Professional Security Magazine editor Mark Rowe continues (from part one) a round-up of what academic and other courses are around, for the security professional, whether to reinforce the line of work they’re in, or to further their career by taking it in a different direction.
One of the oldest universities around is St Andrew’s on the east Scottish coast, and its Handa Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV) is one of the oldest in the academic field of counter-terror, too. It offers a masters (MLitt) in Terrorism and Political Violence, full-time in Fife or part-time by distance learning (four modules and a dissertation). Distance learners use the Moodle eLearning platform, where you access materials for study and pre-recorded lectures. Online tutorials are over Zoom, where students discuss with a module tutor. Not as long as the MLitt is a certificate, with some topics directly about security, such as personnel security, and Critical Infrastructure Protection. It has three intakes a year.
Leicester
Leicester was once the premier place, not that there were many to choose from, to do a security-risk degree. Now Leicester’s more of a general criminology department, and offers a master’s in terrorism, security and policing instead (taking two years, part-time; one year, full). Adrian Beck who studied retail shrinkage is now an emeritus professor; an associate professor is Dr Matt Hopkins, whose PhD was about crime against small businesses.
Bucks New: aviation
Buckinghamshire New University works with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) on its part-time, distance learning MSc in aviation security, like many master’s degrees for someone already in that field, or wanting to specialise there. Down the road from Bucks New is RAF High Wycombe the headquarters base. Year one is about risks; year two about stakeholders, and resilience, and you write a dissertation. Course leader is Rhania Khbais, who in her years as a consultant in the Gulf became the first Arab female ICAO-qualified aviation security manager and instructor (the basis of her dissertation as part of her Bucks New master’s). Alongside her is Maitland Hyslop, someone who it’s hard to sum up in one line: a former soldier, and since consultant, company non-exec, author and lecturer. The uni plans a similar MSc in critical infrastructure security, to start in the autumn, covering the protection of CI from ‘attack, disruption and damage’, from such threats as cyber crime, terrorism and activism. Both courses’ tuition fees are £5,450 a year; if you’re in the forces you may be eligible for funding under the Ministry of Defence’s Enhanced Learning Credits (ELC) scheme. Bucks New’s one year, full-time MSc in cyber security (tuition fee: £13,200) has a partnership with Amazon for running Amazon AWS Academy.
South Wales MSc
Some institutions link their security-related courses to the two-year (accelerated) first degree course they offer in policing, the commonly required route now required for someone to enter the police as a constable. The University of South Wales, for example, offers courses for police entrants, besides an MSc International Security and Risk Management, taught on campus or online.
Protective security
While the actual content from this autumn is still to be finalised, Coventry University offers courses in Protective Security and Resilience. That covers things arguably less considered in the industry, let alone in academia, such as the insider threat, and personnel security. You can choose from: a Postgraduate Certificate taking eight months, a Postgraduate Diploma taking 16 months, and the MSc taking two years (though you could cut a third off, if you satisfy the uni in terms of ‘Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning’; in other words, what you can point to already. The longer the course the more they cost: the PG Cert, £3533, the PG Dip £7066 and the master’s £10,600. Coventry may be about as far from the sea as you can be in England, but it offers those same three qualifications in maritime security. Among the profs there are Paul Martin, the former director of security at the Houses of Parliament and the author of the highly-rated book The Rules of Security.
Oxbridge
Note that some of these unis are not the most famous or highly-rated; some haven’t even been around for many years. Oxbridge remains among the world’s premier seats of learning (pictured; Oxford). If you want to plug into that, one option is Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, mulling over existential risks such as leaks of pathogens from laboratories or misuse of artificial intelligence so that machines take over. A Senior Research Fellow at the Institute is the philosopher Toby Ord, author of The Precipice, who in 2021 said: “Extreme risks define our time. By my estimate, the likelihood of the world experiencing an existential catastrophe over the next 100 years is one in six — Russian Roulette. We cannot survive many centuries operating at a level of extreme risk like this. The government needs to make serious efforts now to increase our resilience to these threats.”
However, as a student you might never see these people. You can get a free taster at many institutions; Cambridge’s Institute of Criminology, for example, runs ‘public Thursday seminars’ that you can attend in person or see on Zoom. That Institute is slanted towards police, which is why you may see top cops with MSt (master of studies) after their name – those courses directed by the former chief constable Dr Peter Neyroud.
For the third and final part of ‘your career options’, click here.
