In rememberance
For our grandparents, it was the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
For our parents, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
For our older siblings, the explosion of the Challenger spacecraft.
For us, it was Sept. 11, 2001.
“What do they say,” said Roy Lanham, campus minister for the Newman Catholic Center, “each generation has its defining moments, and this is obviously one of the defining moments for the current generation of college students.”
While a majority of current Eastern students were in junior high or high school at the time, many Eastern administrators, faculty and staff remember the day and the impact it had on campus and the Eastern community.
Where were you?
Eastern President Lou Hencken was attending a breakfast meeting with Dan Cougill, mayor of Charleston at the time, and Jeff Cooley, vice president for business affairs, when he heard the news.
Upon hearing from a waitress that a plane had hit the World Trade Center, Hencken, like many others, assumed it was a small plane.
“My concern was how could a pilot hit a building that big,” Hencken said.
After finishing breakfast, Hencken turned on the radio in his car to find out more. The radio announcer then announced the collapse of the first tower.
“This person is in Chicago talking and it was obvious that he was nervous. And it’s like, ‘I have to get back to campus as quickly as I can,'” he said.
Craig Eckert, sociology professor, had just dropped his children off at school in Philo. When he returned home, the television was on “The Today Show.”
“They were showing this (video) of a plane,” Eckert said. “I thought it was like a science fiction thing. I thought they were reviewing a movie.”
The next images gave Eckert an emotionally shocking realization.
“All of a sudden Katie Couric and Matt Lauer were there going, ‘This is not a joke,'” he said. “Just as they’re doing that part, they are showing the live picture of the second plane hitting the building, so then I realized this wasn’t science fiction. This was really occurring.”
Having been raised in New Jersey, right across the river from New York, Eckert had a connection to what was happening.
“Right outside my bedroom window growing up as a kid you could clearly see the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center,” he said. “My dad had helped be an ironworker on some of the construction.”
Lanham was in Springfield attending a meeting at the Catholic pastoral center when he received the news about the terrorist attack. The meeting was cut short, and Lanham spent the two hour drive back to Charleston listening to the news on the radio.
“My reaction was one of disbelief at first,” he said. “Then one of, ‘Oh my God, what have we done?’ I think you might say, ‘Hold on, this was done to us.’ But for me, that was my reaction, ‘What have we done; this world that we live in.”
Campus Life
“When I came back here on campus, I think that probably the easiest way to say it is the entire campus was in shock,” Hencken said. “It’s like ‘How could this have happened to us? What has happened?'”
With each passing minute, new rumors were being spread around campus and more information kept coming in, Hencken said.
“You hear first that the planes hit the World Trade Center, then you hear (a plane) hit the Pentagon, then you hear somebody was killed in San Francisco, and you think the two are together,” he said. “Then you hear that a plane crashed in Pennsylvania, and you’re thinking ‘My goodness, what in the world is happening? Will we be next?'”
Sandy Cox, director of the Counseling Center, said that the mood on campus was one like grief.
“It’s one of those things like grief,” she said, “where initially it’s shock and then it’s just a sadness, and usually, it’s a quiet sadness at first.”
Lanham said that the campus was unusually quiet, and that people were gathering, but only in small groups to do what they needed to do.
“For the most part,” he said, “there was a stunned quiet. Not a healthy quiet, just kind of a stunned quiet. People talking in small groups, people meeting in rooms and calling relatives, some people who had friends in New York calling friends and trying to get through to them, others just calling loved ones.”
Hencken said that student behavior changed greatly on that day too.
“I think if I walked between here and the library right now, you and I could take a walk, and I think we would walk by students and see most of them were smiling, happy, joking, having a good time,” he said. “If I would have walked, as I did, between here and the library, you would see people just walking. Not a lot of talking.”
Lanham said that though there was a general feeling of rage, the students on Eastern’s campus did not act inappropriately.
“There was a lot of rage,” he said. “Though on this campus, credit to the students, there wasn’t people throwing out some pretty nasty names to the few international students we had from the Middle East or people of color.”
Though he was not on campus on Sept. 11, Eckert said something happened in one of his classes the next day he would never forget.
“I actually had a student in one of my classes toward the end of the day going, ‘Dr. Eckert, you’re not going to talk about the 9/11 thing again. We’re not going to give up class time,'” he said.
He said that though the student had the right to voice her opinion, he “found it shocking that something that was so important and clearly changed the nature of our landscape as a nation that a student, not even 24 hours after it, was kind of complaining that this was a topic being discussed in her classes.”
What Was Done?
Many departments and organizations held events and did what they could to help students in need on Sept. 11 and in the following days.
Mark Hudson, director of housing and dining, said that the president and vice presidents immediately called the Emergency Management Team together. The EMT is a group of administrators from different, broad areas of campus.
“We just talked about what’s our strategy for making sure the campus is able to deal with this very big unknown,” he said.
Hudson said the biggest concern was that students of Middle Eastern or foreign background would be stereotyped after the events.
“You need to be aware this is an isolated group of people,” he said. “They need to be held accountable for what they did, but that doesn’t mean that everyone of that same origin has those same intentions.”
Hencken also took steps toward preparing people for what may lie ahead.
“The first thing we did was I worked with the people in the Counseling Center and said, ‘Get ready,'” he said.
Hencken also met with the editorial staff of The Daily Eastern News to figure everything out and to determine where to go next.
One of the primary efforts by the university was to organize a service on the South Quad that afternoon.
“As Americans, we are very ritualistic in our grief and memorial services are a big part of it,” Cox said. “It allows us the time to take that minute to reflect on it, to do something we feel is honoring it, and it makes everyone feel better.”
“One of the things we wanted to do at the memorial service was first to help people feel better,” said Hencken, “but second, to let people know what was done was done by a small group of people.”
According to Hencken, one of the most asked questions was whether or not to hold classes on that day and the day following. The answer was yes.
“We did it based on the fact that President Bush came before the American public and said we must do business as usual,” he said. “We must go on, we can not allow these people to make us sit in our rooms and houses and hide.”
Sue Songer, adviser for international students, said that her department worked to do everything it could to help international students reach their families, despite difficulties of jammed phone lines.
“We opened all our offices that night,” she said. “They were all allowed to call home and tell their parents, ‘We’re safe. We’re okay. Everything is fine.’ Many of the students reported that their parents broke out in tears when they heard their voices.”
According to Songer, the reason that most international parents worried about their children was because they didn’t realize the size of our country.
“They heard this happened in New York City,” she said. “They thought it was just next door to where their children were.”
The Newman Catholic Center also opened its doors to any students in need of help or someone to talk to. The church also held prayer vigils and dedicated mass to the victims of the attack and their families, Lanham said.
“We have a tendency in the Catholic church to also pray for our enemies, so we didn’t just pray for those who fell victim but also for those who perpetrated the crime,” said Lanham.
Five Years Later
Five years have passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but many people still have unanswered questions.
“I guess broad questions come to mind,” Eckert said. “Have we learned anything? Is the so-called war on terror really making us any safer? Is it likely that something like that could happen again? Sadly, I think these are the kinds of questions that we’re not paying enough attention to.”
Richard Wandling, political science department chair, said it is important to look back on the day and the effect it has had on the political foundation of the country.
“I think what’s important is that everyone try to take stalk of it, and not just take stalk of it in terms of what we can do to prevent terrorism from happening in the future,” he said. “But also we think about how our political system might have developed in the last five years because of it.”
Others believe that we are still experiencing the after effects of that day.
When speaking to an honor’s class, Hencken was asked what moments in his career changed his life. One of them was Sept. 11.
“It changed it (my life), and it’s going to change it for you,” Hencken said. “I think there has been a loss of some of our personal freedom and some of our civil liberties. And by and large, people are saying, ‘That’s okay,’ because of the fact they want to be safe.”
Some of the ways we have been affected are by the Patriot Act allowing the government to enter our personal lives and through money being allocated to Homeland Security when it could be going elsewhere, Hencken said.
“It’s affected us, and unfortunately I would like to say it’s over,” he said, “but I’m afraid that there are people out there who don’t really like America.”
Lanham said that looking back on Sept. 11, the event can really be put in perspective as compared to other events of the past five years.
“We have to remember as horrible as the tragedy was on 9/11, it was pretty much relegated to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania,” he said. “So as horrible as that is, we have since seen what a tsunami can do that kills a quarter million people, we have since seen what a hurricane can do like wipe out thousands of homes and coastlines. We have since seen and come to realize and understand how one country can bomb another country back to the Middle Ages.”
Most people agree that today should be a day of remembrance for the lives lost five years ago.
“I think again it is a time just to allow us to take a minute to reflect upon what this has meant to us and to honor those people who had lost their lives and to honor those people who tried to save other people’s lives,” Cox said.
“We’re all going to be thinking about where we were at the moment, where we are five years later,” Lanham said. “I would hope when we pause for our moments Monday it’s not just about reminiscing about where we were and what we were feeling, but that we take a moment to pray for our world and our world leaders. And that we actively say, ‘What can I do to lessen the level of violence in the world in my own heart and in our communities.”
