ABOUT A YEAR ago, when I flew home for a holiday, I had a view of the Pentagon as my plane left Reagan National Airport. I looked down at the building, the headquarters of the Defense Department and an icon of military might, and – seven years removed from the attacks that defined a decade – I could see it only as a symbol of vulnerability.

Armed with knives and a willingness to die for an extremist cause, 19 young Middle Eastern men changed the world on Sept. 11, 2001, the day the drone of planes flying to and from the airport for once fell silent. Georgetown, as an institution and as a community, was changed forever in the process.

**Extremely Fast and Incredibly Close**

Thirty-four minutes after hijackers drove a passenger jet into the second Twin Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon. Sixty-four people on board, including alumna [Lisa Raines](https://www.thehoya.com/news/obituary-raines-l-82-on-flight-77/) (LAW ’82) and Georgetown public policy professor [Leslie Whittington](https://www.thehoya.com/news/georgetowns-whittington-dies-in-crash/), her husband and two daughters, died on impact.

It was 9:37 a.m. on a Tuesday.

The headlines in The Hoya, which published its [fourth issue of the semester](https://www.thehoya.com/issues/2001/09/11/) that day, were immediately rendered irrelevant. Georgetown’s new U.S. News and World Report ranking, a grant to the Medical Center and the recent victories of the women’s soccer team no longer mattered.

By the time the Twin Towers fell and the fires of the Pentagon were extinguished, 11 alumni and two Georgetown employees – Whittington and Sandra Teague, a physical therapist at the Medical Center – were dead. Part of the most devastating terrorist attack ever to strike U.S. soil had come within three miles of the Hilltop, leaving a student body, faculty and administration reeling.

Georgetown was overridden by confusion and anxiety; all that was clear was that something catastrophic was in progress. Cell phone networks were jammed. A plane remained lost, the networks said. D.C. news outlets reported bombs at the White House and the Capitol, as well as fires on the National Mall. As staff writer Tim Haggerty [reported](https://www.thehoya.com/news/gu-life-gu-faces-time-of-crisis-as-community/) in The Hoya, armored cars dotted M Street, fighter jets crisscrossed the skies above D.C., and helicopters armed with gun and missile turrets passed campus over the Potomac.

Washington had become a world of smoke and sirens. No one knew where this “creeping horror” – as The New York Times would call it – had come from, or if it had ended.

The American flag on Copley Lawn was lowered to half-staff within an hour of the crash at the Pentagon. Students and faculty, released from classes at noon, watched smoke rise across the river from the Village A rooftops and Key Bridge. Others gathered around televisions in common rooms. Meanwhile, the Department of Public Safety tightened security by checking visitors’ bags, monitoring vehicle entrances to campus and extending shifts for officers. Georgetown University Hospital [treated one survivor](https://www.thehoya.com/news/gu-hospital-hospital-enters-disaster-mode-treats-one-pentagon-victim/) from the Pentagon, Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, for burns.

Charles Nailen (SFS ’04), The Hoya’s senior photography editor at the time, walked to the Pentagon after watching smoke rise from the Pentagon from afar. “As I made my way down the river, I remember the contrast of calmness and chaos around me,” he recalled eight years later. “It was surreal, like a movie set. . There were no tears or people crying like I had seen at accidents and fires before. Everyone seemed to be in complete shock.”

**Healing on the Hilltop**

The hours and days that followed were marked by displays of solidarity, community outreach efforts and prayer. By all accounts, university officials and Campus Ministry worked around the clock to help students, faculty and staff cope with what had transpired.

The afternoon of Sept. 11, Campus Ministry held a prayer service in the Leavey Center. On Wednesday, Sept. 12, an [interfaith candlelight vigil](https://www.thehoya.com/news/candlelight-vigil-faiths-unite-after-terrorist-attack/) took place in Copley Crypt, as well as a Muslim prayer service and a Catholic Mass. D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of the Washington Archdiocese visited Gaston Hall on Thursday for an interfaith prayer service.

In the wake of an attack that seemed to be of unprecedented scope, students strained to express their emotional responses. “This is a way I could show my support,” Lynn Desrosiers (SFS ’02) said of the vigil she attended Wednesday evening. “It’s the only thing we can do.”

Students chalked the words “Say a prayer” on sidewalks around campus and hung American flags from dormitory windows. Georgetown University Hospital was so overwhelmed with people seeking to donate blood that administrators had to urge them to stay home via e-mail.

Georgetown College Dean Jane McAuliffe supervised the [Day of Dialogue](https://www.thehoya.com/news/gu-reaction-day-of-dialogue-fosters-discussion/), a five-hour panel held on Wednesday in ICC Auditorium, during which 10 Georgetown professors rotated as panelists and facilitated discussion of the issues raised by the attacks.

Though a number of universities across the country cancelled classes on Wednesday, Georgetown decided to proceed in an effort to “move forward,” as the university’s new president, John J. DeGioia, wrote in an e-mail sent to the campus community. The university sought a balance between maintaining routine and respecting the gravity of the attacks; on Friday, classes ended at 11:50 a.m. and the Healy Hall bell tolled in honor of a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance that had been declared by President George W. Bush.

**”A Watershed Event in American History”**

The community took little time to recognize the geopolitical significance of what had happened. Hoya Staff Writer [David Wong called the attacks](https://www.thehoya.com/news/news-analysis-a-watershed-moment-in-american-history/) “the seminal moment of an era, the catalyst of events that will define a generation.”

“It’s a watershed event in American history,” security studies professor Audrey Kurth Cronin said. “There is not a precedent we can follow.”

“[The attacks] awoke us . from a gentle slumber of indifference and pettiness,” wrote the presidents of the Georgetown University College Democrats and Republicans in a joint viewpoint published in The Hoya. The old America, they said, was gone.

In a [prescient viewpoint](https://www.thehoya.com/opinion/how-our-world-will-change-after-tuesday/) published on Sept. 14, Cronin discussed the “extremely strong pressures to `do something'” in predicting the course the Bush administration would take. “There will be a formal or informal declaration of `war’ against the perpetrators, as well as concerted, intense efforts to identify a target or targets for a military response,” she wrote. “These pressures will carry with them the danger of believing that a `war’ can be `won’ against terrorists with traditional military means alone.”

In a

For the most part, however, the student body had few answers – only questions. What would happen next? How should one react?

“We are standing together at the top of a precipice so unnerving because no one can possibly know what to expect on the other side,” Laurie Minglelli (COL ’02) wrote. “We are standing at the edge of uncharted territory.”

**”A Quiet Seething”**

Confusion, sadness – “and anger, too, was there, although I’m not sure anyone knew whom or what to be angry at,” said professor Charles King, a member of the Day of Dialogue panel.

embers of Georgetown’s Muslim community [expressed concerns](https://www.thehoya.com/news/muslims-fear-hostility-after-attack/) about this anger because of the media’s focus on Muslim suspects and reports of verbal and physical harassment of Muslims around the United States. “The media has clearly been biased against Muslims,” said Imam Yahya Hendi, now director of Muslim chaplaincy. “I believe the media is inflaming the crisis.”

“I’m afraid that progress for Muslims will turn back,” Sadaf Jaffer (SFS ’05) said.

In The Hoya, the Muslim Student Association [urged members of the university community](https://www.thehoya.com/opinion/in-time-of-crisis-americans-must-act-with-tolerance/) to reject “false associations of our religion with the perpetrators alleged to have committed these acts.”

Professor John Esposito, the founding director of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, said he did not recall reports of any acts on campus reflecting anti-Muslim animus. Esposito said the attacks set back the progress of the center – and the country – in ameliorating and developing Muslim-Christian relations by about 10 years; at the same time, he said, the work of the center “increased exponentially” in the aftermath.

According to Esposito and Nailen, Georgetown took a leading role after 9/11 in efforts nationwide to promote understanding across cultural and religious barriers.

“Georgetown has been a leader in building understanding and dialogue on the global implications that first came to light on [Sept. 11],” Nailen said.

**After the Fall**

“The world – the one we had been warned about in history books and by parents and grandparents – was suddenly before us, in our backyards and living rooms. It was not going away; it never will,” wrote The Hoya’s editorial board on Sept. 14. The days of an inward-looking Georgetown – and United States – were over.

9/11 changed more than Georgetown’s security protocols; it gave the university a new orientation. The attacks contributed to a transformation that would continue over the course of the decade, as Georgetown took on a more global outlook and gained international renown.

That day also reformulated the university’s academic outlook. “There wasn’t a single issue that caused 9/11, but a complex set of issues with political, religious and economic repercussions,” Nailen said. Georgetown’s faculty and students have, in a diversity of ways, sought to confront those issues in the intervening years: by engaging with the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, for instance, and by committing to educating foreign students at the School of Foreign Service in Qatar since its foundation in 2005.

As [DeGioia wrote](https://www.thehoya.com/opinion/georgetown-has-a-unique-mission-in-crisis/) in a viewpoint in The Hoya three days after the attacks, Georgetown emerged from the haze a leader. “As an international community, Georgetown fosters a spirit of cooperation and understanding among the diverse communities that make our campus such a vibrant place,” DeGioia wrote. “As a university, Georgetown has a special role to play. . We contribute to the body of knowledge and public discourse as the nation seeks understanding and healing.”

9/11 took more than a dozen members of the Georgetown community, nearly 3,000 others, and – some have said – America’s innocence. It also gave Georgetown a mission.

SOON, STUDENTS WITH no personal recollections of Sept. 11, 2001, will begin to matriculate at Georgetown. 9/11 will take its place as the most prominent of recent horrors in the American imagination – the first in the series of unfortunate geopolitical events that has set this decade apart from all others – rather than the visceral, disquieting memory it remains for the current denizens of the Hilltop.

But 9/11 will not fade from the consciousness of Georgetown as an institution anytime soon; the horrors of that day grazed Georgetown too closely and redirected the university’s path forward too decisively. Long after Georgetown watched the smoke of the damaged Pentagon fade, the memories of that day – the sights and sounds of the attacks, the lives they took and the implications they had – will linger.”