Published: May 16, 2008 12:00 am            

Former OU professor donates collection to terrorism institute

Transcript Staff Writer

Before the Oklahoma City bombing brought terrorism to the public eye, there wasn't much research in the study of terrorism.

In fact, Dr. Stephen Sloan said only about two dozen people in the U.S. were studying terrorism -- and Sloan was one of them.

Sloan has studied the field since the 1960s. And although he's now a professor and fellow of the Global Perspectives Office at the University of Central Florida, he studied terrorism for nearly 40 years as a professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Thursday, he returned to the state to donate his collection of terrorism research materials to the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City.

As one of the foremost terrorism experts at the time of the Murrah Federal Building bombing, Sloan was on the steering committee that formed MIPT in 1999. The nonprofit operates a training and education center informing the response community, academia and the public about terrorism.

The collection he donated to the institute consists of books, journals, videos and periodicals on terrorism that span Sloan's career. A number of the items come from early in his career, items that can be hard to come by now.

The research related to terrorism has largely been in the last decade or so. When Sloan began studying terrorism, he said it was hard to get people in the U.S. interested in it.

"There still was a view that terrorism happened to other people in other countries," Sloan said.

But he kept up his research, providing simulations of terrorist attacks and teaching one-of-a-kind classes at OU on terrorism.

Because Oklahoma is a smaller state, there wasn't as much red tape to go through. Sloan found people willing to study potential terrorist threats and get the state prepared to respond to terrorism. As a result, Oklahoma had the earliest terrorism preparedness training in the country.

At the same time, Oklahoma is a long way from Washington, D.C., so it was hard to get the federal government to listen to the research coming out of the state, Sloan said.

OU was supportive, but only to a point. Sloan wanted to establish a center for the study of terrorism.

"It was an idea before its time and, frankly, I've always regretted OU didn't act on it," Sloan said.

But Sloan continued his research, including terrorism preparedness studies in the Oklahoma City area. Sloan repeatedly identified the Murrah building as one of the government buildings most vulnerable to attack. But in the end this was only sad and ironic, Sloan said

"I never thought the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history would occur 10 blocks from my house," he said.

When the building was bombed, Sloan became the on-hand terrorism expert, doing nearly 200 international interviews in the wake of the tragedy.

Since then, there has been much more interest in the threat from terrorism.

Kelly Damphousse, associate dean in OU's College of Arts and Sciences, said he has studied domestic terrorism since 1994. But it was only after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that he was able to get government funding for his research or major attention to the findings.

Damphousse came to OU in 1997, and at that time if anyone in the state had a question about terrorism, they came to Sloan.

"The major impetus of terrorism research at OU was Steve Sloan," Damphousse said.

The research at OU encompassed other areas, too, including the Health Sciences Center and the Department of Sociology.

"So the University of Oklahoma has been doing cutting edge research ... since Steve Sloan came to OU, but really that's been accelerated since 1995," Damphousse said.

The study of terrorism has increased exponentially in recent years, but it still has a long way to go. Many of the most brilliant scholars are still young, Sloan said.

"They lack the expertise level so they're on a steep learning curve," he said.

And the key to dealing with terrorism in the future lies with education, he said. The U.S. needs to be more knowledgeable about the threat out there, he said, "instead of simply reacting to it."

Since the Oklahoma City bombing, the federal government has prioritized the study of and response to terror. But Sloan said the state and local level of terrorism response still needs a lot of improvement.

"There's been great advances done, but ultimately all terrorism is local because who's going to have to respond but the local level," Sloan said.

Julianna Parker 366-3541 jparker@normantranscript.com

        

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