Four years ago, the class of 2005 arrived on campus like any other group of freshmen – eager and a little nervous.
Then, just a few days into their college careers, came the terrible jolt of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Some were shuffling in and out of morning classes when the news hit, followed by the realization they would have to confront a suddenly scarier world away from home, in the company of unfamiliar faces.
Many of those students are graduating this month. For this group, the attacks were a defining experience of their college years, the moment when the identity of the class of ‘05 was forged.
“We were all shocked together, and we were all confused together, and we were all mourning together,” said Elizabeth Tomber, who graduated last week from the University of Dayton in Ohio.
For some, like Tomber, the attacks nudged their academic trajectories. Her interest shifted from Judaism to Islam, and her planned major from religious studies to international studies. She also took Arabic, studied in Morocco and will be in Egypt next year.
Others were prompted to reconsider what they wanted from college. Margaret Cahoon transferred from Barnard College in New York City to Amherst, in a small Massachusetts town where she thought she would feel more comfortable.
“The city is already kind of an alienating place to start,” said Cahoon, who graduates May 22. “The way the city dealt with it was amazing, but at the same time I felt cut off from the people I know and love.”
For still others, such as Clinton Rusch, the attacks proved to be a turning point not just in their academic careers but in their lives.
“My first two years of college, looking back I think the biggest thing I was lacking was some kind of direction, some kind of structure,” Rusch said. He had dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and was working in a hotel at the time of the attacks.
But watching the World Trade Center rescue workers inspired him to join the National Guard.
“I realized I wasn’t doing what I should be doing,” Rusch said. “My parents’ generation had their opportunity to contribute and my grandparents’ generation definitely had their opportunity to contribute. Here was mine.”
Later, he returned to Wisconsin in the ROTC program. After finishing up some coursework this summer, he will graduate and receive his commission in August.
“It was a horrible tragedy, but I’m lucky I had something to redirect my life like that,” he said. “Had Sept. 11 not happened, I probably would have gone back to college, but I wouldn’t have been as motivated and as disciplined as I am.”
For most students, the effects were less clear-cut, but still real. Academically, many students signed up for courses in areas such as Middle Eastern studies and history. Enrollment in Arabic nearly doubled in 2002.
Students say the attacks ushered in a period, at least, of serious debates about politics and religion on campus.
“For an international studies major, it made what I was studying real,” said Tomber. “You can’t ignore that international politics and foreign policy matter when something like that happens.”
But some say the seriousness after Sept. 11 petered out.
“It sort of astonishes me that it sort of fell off the radar screen, psychically, except for the students – we have a lot – from New York, New Jersey,” said Rev. Mark Radecke, chaplain at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. “I wish I could tell you it was different.”
At Connecticut College in New London, 200 students signed up for a “religion and terrorism” class in the spring of 2002. But after that, Professor Eugene Gallagher said, life, and the students’ academic interests, more or less returned to normal.
“It’s part of the baggage they carry forward with them, but for the vast majority it’s not that central,” said Gallagher, a 27-year teaching veteran at the school.
Still, college is about more than the classes. And some students say the attacks, though traumatic, brought them closer to their classmates for the four years that followed.
“That event did make us open up to each other in a way would have eventually, but it happened much more quickly,” said Paige Wallace, who said the attacks initially caused her to question her decision to come to Amherst, a school far from her home of Healdton, Okla.
“Any time you go through that amount of pain, experiencing it as a group ties you together,” she said.
That was especially true for the students who were physically close to the disaster.
“It wasn’t so much the events of Sept. 11 that shaped our class as how we responded,” said Keith McGilvery, a senior at Fordham University in New York who recalled watching the twin towers burn from his freshman-year residence hall. “We were new freshmen, but within minutes students were on the phone, trying to console friends, help them find parents.”
McGilvery, who later became student body president, said the attacks were one reason he spent five months traveling abroad, hoping to better understand the United States’ role in the world and prepare for a career in journalism.
“Even though (Sept. 11) was incredibly upsetting and unfortunate,” he said, “it really almost served as a catalyst to put my class into action and hash out what we wanted to do with our lives.”
AP-ES-05-13-05 1424EDT
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