PORTLAND – Terrorism and its effects have become hot topics in Maine college classrooms. At Bates, a student says you can hardly find a class where they’re not talking about it.

“There’s so many aspects to it that every discipline is affected in some way,” said Bates College senior Will Coghlan, who is also co-editor of the Lewiston school’s student newspaper.

In a class on the French Enlightenment, “we’ve definitely applied some of the basic ideas of ethics and morality and religious tolerance to what’s gone on over the past couple months. Those ideas are 250 years old, but they’re really very relevant to what’s going on,” Coghlan said.

At the University of Southern Maine, local elections are usually the prime topics in November for political science professor Richard Maiman. But this fall, America’s response to terrorism offers a broader lesson.

“The events provide an interesting framework to examine the underlying political culture of the United States,” Maiman said.

“Most students feel their lives have been changed by these events and are looking for ways to understand them and place them in a larger context. That’s true of people in all walks of life, so why shouldn’t it be true of students?”

At Bowdoin College in Brunswick, half of a 16-member class studying the Middle East plan to write term papers on terrorism, according to Sue Danforth, spokeswoman for the private liberal arts college. In the past, one student might have selected that topic, she said.

While there have been reports in other states of enrollment spikes in Army ROTC programs since the September attacks, there have been no increases at the University of Maine in Orono or the University of New Hampshire.