The University Responds

Taking stock, taking action in the wake of the attacks.


By Bill Kirtz

How to think about the unthinkable?

At a Matthews Arena memorial service for victims of September’s terror attacks, President Freeland told the university that education and scholarship are the best answers to bias and hatred.

And in prayers and seminars, faculty meetings and e-mails, classrooms and corridor conversations, members of the Northeastern community have responded in myriad ways to the attacks and the subsequent U.S. retaliation.
Some made quick adjustments. Northeastern University Press rushed to print more than 60,000 additional copies of The New Jackals, a prescient 1999 double portrait of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef, the Kuwaiti-born munitions expert behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. By late October, the book was number nine on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list.

To accommodate students’ travel difficulties, the university extended fall registration deadlines. It also assured those enlisted in the Army Reserve or the National Guard that they wouldn’t be penalized academically if their units were called up.

NU’s ROTC unit enrolled twenty-four first- and second-year students, compared with twelve a year ago. Northeastern Students Unite for Peace held meetings to “fight to end this and all wars,” saying “vengeance is not a solution.”

Michael Dukakis, distinguished professor of political science and acting chair of Amtrak’s board of governors, worked to address the challenges presented by a dramatically increased demand for rail travel.

Scott Quint, director of the International Student Office, thinks that Northeastern experienced none of the anti-Arab demonstrations seen on some Boston campuses because the university is one of the nation’s most geographically diverse, enrolling 2,561 international students from 133 countries (including more than 500 students from Arab countries).

In fact, Quint and his staff had been at Logan Airport until midnight on September 10, welcoming some 600 overseas newcomers to NU. Within hours, his office would be flooded with e-mails from worried parents.

Quint says proposed crackdowns on international student visas would affect every academic institution, but NU would, if necessary, provide additional support to help prospective students determine what academic and visa documents they need to enroll.

The university honored FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service requests for information on a few current and former international students. More than 195 colleges across the country answered similar requests during the weeks that followed the attacks. University spokesperson Ed Klotzbier says NU has “cooperated fully with authorities,” and was not, as were some universities, subpoenaed for student data.

Several of Osama bin Laden’s Saudi Arabian relatives—who have publicly denounced the terrorist leader and his actions—attended Boston-area universities, including NU. One of his fifty-three siblings earned a bachelor’s in engineering at the university in 1975. Another relative received a bachelor’s in international business in 1997.

Many at Northeastern are struggling to understand complex religious and cultural issues raised by the attacks. To provide some clarity, Quint, who advises the Islamic Society and the Arab Heritage Club, is hosting regular discussion sessions. “I’ve never seen so many people asking questions—we need cross-cultural answers,” he says.

Islamic Society treasurer Marwa Eid helped plan an interfaith student dialogue to disassociate Islam from terrorism. The junior computer-science major was pressed into leadership when the group’s head, senior computer-engineering major Hassan Bishil, had to take a leave of absence from school after flights from Saudi Arabia to Boston were temporarily canceled.

The Lebanese-born Eid, daughter of the head of the New England Islamic Center, says her headscarf has drawn no hostile reaction on campus. “In any society, all over the world, there are good people and bad people. People are really angry, and in Islam anger is one of the worst things. We should try our best to befriend each other,” she says.

She thinks some Palestinians celebrated the tragedy because they “consider America to be a sister partner of Israel and therefore they became happy to see that the Americans, in their view, have now had a taste of what they taste every day. I know it’s not necessarily right for them to feel this way, but we have to understand it.”

Not long after September 11, visiting international affairs lecturer Irm Haleem drove from Arizona to Massachusetts with her husband, an Air Force military intelligence officer. At night, they stayed at Air Force bases—“the safest places to be,” she says. Wearing a jacket decorated with intertwined American and Pakistani flags, she says she experienced no negative incidents on the road and is meeting with none in her American politics and international affairs classes. Her message to students: “Don’t use the attacks as an excuse for racism.”

Denis Sullivan, a Middle East scholar who chairs the political science department at Northeastern, faced the dilemma of “how to make sense out of the senseless. We can’t explain it away. Students are reeling, but they’re trying to be calm. We must work together to heal and understand.”

He arranged a fall-quarter seminar series on the causes and consequences of September 11. Faculty from several disciplines held weekly discussions on such subjects as backlash and intolerance, Arab and Muslim differences, the attacks’ impact on the economy and civil liberties, and rebuilding a “chastened world.”

Sullivan says enrollments in international affairs and Arab-Israeli conflict classes at NU have swelled. “It shows we all need to know about the background to the tragedies, the impact of the attacks, and, hopefully, the way toward coping and coming to terms with it all,” he says.

Outside the classroom, a group called NU Campus Against War and Racism formed quickly after the attacks. Its organizer, sophomore history major Matthew Boucher, says it will hold weekly information sessions to communicate that “military retaliation is not an answer. It only perpetuates the cycle of violence and prompts more terrorist attacks.”

Meanwhile, philosophy professor Stephen Nathanson sounded a similar theme, telling colleagues, “We need to raise questions [for students] about our roles as citizens, about not being passive and finding appropriate ways to influence the [political] process.”

Provost David Hall told those gathered at the September 20 memorial service that “the attack on humanity transcends all borders. We have a world to redeem and build.” Donnie Perkins, affirmative action and diversity dean and director, believes that building process “could be an opportunity to be bold, to reach across boundaries and learn from each other, to move out of some of our boxes.” This month, he helped do just that through an NU–hosted conference on race relations at New England colleges.

Some instructors agonized over whether and how to discuss the tragedy. Donna Qualters, Center for Effective University Teaching director, says she was flooded with teachers’ queries about the appropriateness of mentioning subjects—however vital—outside their specialty. Her advice: “The first rule of good teaching is to be authentic. If you feel comfortable discussing it, do. If not, don’t.” But, she adds, the “elephant in the room”—the massive impact of September 11—won’t go away if it’s ignored.

Tim McCurtain, a junior communications major, says he’s more comfortable talking through his feelings with friends and family than with professors. Still, he says, the tragedy came home to him when he learned his seminar leader, co-op coordinator Jacqueline Sweeney, had a sister-in-law aboard one of the hijacked planes. “She shared [her emotions] with us in a really respectful way,” he says.

April Field, a junior international affairs major, says the tragedy wasn’t discussed in her American ideology or modern China classes—only in her modern English novel class, where her teacher pronounced the death of irony. Kerryn Donahoe, a senior management information systems major, says her professors mentioned the events only at the start of the quarter. Given the amount of time that had passed by then, she says, this was the right tack to take: “Emotionally, most students had gotten past it.”

Michael Woodnick, director of spiritual life, doesn’t want to get past it. At the memorial service, noting that he lost a close friend in the tragedy, he called on God “to help us understand the distinction between justice and revenge.” This month, he sponsored a lecture by a Thai monk on the topic “If Buddha were alive today,” and he’s invited faculty and staff to help develop programs exploring the spiritual question “why?”

Also drawing spiritual lessons from the tragedy is Nadia Peeva, who came to Northeastern from Bulgaria three years ago to earn a master’s in business administration. Now, she handles strategic client counseling at Deloitte & Touche.

On the morning of September 11, she got to her office in a building across the street from the World Trade Center around 7:30, then went down to the
second-floor gym for a workout.

She was in the locker room when she felt the tremor of the second plane hitting. “We stood there for a little bit,” she says. “People started moving, and we just followed them. We started walking uptown. People were gathered around radios, and we heard a rumor there were four more planes coming down. We panicked, we saw the buildings collapse, and we kept on going north about fifty blocks.”

She thinks the terror attacks “should make us band together. This is an opportunity to heal. People can look into themselves more and contemplate spirituality—and build a higher level of tolerance, compassion, and forgiveness.”

Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the School of Journalism.