It's a scene that few at Duke would like to contemplate. A militant group opposing U.S. foreign policy seeks to send a message to the American public and releases a lethal biological agent into the newly installed air-conditioning system of Cameron Indoor Stadium during a packed basketball game. Millions of people watching the event on national television look on in terror as fans and players begin coughing unrestrainedly. Police officers and local emergency officials, having trained for just such an attack, act to control the situation as best they can, although some deaths appear inevitable.
For now, such a scenario is just an idea on paper for University security officials, at least as far as the public knows. But the possibility of an attack against a high-profile sporting event--or against any one of a number of other possible campus targets for terrorists--has been keeping Duke police and other area emergency agencies on their toes. The threat is not new, but the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and more recently the U.S. invasion of Iraq, have heightened concern to the point that last month, when American tanks began rolling into Iraq, the University implemented strict new security measures. Police blocked off some campus roads and took up new stations around the University and Medical Center.
The measures did not last long, but officials promised to reimplement them if and when the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raises its threat level to "red." That possibility, and the inconveniences it could impose on people's lives, has left many wondering whether Duke, or any other university, is really at serious risk of a terrorist attack.
"It's extremely difficult to assess the threat," says Chief Clarence Birkhead of the Duke University Police Department. "What we do is, we do our own assessment of what we think our own vulnerabilities are and what could be possible targets, based on information we have collected over the years."
Birkhead has been meeting regularly with other University officials to discuss the threat level. They tend to include high-level administrators--Executive Vice President Tallman Trask, Vice President for Student Affairs Larry Moneta and Associate Vice President for News and Communications David Jarmul, among others. Together, they examine information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies, and they issue policies and warnings like the one last month.
"When hostilities broke out, we didn't know what to expect, and there were just a lot of potential scenarios," Trask says. "We had no idea what was going to happen, but you can imagine the hostilities that could break out in response to the war that we needed to contain. You've got a badly divided country on this issue, and we find ourselves in a badly divided part of the country."
Still, Duke has yet to receive a specific threat of an attack and, Birkhead notes, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has told Congress that the threat to universities is "soft," or not as imminent as the threat to major government buildings. Renee Hoffman, public affairs director of the state's Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, which is coordinating North Carolina's homeland security efforts, calls the threat to the state's universities not particularly high. Terrorists, she notes, usually seek two specific criteria for their targets--symbolic value and potentially high casualties--and universities simply do not fit that description.
"Terrorists like to hit things that are going to cause a great deal of panic and a high casualty count, and people on college campuses tend to be fairly spread out, unlike 101-story office buildings," Hoffman says. "So in terms of, 'Can they create the same type of scare on a college campus?' -- probably not, and probably not on a campus like Duke. If you're in a high-rise university in New York City, that's another story."
Not surprisingly, in a field where little is known for sure, others disagree. Universities often have sensitive research equipment, and they often store large amounts of lethal biological agents or chemicals that could be targets of theft. Indeed, the anthrax scare of fall 2001 began when a Florida man contracted the disease around the time of a visit to Duke, although no direct connection was ever established. Or in a symbolic way, some experts suggest, an attack on young Americans could prove attractive for a group that resents American culture.
"Just as the terrorists claim that our war in Iraq is killing women and children, they may very well choose to reciprocate against targets, such as our young, that would be emotionally telling, that would have significant emotional impact," says Peter Probst, director of programs for the Institute for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. "The children represent the greatest emotional vulnerability we have, and the safety of our young is a matter of great concern."
With the threat level so uncertain, then, many universities are preparing for the worst and planning for specific contingencies. For Duke that means mainly protecting sporting events, the Chapel, the Allen Building, various research labs and the Hospital, and it means training emergency officials in everything from manning check-points to identifying weapons of mass destruction. Last month's tightened security was a valuable warm-up during which the police were able to gauge the public's readiness.
The hope, Trask says, is that the public's awareness is high enough and that he and other administrators meet enough to prepare appropriately.
"We're going to see how events unfold," he says. "I'm sure we have not met for the last time."
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