In honor of the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we will look back at the Student Movement archive from the day after 9/11. As we students do not remember the attack, since we were either not born or too young, the archives and my interview with Dr. Gonzalez (2003 graduate of AU) present an insightful description of the feelings of fear, confusion, and solidarity experienced by America and the Andrews community.
Student Movement Volume 87, Number 3, 9/12/2001:
As of six p.m. Tuesday evening, buildings still blaze near the site of what used to be the World Trade Center, a building once filled with nearly 50,000 employees.
An event that reached across the nation to touch millions of lives, students at Andrews University were equally shocked by the news, some rushing from chapel upon the announcement.
Televisions set up all over campus continue to draw people, and Student Services saw a long line of students filing through their office to take up Dr. Hoilette’s chapel-time offer of calling home on the AU dollar.
Mass hysteria grips the nation as local gas prices soar to $5 a gallon and station attendants confess they don’t know when the next shipment will arrive. The paranoia has similarly affected the American Stock Exchange and Nasdaq, both of whom will remain closed on Wednesday, along with most of the businesses across the nation, and the FAA has announced the cancellation of commercial flights until noon Wednesday.
The USS George Washington and the USS John F. Kennedy have been deployed to the New York coast, while other ships sent out to sea are frigates and guided missile destroyers capable of shooting down aircraft.
While the borders of Canada and Mexico have not yet closed down, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has prepared emergency-response teams in the case that biowarfare should happen to break out.
Reflections from Dr. Daniel Gonzalez-Socoloske, current professor of biology at Andrews University and graduate from the class of 2003, 9/16/2021, (edited for length and clarity):
I remember being woken up by my roommate who was the RA of the hall. If I recall, it happened early at around eight or nine in the morning. And this is the time when cell phones were just kind of kicking up, so only some of us had cell phones. But we all had TVs in the dorm rooms, and so we clicked on the TV and every channel was showing a live feed of the smoldering tower.
This is when only one tower was hit, and there were a lot of questions, and we were all asking each other what was going on. Nobody understood that it was an attack, but all the TV channels and news networks were all tuned into this, so we watched in real time. I remember hearing about the Pentagon being hit, but we never saw footage of that. I remember being glued to the TV and watching the plane hit the second tower. And just the gasp of seeing that explosion, because we didn't even know what had hit the first tower. It was all hearsay at that point. We didn't know it was an airliner, and there were talks that it was a Cessna or a small plane or something else.
But we literally watched the second tower get hit and then it started to sink in. I remember watching both towers go down on live television, one after the other, and it was surreal. It was like you were watching a movie. Keep in mind, this is at the time when Hollywood was putting things out like “Independence Day”, so we had already seen CGI of the White House and other iconic buildings explode or collapse. And that's literally what it felt like, except that this was real. And so it was such a mix of emotions.
As a result, the campus just froze the whole day. None of us did anything other than watch TV. We were just glued to the TV so we would get constant updates and a live feed from New York. When the towers went down, it was just, I mean, I don't know how to describe that feeling.
The university put out an announcement at some point that morning that classes were being canceled and that students were encouraged to meet for prayer at PMC church. And there were counselors on hand to assist students, as we had a lot of students from New York and New Jersey, and a lot of them of course were devastated.
It was one of those moments in life where you felt even in the moment that life would never be the same. And life was never the same. I'm getting the same vibe with this pandemic; we're going to look at it as a before and after. And for my life, it caught me right as I was around 20 years old. I was your age. And I can very much point to before 9/11 and after and everything that changed: air travel changed completely, the way we looked at each other changed, the way that we interacted. We engaged in this war that just now we are officially closing after 20 years. Things were definitely never the same.
The university mobilized pretty quickly. They organized a bus with anybody that wanted to go to New York to volunteer, to help in whatever capacity. They didn't know exactly how, but they had at least a busload of Andrew students who went to New York close to ground zero. They helped out in various capacities by either praying with people or with mental aid.
At Andrews there was this desire to want to do something, but we didn't know how to help. We were all shell-shocked. Especially with the number of missing people and the wild estimates of how many people had perished.
Certainly at no point in my lifetime had I ever felt a direct attack by another organization or nation towards the United States and, you know, especially not on our soil. And so we were all in sort of unchartered waters. But Andrews was very responsive. They canceled classes that day and I'm pretty sure for the days after there was a soft entry back into coursework.
There was a lot of mental fatigue that the students were going through, certainly those from the New York area, but even for the rest of us it was very difficult to focus. Again, a lot of parallels with the mental grief that we're going through with this global pandemic. Except in that case, it did more to unify the United States and create a solidarity that everybody felt. There was an amazing moment of flattening the world, where you saw every nation expressing strong solidarity. And there was this pride of being an American in this notion that there was a togetherness that I haven't felt since. It would be interesting how that would work in today's political environment. There was no blaming each other, and there wasn't this notion of one political party versus another. Everyone understood we were all Americans, and it was a very sort of somber moment for our nation.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.