Department of ‘Your Name Here’

Harvard does not sell the naming rights to academic departments. In a pinch, such a strategy might raise a few million dollars for the school—and would likely reach a logical end with the “J.P. Morgan Faculty of Arts and Sciences”—but everyone knows that the school is not exactly cash-strapped

There do exist, however, even more absurd methods for naming a department. Ask the United States government, which could not have done worse its current moniker for our consolidated domestic security bureaucracy: the “Department of Homeland Security.”

“Homeland Security” is a chilling and artless term—both for its linguistic similarity to the terminology of totalitarianism, and for the inaccurate and unhealthy implication that America is a “homeland.” And the term’s ties to an unfortunate set of policies further magnify its natural lack of grace. Now, in the midst of a contentious presidential campaign, is the proper moment to address the issue of the department’s inappropriate call sign. I want to see one of the candidates propose some—in fact, almost any—alternative. The “Department of Domestic Security.” The “Federal Security Department.” Even the “Department of Milk and Cookies.” Such a proposal could serve the next president as the first signal of a broader process to demonstrate to our friends an America reconsidering the shadow it casts in the world.

Even at the time of its creation, the lexicology of “Homeland Security” drew fire. In 2002 conservative columnist Peggy Noonan suggested that George W. Bush reconsider the name. “Homeland isn’t really an American word,” the former Reagan advisor opined in The Wall Street Journal, “It has a vaguely Teutonic ring--Ve must help ze Fuehrer protect ze Homeland!”

Noonan seems to have struck the source of the visceral unease that the term provokes. “Homeland Security” resembles a call for devotion to safeguarding some German “fatherland” or Soviet “motherland.”

The term seems to achieve such an effect from a combination of two characteristics: first, by indicating that the well-being of the domineering “land” takes precedence over that of its people, and second, by the choice of Germanic word-collision over more harmonious Latinate diction such as “domestic.” And the effect does not seem to have diminished in the six years since Noonan’s column. For the listener able to ignore the term’s ubiquity, “Homeland Security” retains its sinister ring.

What is more, the drive to recast our great nation as a “homeland” belittles America as an ideal. Americans have never been defined by a common geographic or ethnic heritage so much as by a shared investment in a set of democratic values. What sets the United States apart from almost any nation on earth is this conception that we are a people bound together more by our beliefs than by a common origin in some racial or ethnic “homeland.” As Tocqueville said of the earliest settlers, “they hoped for the triumph of an ideal.” It may seem trivial to some, but to call America a “homeland” is to forget what makes our nation truly exceptional. For our own government to reinforce this misconception does a disservice to our public discourse.

(And let us not forget that America most certainly did not live up to her professed ideals with regards to the people whose “homeland” this truly is—namely, “Native Americans.” This provides another ground on which to steer clear of references to the American “homeland”).

The benefit of a lexicographic “regime change” on this issue would not confine itself to our borders. Such a reform would also signal to the entire globe a change in the attitude of America’s foreign policy. An obsession with “Homeland Security” projects an insular view of American responsibility to the world, and abandoning the term would rightly project a national quest to seek a more reasoned—rather than fanatical—balance between short-term security interests and longer run diplomatic goals.

To do away with the department itself is not an option; America obviously requires an inward-looking security service. The term “Homeland Security,” however, has been so stigmatized by abuses at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility and by invasive customs procedures at American ports of entry that a change in terminology would be a significant symbol of America’s desire to reconnect with the world. And history shows precedence for such a symbolic action: it is not for nothing that on the eve of the Cold War, with America seeking to present a non-aggressive face to the world, the “Department of War” became the “Department of Defense.”

In response to numerous surveys confirming falling opinions of the United States around the world, the Commission on Smart Power—a bipartisan project chaired by Kennedy School of Government professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. and former Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage—has suggested that the emphasis on a narrow “War on Terror” driven by self-interest should be replaced by “an American commitment to providing for the global good.” More than a symbol, then, the act of reconsidering “Homeland Security” can serve as the first step in demonstrating America’s commitment to the world. It would show an America seeking a more well-reasoned approach to foreign policy: a president who took the fascist connotations of “Homeland Security” seriously would not stand for the legalist parsing prevalent in the so-called “torture memos.”

Renaming one government department will hardly be the toughest decision faced by our next president. Rather, that individual’s most crucial task will be to stake out a position for America in the 21st century world as more than a crotchety and insecure bully. As such, the next president cannot stay home and build ever higher walls. He—or she—must seek to engage with our global partners with ambitions of advancing reason and forging compromise, and should acknowledge this necessity by pledging to eliminate the term “Homeland Security.”





Max J. Kornblith ’10, a Crimson editorial editor, is a social studies concentrator in Cabot House.