Terror in the Name of God
Why Religious Militants Kill

Jessica Stern PhD 1992
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
New York, NY, 2003

FOR MUCH OF HER professional career, Jessica Stern PhD 1992, now a lecturer at the Kennedy School, has focused on terrorism — through research, teaching, and as a government official at the National Security Council — struggling to make sense of how people purportedly motivated by religious principles can commit violent acts against innocent people. As she writes in the introduction to her new book, Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, she finally resolves to go directly to the source to find her answers: “A few years ago, I decided to do something scholars rarely do: I decided to talk with terrorists.”

In Terror in the Name of God, Stern offers readers an uncommon opportunity to follow her as she journeys to remote regions of the world — sometimes traveling
for days — to find answers. Among her many destinations, Stern travels to Jordan to speak to Hamas leaders; to Indonesia and Pakistan to visit religious radical leaders of jihadi groups; to Jerusalem to visit a Jewish extremist jailed for plotting to blow up Muslim shrines; to Washington, DC, to attend a pro-life fundraiser honoring the ex-convicts of antiabortion crimes; and to a Texas trailer park to visit a former member of a Christian apocalyptic cult.

Stern paints a vivid picture of the people and places she visits, sharing the details
of the food she’s served (Mexican chicken casserole in Burleson, Texas), the clothing she wears to conform to customs (a long skirt, long sleeves, and scarf to cover her hair, neck, and shoulders in ultraorthodox neighborhoods in Jerusalem), the exotic landscapes she encounters (the waterfalls and lakes in Kashmir), and the fear she experiences for her safety as an American woman interacting with known murderers (fierce pounding at her hotel door in the middle of the night in Pakistan).

By providing extensive quotes from her interviews, readers are able to hear the
terrorists in their own words as they express their grievances. “This book,” writes Stern in the introduction, “is about those deeper feelings — the alienation, the humiliation, and the greed that fuel terrorism.” At the end of the almost 300-page book, Stern concludes, “Unless we understand the appeal of participating in extremist groups, and the seduction of finding one’s identity in opposition to Other, we will not get far in our attempts to stop terrorism.”

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Talking to Terrorists

Sitting in her office at the Kennedy School three months after Terror in the Name of God is released, author Jessica Stern is asked if she ever, over the course of her research, feared she might be persuaded by one of the many religious extremists she interviewed. Her response is quick and certain: “Never. I was impressed by their religiosity, faith, and commitment, but I was never impressed by the activities. Even if in some cases the objective is understandable or even laudable, I never met a terrorist where I didn’t feel there was a very serious moral error when the shift was made to take violent action.”

What is also clear to Stern is how hard it would have been after September 11 to accomplish what she had accomplished. Almost all of her interviews were carried out prior to the World Trade Center/Pentagon attacks. “The level of antipathy to the United States has skyrocketed among Islamist groups,” she says, “and even for those whose enemies are local, America is very important, so it’s a very different environment.”

Universities in the Marketplace
The Commercialization of Higher Education

Derek Bok
Princeton University Press
Princeton, NJ, 2003

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard University and a professor at the Kennedy School, writes in his book Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education about the dangers of commercial initiatives at universities, which he defines as efforts to sell the work of universities for a profit.

Throughout this book, he ponders the following questions: Is everything in the university for sale if the price is right? If more and more “products” of the university are sold at a profit, might the lure of the marketplace alter the behavior of professors and university officials, which could change the character of universities for the worse?

In this candid look at the growing commercialization of our academic institutions, Bok illustrates how these ventures are undermining core academic values and suggests ways universities can limit the damage.

Better Together
Restoring the American Community

Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, with Don Cohen
Simon and Schuster
New York, NY, 2003

In this new book, Robert Putnam, professor of public policy at the Kennedy School, and his co-authors use storytelling to illustrate how social capital — defined as social networks, norms of reciprocity, mutual assistance, and trustworthiness — can re-create new forms of community, adapted to the conditions and needs of our time. Putnam and his co-authors reveal how a neighborhood in Roxbury, Massachusetts, unravels and then re-creates itself. Also revealed is UPS’s experience with employee-run committees for health and safety and employee retention.

Stories included in this book are tales about a middle school in a small town in Wisconsin where sixth-graders develop and carry out local improvement projects and an arts project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, that uses modern dance to bridge two different communities.

Plan B
Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble

Lester Brown MPA 1962
W.W. Norton & Company
New York, NY, 2003

“We are asking more of the earth than it can give on an ongoing basis,” writes Lester Brown MPA 1962 in his latest book, Plan B.
Trees are cut faster than they can regenerate. Fish are caught quicker than they can reproduce. Carbon dioxide is released into the air faster than nature can absorb it. According to Brown, president of the Washington, DC-based Earth Policy Institute, the “business-as-usual” approach for dealing with these problems — what he calls Plan A — is no longer working. “The alternative is Plan B,” he writes. “A worldwide mobilization to stabilize population and climate before these issues spiral out of control.”
Part I of the book is the bad news.
It lays out the evidence that we’re in trouble, with sections on falling water tables and advancing deserts. Part II is the good news, with concrete information on how to halt the destruction.
“We can build an economy that does not destroy its natural support systems,” Brown writes. “To paraphrase Franklin Roosevelt at another of those hinge points in history, let no one say it cannot be done.”

The Early Admissions Game
Joining the Elite

Christopher Avery, Andrew Fairbanks MPP 1995, and Richard Zeckhauser
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, MA, 2003

You either love the idea of colleges letting students apply early or you find the practice, which is rapidly growing, totally unfair. Either way, say the authors
of this book, early admissions is the true “big secret” of the getting-in process: Apply early and your chances of being accepted to a top college dramatically improve. But early admissions is also a complicated game that pushes students to make hasty decisions. It also favors the wealthy — those who can hire private counselors and can forfeit the option of negotiating financial aid. Written by two Kennedy School professors (Avery, Zeckhauser) and one former student (Fairbanks, also a former associate dean of admissions at Wesleyan University), Early Admissions looks back at the evolution of early admissions, gives a straightforward assessment of the current situation based on interviews and an examination of more than 500,000 college applications, and offers suggestions for future reforms.