of Defense Intellectuals,” Signs, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1987), pp. 687–718.
29 Of the six courses for which this was the case, two were offered at Wellesley, a women’s college.
30 For recent research on the gender gap, see, for instance, Heather Hurlburt, Elizabeth Weingarten, Alexandra Stark, and Elena Souris, “The ‘Consensual Straitjacket’: Four Decades of Women in Nuclear Security,” New America, March 5, 2019, <www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/the-consensual-straitjacket-four-decades-of-women-in-nuclear-security/>.
31 Blanca Quilantan, “Should Colleges Let Ailing Majors Die or Revamp Them?” Chronicle of Higher Education, May 20, 2018, <www.chronicle.com/article/Should-Colleges-Let-Ailing/243447>; Jonathan Kramnick. “The Interdisciplinary Delusion: Saving Disciplines Is the Only Way to Save Ourselves,” Chronicle of Higher Education, October 11, 2018, <www.chronicle.com/article/The-Interdisciplinary-Delusion/244772>.
32 Marc Parry, “Colleges Rush to Ride Data-Science Wave: New Programs Train Students to Make Honest Sense of Numbers,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, 2018, <www.chronicle.com/article/Colleges-Rush-to-Ride/242674>; Alexander Kafka, “With Student Interest Soaring, Berkeley Creates New Data-Sciences Division.” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 1, 2018, <www.chronicle.com/article/With-Student-Interest-Soaring/244986>.
33 See, for example, Jack Nassetta and Ethan Fecht, “All the World Is Staged: An Analysis of Social Media Influence Operations against US Counterproliferation Efforts in Syria,” Occasional Paper No. 37, James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, September 2018, <www.nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/op37-all-the-world-is-staged.pdf>.
34 In response to the question, “Do you incorporate new tools into your courses, such as satellite imagery analysis, network analysis, 3D modelling, etc.?” respondents answered no for fifty-five out of sixty-eight courses.
35 Matt Korda. “At #NukeFest, We Asked All the Wrong Questions,” Inkstick, March 19, 2019, <https://inkstickmedia.com/at-nukefest-we-asked-all-the-wrong-questions/>.
36 “Young Women in Nonproliferation Initiative,” James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies <www.nonproliferation.org/education/women-in-nonproliferation/>.
37 Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy is one such organization. It encourages leaders in the field to make concrete SMART—specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound—pledges that promote gender equality within their own workplaces and beyond. For an explanation and examples, see “SMART Pledges,” Gender Champions in Nuclear Policy, <www.gcnuclearpolicy.org/champions/smart-pledges/>.
38 Danielle M. Young, Laurie Rudman, Helen Buettner, and Meghan C. Mclean, “The Influence of Female Role Models on Women’s Implicit Science Cognitions,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2013), <www.researchgate.net/publication/258181938_The_Influence_of_Female_Role_Models_on_Women's_Implicit_Science_Cognitions>.
39 With these recommendations in mind, the Center for Nonproliferation Studies established a Young Women in Nonproliferation Initiative in 2018, which offers events, resources, and mentorship to encourage female undergraduates to pursue careers in this field. These activities help college-aged women interact with women experts and practitioners, something that, as the study results suggested, they have few opportunities to do at their home institutions. They can also encourage greater awareness of the intersection of gender and WMD issues at US colleges and universities so that instructors and administrators will be more conscious of the need for inclusive discourse on WMD issues.