"I was looking for something to take us back home," said Lehman, who was a senior with Cooper at the Spence School, a private girls' school in Manhattan, when the two World Trade Center towers collapsed. "I spent the last year trying to push those memories away. I thought I needed to spend the day thinking about it."
Wednesday was a day of reflection across campus. A solemn tone was struck early, as a single chime rang out on six different occasions, each corresponding to the moment that the four planes crashed and the World Trade Center towers collapsed.
Throughout the day, groups small and large gathered to hear physicians and policy analysts, religion experts and legal scholars, try to make sense of the painful events of the last year.
Trees were planted and prayers were said in memory of the six Duke alumni killed in the attacks. In Duke Hospital, staff, patients and visitors posted their thoughts at three writing stations.
And in classes, such as Charles-Philippe David's political science course, "War and Peace After 9-11," students debated what has changed in the world during the past year. Not much, senior Reuben Manning told classmates. "There have been planes hijacked before, and there will be planes hijacked in the future," he said. "It's not necessarily that the nature of terrorism has changed; it's just the stage is bigger."
Other students said they felt much had changed, from the restrictions imposed on travel to Americans' new sense of vulnerability.
Back on the chapel steps, Antonio Arce, a doctoral student in Latin American politics, said he felt emotionally drained by the one-year anniversary. "After all the stories came out of people's lives and who they lost and all the tragedies that took place in the buildings, today actually brought more tears than when it happened."
Lina Adilah, a librarian at Perkins Library, voiced a note of optimism: "I think people are more united than before and there is more tolerance for other cultures. You just feel people are kinder, you can see it in their eyes. They want to help, rather than just walking on by."
Listed below is a snapshot of Wednesday's activities around campus:
Memorial service outside Duke Chapel
Flanked by uniformed Duke and Durham police officers, Durham firefighters and student ROTC members, President Keohane asked those gathered to be inspired by the many acts of heroism shown over the last year.
"On this occasion of national remembrance, we relive last year's grief, patriotic pride and anger - but with a difference. We stir up our most painful emotions not in order to lay the ghosts of the men and women who died, but to let their spirits rouse us, the living, to further efforts by whose light we can create and sustain a better world where terrorism can find no foothold - a world where innocence need not be sacrificed on the altar of national ego or religious fundamentalism.
"We have had enough and more than enough of fire, hatred, blood, the anti-hero; enough of chaos," she said. "On this solemn day, may we recognize that the spirit of heroism did not die with our heroes."
Other speakers included Chief Otis Cooper of the Durham Fire Department, interim Chief Steve Chalmers of the Durham Police Department, Duke Police Chief Clarence Birkhead and Joshua Jean-Baptiste, president of Duke Student Government.
"The tragedy of Sept. 11 changed the world as we know it," Jean-Baptiste told the crowd. "The safety and innocence many of us felt here in our Gothic Wonderland may never return."
Divinity School
On Tuesday, divinity professors discussed what would be an appropriate response from a Christian community to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The church was right to offer healing in the days and weeks following the "unspeakable horror," said William C. Turner, Jr., associate professor of the practice of homiletics. But it is now time for the church to say that the people who died on airplanes, in the Pentagon and in World Trade Center offices "are not heroes. They are victims of a sinful world," as are thousands of other people who die each day from war, starvation and disease, he said.
William H. Willimon, professor of Christian ministry and dean of Duke Chapel, said Americans sought comfort in the wrong places after the attacks. "We reached out and grabbed a flag instead of a cross," he said. "We sought our consolation in Bette Midler and Rudy Giulliani" instead of the scripture.
Emmanuel Katongole, a visiting faculty member from Uganda, said he worries that the new foreign policy paradigm that pits the United States against terrorism may lead Americans to ignore the plight of the Third World. Katongole said terrorism should not be downplayed, but noted it is only one of many threats. "Environmental degradation and the silent death of millions" are equally important, he said.
On Wednesday morning, Professor Stanley Hauerwas, speaking in York Chapel, said Sept. 11 is "a day we struggle to forget, even though forgetting seems an act of betrayal to those who died. In an apocalyptic time, the rulers of nations can learn from religion that God has abolished war. God was not rendered powerless by the events of Sept. 11." Hauerwas, the Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics, added, "The alternative to terror, both terrible and wonderful … is us."
Duke Hospital
For 10 days in February, Dr. Eric Christopher, clinical associate professor in Duke's departments of internal medicine and psychiatry, helped the American Red Cross provide health care to Ground Zero workers. On Wednesday, he shared his observations with medical residents, students and attending physicians at the hospital.
"Trauma creates disempowerment and disconnection," Christopher said. "On a mass scale and with travel and communication lines severed, people in Manhattan were left with few escape routes from the city and an inability to connect with others." Re-establishing a sense of safety and reconnecting with others - perhaps a therapist or another survivor - is paramount when helping people cope with the loss of life. Re-establishing relationships helps people reconnect and can ultimately lead to healing, he said.
Political Science
After holding a memorial for Sept. 11 victim Peter Ortale, a Duke alumnus who majored in political science, faculty members Peter Feaver, Robert Keohane and Bruce Jentleson examined "The Impact of 9/11 on America's Role in the World." The professors seemed to agree on four
points:
- The military action immediately after Sept. 11 appears to have been well-conceived, well-directed and effective in achieving its immediate goals of destroying the terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan and driving its leaders underground.
- The mission now is no longer as clear, and the enemy is not well defined.
- Regardless of what is to be done, no "military-only" approach will be successful.
- The toughest piece of the puzzle will be creating and maintaining an international alliance for whatever activities are undertaken.
Law School
While many commemorated Sept. 11 by looking back, Duke law professors used the occasion to discuss some of the complicated legal issues still confronting the United States.
Associate Professor Michael Byers said the U.S. clearly had the force of international law behind it during the fighting in Afghanistan, but the same probably cannot be said for an invasion of Iraq.
If Iraq refuses to allow comprehensive weapons inspections, Byers added, the U.S. should seek support in the United Nations' Security Council before undertaking military action. "To go it alone would fragment that support."
Professor Madeline Morris noted the political nature of terrorism creates a unique tension that complicates efforts to prosecute terrorists -- efforts that even now are playing out across the globe.
"The contours of national and international authority over law enforcement in the field of terrorism is an issue that is going to develop in important ways in the near future," Morris said. "The new permanent International Criminal Court -- which is coming into existence even as we speak -- is planning to take up the question of whether its jurisdiction should be extended to encompass crimes of terrorism."
Professor Scott Silliman, executive director of the Law School's Center on Law, Ethics and National Security, said the United States' treatment of many captives taken in the last year violates provisions of the Geneva Convention as well as U.S. domestic law. Among the most troubling cases are those of Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla, two U.S. citizens who have been detained for months without benefit of counsel and without any specific charges lodged against them.
Further, he said, the United States, although claiming to be a nation under the rule of law, is seemingly not satisfying its commitments under international law. "I am troubled by our continued refusal to adhere to the Geneva Convention," Silliman said.
Sanford Institute of Public Policy
The day's events concluded with an evening symposium to examine the policy implications of Sept. 11. Sanford Institute Director Bruce Jentleson neatly summed up the panel's two fundamental points: First, "we face very serious problems and very serious threats. There can be no illusions," he said.
But there is also a tremendous amount of creative thinking among ethicists, scientists, policymakers and others. "This is a challenge for us on the panel and for your generation," Jentleson told the audience of nearly 200 people. "We have met many challenges before and we will do so again."
Bruce Kuniholm, professor of public policy studies and history, said since Sept. 11, there is an increased sense of vulnerability, not just for the U.S. but for the world. "The attack made clear that it was not just the United States with its superpower status and its open society, but the whole interdependent international community that faces a threat," said Kuniholm, who served on the State Department's policy planning staff during the Carter administration with responsibilities for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia.
He urged the Bush administration to outline a broader vision of international interests and to provide a "transnational vision" of how to protect those interests, including "addressing the political and economic realities that create support for terror."
For the medical research community, the Sept. 11 attacks have had a galvanizing effect, said Professor of Medicine Barton Haynes, who also directs the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. "There has been a sharp focusing of the research community on research on biodefense and emerging infections, as well as on ethical and logical issues." The anthrax attacks that followed also "produced an immediate wake-up call to the biomedical research community," he said.
Haynes echoed other panelists in emphasizing the post-Sept. 11 realization "that we live in a global community, and that the health and welfare of citizens in developing countries distant from the U.S. is critical to our own well-being in the U.S."
Silliman, a retired Air Force colonel and military attorney, also appeared on the evening panel, and he encouraged lawmakers to consider long-term, international consequences of any legal actions. "My concern as we craft legal tools in the War on Terrorism is that we are shaping international law that will not be for us alone to use," he said.
The fifth panelist, Professor Maureen Quilligan, chair of the English Department, noted that the word "terrorism" originated in 18th-century France, during the French Revolution's "Reign of Terror." "The term is meant to terrorize the population with fear," she said. "The best thing we can do to end the war on terrorism is to give up our terrible fear. The only thing we truly have to fear is our own terror."
This article, written by Keith Lawrence, is based on reports by Blake Dickinson, Jon
Goldstein, Sally Hicks, Tracey Koepke, Kathy Neal, Jerry Oster, David Reid, Cabell Smith
and Sherry Williamson.
