NU named Center of Excellence in Information Assurance

By Lee Marshal
Norwich Guidon Staff Writer

Beginning in the 2001 academic year, the National Security Agency has designated Norwich University as a center of academic excellence in information assurance education for the next three years.

This designation was bestowed upon the university as a result of numerous applications sent by Phil Susmann, the Norwich University Chief Information Officer, and Professor Tom Aldrich to the NSA, America’s information defense agency.

“Norwich can benefit greatly from this opportunity,” Aldrich said. “We will receive formal recognition from the United States Government, which will be in the form of an official Government Certificate. Initiative in the form of scholarships from the government will be provided to the universities who have been designated as Centers for Academic Excellence.”

Susmann said it took more than scholastic aptitude for Norwich to receive the designation.

“To be a ‘center of excellence,’ you not only have to have the curriculum but you also have to have outreach into the communities,” Susmann said. “There are not a lot of schools that have the set of rigorous guiding values that Norwich has.”

According to a Norwich Media Information Paper, “The program’s goal is to reduce vulnerabilities in the National Information Infrastructure by promoting higher education in information assurance, and producing a growing number of professionals with information assurance expertise in various disciplines.”

In June 1999, a Department of Commerce report estimated that the U.S would require more than 1.3 million new highly skilled information technology workers between 1996 and 2006.

For Norwich University students, the designation means a head start on other institutions in job areas that require special training in computer crime and forensics and in information assurance.

Being one of twenty-three schools in the nation designated as a center of excellence, Norwich has an advantage on hundreds of schools in the country by offering new classes such as Network Security, Contemporary Issues in Computer Science, Advanced Operating Systems, Computer Forensics, Information Systems Security Assurance and Cyber Crime. The prerequisites for these new courses are those core courses that students with Criminal Justice, Computer Science, or Computer Information Systems majors would already be taking in the 200, 300, and 400 levels.

The White House and the NSA (National Security Agency) have acknowledged the need for intensive higher education in all aspects of what we now refer to as Information Assurance.

The NSA is the Nation’s cryptologic organization. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect U.S. information systems and produce foreign intelligence information according to the NSA website (www.nsa.gov).

“Phil Susmann and Colonel Aldrich have done a masterful job getting us a national center of excellence designation,” university president Richard Schneider said. “I think from the very founding of Norwich we were supposed to be educating students to preserve the republic and to fight off the threats that were possible against us.”

President Schneider is hopeful that the new designation will prove helpful in raising Norwich University’s public image and will give university students the opportunity to meet interesting individuals from various technological fields.

“We are going to have visitors on our campus to look at the army of the future,” according to Schneider. “I want the whole world to know about Norwich. We will have speakers here and national experts and international experts coming to campus, and that is very exciting for students to rub shoulders with people like that. And we’ve added a couple national experts to our faculty this year, said Schneider.

One international expert who has already agreed to speak at Norwich is Professor Michel E. Kabay.

In 1982, Kabay won the Systems Engineer of the Year Award. He has written security columns for trade magazines such as Computer World, Secure Computing Magazine, Network World, Computing Canada and many others.

Kabay has published over 250 technical papers in operations management and security, along with completing a college textbook. He received his Ph.D. in 1976 from Dartmouth in applied statistics and invertebrate zoology.

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