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Popular class cancelled
A popular Criminal Justice course, titled national security issues and terrorism, has been cancelled as an elective for students at SCSU.
The professor of the course, Kathleen Sweet, has been teaching the class since she has been at SCSU. Sweet brings expert knowledge to the class as she is a retired United States Air Force lieutenant colonel that has experience as an intelligence officer for the CIA.
Sweet has taught the class with a law enforcement perspective on terrorism.
Sweet said that she thought that the class would be a great addition to the regular curriculum of the criminal justice department because of the relevance the course has to students. She said that it was not her intention to make the class a core class which would require all criminal justice majors to take the course in order to graduate.
The course never made it into the curriculum and is also not being offered as an elective for the fall term of 2002. Sweet feels that the course would be a great addition to the criminal justice curriculum because of the effects that the terrorist incident on Sept. 11 will have on the law enforcement practices in the future.
"If it isn't timely I don't know what is," Sweet said.
The structure of the class and the topics discussed focus on a few main topics. Sweet tries to recognize the importance of topics such as various terrorist groups from around the world, different countries' methods of combating terrorists and current events in terrorism. Current events in terrorism are more than relevant to Americans now; they are becoming an every day part of life.
"It (terrorism) is applicable to everyone in America now," Sweet said.
Sweet would like to try offering the course as part of the regular criminal justice curriculum in the very near future.
"I intend over the summer to resubmit the course through the regular process," she said.
The deciding factors that lie in front of the course's submission into the curriculum rely on SCSU and other departments. There are some other departments that would like to offer a course that focuses on terrorism, but there are no courses that will offer this topic for the upcoming fall term.
Students that are currently in national security issues and terrorism feel that the course is just too important to drop from criminal justice altogether.
"This class is informative because it deals with real world issues," said Luke Gulbranson, a criminal justice major.
Gulbranson said that the course has been so informative that it has helped him better understand terrorist situations that he hears about daily.
"If you take this course, you understand better what they are telling you on the news," Gulbranson said.
In the future, Gulbranson hopes to be part of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and he said that this particular course has helped prepare him and other criminal justice majors for situations that they may be walking into as part of their jobs down the road.
"A lot of criminal justice majors are going to be walking into jobs where they might need to deal with terrorist issues, and this course helps prepare them for those types of situations," Gulbranson said.
Geoff Higgins can be reached at: [email protected]
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