Chronicle of Higher Education

From the issue dated December 14, 2001

By ANDREW BROWNSTEIN and ERIC HOOVER(Photograph by Tom Cogill)

The clock reads 3 a.m., and Matt Gosney is lying in bed, CNN dimly glowing from the television nearby.The anchor coolly announces a smallpox outbreak in several American cities, the latest salvo in our shadow war with terrorism. Massive casualties are expected. Once again, the country is thrust into chaos.

Mr. Gosney jolts awake. He's still on the quiet campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, with its fall foliage and picture-postcard views of Seneca Lake.

It is 3 a.m. But the line between waking life and nightmare is not what it used to be.

"You wake up in the morning, and you don't know what's going to happen," says Mr. Gosney, a senior majoring in political science. "How can you not be scared? Four planes were hijacked by men with box cutters. People have been killed by letters in the mail. It's just awful."

Matt Gosney of Hobart: "You can read about injustice in Africa and you'll feel bad, but then you'll close the book With September 11, the ability to separate yourself is impossible."

As more U.S. troops head to Afghanistan, many college students also find themselves on unfamiliar ground. The relentless 24-hour news coverage, with its own theme music for war, has been quick to fix on the attacks as a "defining moment" for students. But many feel the only thing that defines them is uncertainty. "They sense that things are really changing, but they're still searching in the rubble," says Bobbi Patterson, a senior lecturer in religion at Emory University.

The students are caught in a kind of limbo between patriotism and protest, a place where neither the fervent Americanism that followed Pearl Harbor nor the bitter sentiments evoked by the Vietnam War seem appropriate. As they grapple with new realities, the early signs are that the events of 9-11 and its aftermath have made an indelible mark.

"Sometimes, it seems like generations come slowly," says Hunter R. Rawlings III, president of Cornell University. "Sometimes, they come quickly. This is one of the latter, I think. Students who graduated two or three years ago will be thought of as one generation, and students who graduate five years from now will be another generation."

* * *

Canandaigua, a town of 11,000 in the heart of New York's Finger Lakes region, is hardly an obvious target for a terrorist strike. But in September, just after President Bush told Congress of his plans for war, the lights went out. Panicked residents thought they were under attack.

It turned out to be nothing more than a routine power outage. The overreaction might seem funny -- even quaint -- but not to Mr. Gosney, in nearby Geneva.

"What hit me was that at no other time would a power outage lead to the reaction 'Oh my God, we're under a terrorist attack,'" he says. "I feel vulnerable in ways I've never felt before. We have to come to terms with the fact that this is a scarier time."

Mr. Gosney, an A student, is having trouble taking it all in. For three days after the president's address, he cried constantly. He has trouble sleeping and takes medication for anxiety.

His room in Medbery Hall, where he is a resident adviser, belies an internationalist bent and fiercely liberal politics. Street scenes of Paris and Madrid grace the walls, and a cover of The Nation taped over his desk depicts President Bush as Alfred E. Neuman of Mad magazine.

Mr. Gosney -- "Goz" to his friends -- sits cross-legged on his bed and straightens his sky-blue Adidas cap. "I am having the hardest time doing my schoolwork right now," he admits. "I sit here in my room and look at the 15 or so magazines I subscribe to, all of which have covers on the war. Then I look at my books on colonial Africa or indigenous people in Argentina, and I really just question what I'm doing."

The campus mood, he says, is "eerie," as students respond to the events with foreign-policy discussions and peace vigils, as if this were another Gulf War.

One recent day outside Scandling Center, the student union, an antiwar group held a regular noontime vigil. It was just after the Northern Alliance had liberated Kabul, and the leader of the student group came by to confirm with Mr. Gosney that the United States was still bombing Afghanistan. He nodded. Satisfied, the protester "went back to stand in solidarity with his brothers and sisters," Mr. Gosney says. "It's just surface-level showmanship on all sides."

Faculty members have tried to place the events in context. In Mr. Gosney's African-politics course, the professor compares the death toll on September 11 to the AIDS epidemic in Swaziland, which has infected more than one-third of the population, or the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 died. Imagine, the professor tells students, 320 World Trade towers, armies going floor to floor with machetes and guns.

"There's a certain distance and remove on campus," Mr. Gosney explains. "Yes, you can read about injustice in Africa and you'll feel bad, but then you'll close the book. With September 11, the ability to separate yourself is impossible."

Not all students talk about the war in such personal terms. But underneath, emotions are fraying. Mr. Gosney first noticed that when two friends, chain-smoking and discussing the war, stopped short of fisticuffs when one suggested that the Taliban may prove difficult to defeat.

One of those friends, Takao Yamada, a senior majoring in political science and English, has taken the events particularly hard. For this feisty Republican, whose Japanese-born father instilled in him a passionate brand of patriotism, September 11 took away what no campus sparring partner could: his belief in the nation's invulnerability.

The day before the attacks, Mr. Yamada sat in a literature class as a professor expounded on the nature of tragedy. Back then, it seemed far-off, like something out of Shakespeare or Sophocles. That night, he stayed up with a roommate until 5 a.m., drinking and talking about girls.

"One of the first thoughts I had on September 11, once I could get my mind around what happened, was that I wish I had stayed up a couple more hours," Mr. Yamada says. "I wanted a couple more hours in a world where bullshitting about girls seemed important."

Mr. Gosney echoes the notion that post-September 11 "life seems like it's on pause." Before the attacks, he was considering a career in politics. Now, he isn't so sure. Until the moment of decision comes, who knows what the next broadcast of CNN will bring?

"There are no study breaks from war," he says.

* * *

"Nowhere."

"Somewhere, but not here."

"Who is God?" -- some of the answers students gave to the question "Where was God on September 11?," asked by three Christian students at Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, Calif., in a video to promote a religious event.

* * *

On the morning of September 11, Becky Olsen wore black. It wasn't a premonition, though she's a woman of profoundly mystical beliefs. Ms. Olsen was dying her hair a lighter shade of blonde, and the shirt was dispensable.

Becky Olsen of Northampton County Area Community College: "What has happened here is so hard for us to believe, so difficult for us to comprehend, yet it is reality, and we must face it."

That was before the world changed. She turned on the television, and in moments the phone rang: It was her sister in North Carolina. They talked of their brother in the Navy, a sailor aboard the U.S.S. Donald Cook, a destroyer. He had been in danger before: The Cook helped save crew members of the U.S.S. Cole last year, when a bomb killed 17 of its sailors off the coast of Yemen. Now, he could not be reached. An e-mail message from the ship's captain explained that no communications from sailors would be coming for the next four days.

In addition to fears about her brother, Ms. Olsen, a second-year journalism student at Northampton County Area Community College, in Bethlehem, Pa., says the events of September 11 reinforced the idea that loss is part of life. She had dreamed of moving to New York to become a book editor. "There goes that," she thought immediately after the attacks.

She recalled the day, five years before, when she approached the great golden elevators of the World Trade Center and boldly signed her name in the guest book. "I remember thinking that'll be there forever -- it's part of history now," she says. "Not to sound grandiose, but on September 11, I thought, 'There goes my history.'"

The very recognition that one day can obliterate thousands of people and careers, and even someone's history, also reaffirmed Ms. Olsen's bedrock faith.

Ms. Olsen was an atheist until she was 14, when a "blinded by the light" experience at a prayer meeting left her with the electrical feeling "that God touched me." The experience seemed to lift her above a life of hardship -- estrangement from a father who left while Ms. Olsen's mother was still pregnant, and poverty that forced her family to move 20 times before she was 18.

Now, Ms. Olsen is president of the campus Christian Fellowship, a nondenominational group devoted to the study of Scripture and community service.

Following the attacks, even the fellowship faithful struggled to understand God's plan. Why, they asked, do tragic events happen? How do people maintain inner peace in a time of upheaval? And what is the role of free will in God's world?

Even as Ms. Olsen turned to faith for strength and solace after September 11, the campus turned to her for the same. "I usually pray just for myself," she says. "Lately, I've been finding myself praying a lot more for others."

The first call came two days after the attacks. The college, in a working-class steel town where few seemed more than a degree of separation removed from the attacks, asked her to lead a grieving campus in prayer.

"Dear God," she read to an audience of more than 80 assembled at the Northampton campus. "So many of us are frightened right now, so many are grieving deep losses, so many are angry.

"What has happened here is so hard for us to believe, so difficult for us to comprehend, yet it is reality, and we must face it. I believe I speak for most of us when I say that we don't want to face it alone."

* * *

Tim Dodd, assistant dean for undergraduate studies at Case Western Reserve University, finds that many of his overachieving students are struggling to "normalize" the events of September 11.

"These students feel an incredible pressure to achieve," he says. "They're taking the perfect classes so they can get into the perfect grad school and on to the perfect life."

If the larger-than-ever caseload at the university's counseling center is any guide, many of them are failing. Walk-in traffic is up 273 percent, compared with the same period last year.

* * *

Low clouds are rolling in over the University of California at Berkeley. As the wind whips foam from the fountain on Sproul Plaza, Hoku Jeffrey scrambles to weigh down the stacks of fliers on his table.

Students stop to pick up a handout that reads "Why We Must Eliminate the SAT Now" and another that describes "the corrupt role the U.S. government plays around the world and at home." While the students take turns signing a petition to stop the war in Afghanistan, Mr. Jeffrey checks the sky.

Rain's coming, but he seems content to man the table all day.

Hoku Jeffrey of Berkeley: "The question for me has become how to translate that sense of fragility into a movement for peace and equality."

A senior majoring in ethnic studies, Mr. Jeffrey says his convictions didn't crumble with the twin towers. Like many students a continent away from ground zero, he has felt emotionally distant from the attacks and the grieving he sees on the news. (As one Berkeley student grimly jokes, "They get all the action on the East Coast, and we get nothing.")

What Mr. Jeffrey heard on September 11 was a different kind of wake-up call.

The attacks "created this sense of fragility of human life, of the country itself," Mr. Jeffrey says. "The question for me has become how to translate that sense of fragility into a movement for peace and equality ... and how to link support for affirmative action with protest against the war?" It's simply not in Mr. Jeffrey to give up on those issues. Mr. Jeffrey, whose father is black and whose mother is Chinese, says he often felt like an outsider while growing up and attending mostly white high schools. It was only in 1995 -- when he first met Berkeley students who were protesting the University of California regents' decision to ban affirmative action in admissions -- that he found a sense of purpose.

"For the first time, I had the feeling that you could build something ... you could stand up to powerful forces and generate energy," he says.

Within days of the terrorist attacks, pundits were writing obituaries for the student protest movement, against globalization and other issues. Following a year that saw more student activism than any in recent memory, many observers predicted the causes would be muffled amid the resounding cries of patriotism.

Mr. Jeffrey seems reluctant to even discuss those predictions. He insists that September 11 will, in the long run, prove a boon for student activists, giving them a new sense of purpose and a common cause to rally around, especially if the war drags on and U.S. forces experience heavy casualties.

But he acknowledges the environment has changed.

"There are people who were really into [the protest movement] who are hesitating," he says. "There's the concern that having strong messages at a time like this can seem insensitive. It's made me think more about how I say what I say."

It will be a struggle, he concedes, to convince many students of the war's injustice. The vast majority of American students (as many as 90 percent in some polls) support the war in Afghanistan. Although Mr. Jeffrey sees strands connecting affirmative-action debates and the "racist" war in Afghanistan, most students may not. Even at Berkeley, a bastion of liberalism, hundreds of students have turned out for rallies in support of the war, and many of the university's 31,000 students privately say that they can't bring themselves to fully embrace antiwar messages.

"There are a lot of shades of gray here in terms of peoples' opinions," says Alex Najera, a senior. "Many students are in the middle somewhere. There's the feeling that this may not be the best time for a mass movement, something for which many students simply don't have the time."

But Mr. Jeffrey is unlikely to give up the fight any time soon. "This movement's really who I am, and if I let go of my beliefs, who would I be?"

* * *

Nearly a month after the attacks, Tim Dodd of Case Western attended a committee meeting on student enrichment. The topic: how to deal with the events of September 11. The chairwoman, an administrator who was at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1970, remarked that students had voted to suspend classes that spring, after the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State University and Jackson State College that followed.

"The students at the meeting didn't say a word," recalls Mr. Dodd. "It struck me that these students couldn't envision suspending classes for any reason. A few minutes later, one of them spoke up. She asked if there was any way to give them extra credit so the events of September 11 didn't affect their grades. I was floored. To me, that's the anecdote that defines the generational divide."

* * *

For Michael Lane, a Knox College senior, it was a typical Thanksgiving: turkey, football, and the roar of fighter jets overhead. The place Mr. Lane calls home, after all, is right next to the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, in Tucson.

The son of two Air Force sergeants, Mr. Lane had spent almost every major holiday of his life on or near a military base. But this year, his mother and brother had to miss the meal because they were stationed overseas, and Mr. Lane wasn't feeling like himself.

After September 11, he first became angry. Then, as his penultimate semester at the college in Galesburg, Ill., wound down, he developed a lingering sense of "disorder." In addition to worrying about the safety of three family members, all of them on active duty, he was grappling with his own recent decision to drop plans for a military career.

"In the past two months, I've definitely lost my edge," Mr. Lane says.

Mr. Lane, a political-science major, has stopped poring over his statistics textbook. Although he once took detailed notes for his congressional-history course, he now just skims his reading assignments.

"I was raised to be a perfectionist, to put scholastic work first," he says. "But grades, well, they're just these letters now." Mr. Lane's father, chief of operations at the Arizona base, could be deployed to the Middle East next year. His mother, a maintenance superintendent who usually can communicate with her family only via e-mail, has been sent to a classified location in a country whose name ends in "stan," he says. His brother is stationed at a U.S. Army base in South Korea.

"No matter how strong your faith is in the military, you're going to have dark thoughts when something bad happens and your family's out there," Mr. Lane says. "Especially now, when anything seems possible."

Growing up in a military family, Mr. Lane's patriotism has always run blood-red. For him, the idea of personal sacrifice was never an abstraction; it was as real as his grandfather, a U.S. Army soldier who lost a leg in World War II. Mr. Lane once seemed destined for a military career himself, accepting an Air Force ROTC scholarship at the University of Arizona. But he later transferred to Knox, deciding that he could not balance academics with pilot training and that the military wasn't his calling. The decision upset his parents, who accused him of throwing away family tradition, not to mention a full scholarship.

He has not regretted that decision, although he sometimes longs to play a role in the war.

In some ways, though, he feels as if he already is fighting a battle, albeit one of perceptions: While September 11 only strengthened his patriotism, it prompted many of his peers to criticize the U.S. military. Within days of the attacks, chalk messages appeared on campus sidewalks: "How many bombs does it take to be a terrorist?" and "Don't kill kids."

Mr. Lane took it personally.

"I wanted to go and write, 'Let's go to war,' but I knew the second I did, I'd be ridiculed," he says.

Knox, the site of a historic 1858 debate between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, in which the future president framed his objections to slavery in moral terms, is not so open to debating the war in Afghanistan, according to Mr. Lane. The war and the military are generally unpopular on this liberal campus of 1,200 students.

One day in class, he argued that military retaliation was necessary to protect liberty.

"My ideas struck most students as pretty extreme," Mr. Lane says. "Many students who are now in college have led incredibly sheltered lives, so it's easy for them to criticize the military. I wanted to say, 'That's my family out there protecting the country.'"

He knows his challenge, as a patriot with a college meal plan, is not to argue but to tolerate what he perceives as other people's lack of patriotism.

After graduating next year, Mr. Lane hopes to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Central Intelligence Agency. For now, his way of coping is to spend more time with friends.

"People always say, 'Enjoy college because it's over before you know it,'" says Mr. Lane one afternoon, raising his voice over the noise of a television and the laughter of his roommates at Knox. "Now we've seen how everything that's important can literally disappear in a blink of an eye. More than ever, it seems more important to hang out, just sit in the living room with the guys."

"College," he says, "is the only hometown I've ever had."

* * *

Christopher Savarese, a senior at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., once was content as long as he had time to study, hang out with his girlfriend, and listen to the Wu-Tang Clan, a rap group from his hometown of Staten Island, N.Y. Sporting a sun tattoo on his right arm and numerous piercings, Mr. Savarese thought he would be the last person to put an American-flag sticker on his car. Then came what he calls the worst day of his life.

"After days of watching CNN, I felt this pain in my stomach, and I had to get it out, do something, you know, anything, to make a small difference. I didn't want to go to rallies or vigils. So I started a voter-registration drive on campus. I set up a booth, handed out forms, hundreds of them, every week, right up until Election Day. I'd tell people, 'Sign up, show the terrorists that we're strong.' After September 11, I felt like I'd been living in a fake world all this time. What could I do that was real?"

* * *

Unusual as it may sound, Raphael Matos's reference point for September 11 is a painting, his ironic, seven-foot-tall rendering of a white pimp. Sitting behind Mr. Matos's couch, the man sports a lime-green jumpsuit, a blue leopard-print hat, and a gold chain.

Raphael Matos of USC "can't feel inspired about a country in which I'm often treated like a second-class citizen."

"The dynamics of the pimp culture are the dynamics of power, and that dynamic relates to so many situations," Mr. Matos says. "You're either the pimp, or you're being pimped. And which you are is going to shape your views of the world."

Mr. Matos nearly lost a loved one on September 11, but he didn't lose his antipathy for the United States. For Mr. Matos, a student in the University of Southern California's master's program in public art, the terrorist attacks changed almost nothing.

Born in Puerto Rico to Dominican immigrants, Mr. Matos often feels slighted because of the color of his skin. There are those little moments, such as when security guards follow him down the aisles of department stores in Los Angeles, or times he has seen white fraternity members throwing "ghetto fabulous" parties, decked out in Afro wigs.

There are subtler reminders, too: In his arts classes, Mr. Matos says professors too often limit their discussions to the creations of white men.

"When I see people waving flags, it's tricky for me, because on the one hand I do think it's good if it helps them unify," says Mr. Matos, who has helped collect campus donations for New York relief efforts.

But when it comes to patriotism, he says, "I just don't feel it."

His take on the war is even more surprising given that he was raised in the Bronx, N.Y., and that he had a personal connection to the attacks on New York. On the morning of September 11, his stepfather was waiting to board a subway train beneath the World Trade Center when the second hijacked plane hit the South Tower. He fought his way through a crowd and out of the station before the tower collapsed.

"When I finally found out he was OK, I was just in shock, numb," Mr. Matos says. "Then I felt angry."

Although the feeling faded quickly, his mother and stepfather are still shaken. They have encouraged him to join the military to avenge the attacks. Although Mr. Matos understands their emotions, he says he would sooner go to jail than serve. He worries that the war lacks a clear goal, that it will endanger innocent people and prompt only more terrorist attacks. But mostly his ambivalence stems from how he feels as a minority resident of the United States.

"I can't feel inspired about a country in which I'm often treated like a second-class citizen," Mr. Matos says. "If I were to go off to war and come home alive, as a man of color, I'd still be treated like a second-class citizen."

* * *

This generation is one awakened to heroism and evil. In the ruthlessly calculated attacks, and the subsequent sacrifices by police officers and firefighters, students saw vivid examples of both.

Thomas S. Hibbs, an associate professor of philosophy at Boston College, says the contrast in attitudes before and after September 11 is evident in students' reactions to the trial of Socrates in Plato's Apology. Where students once were prone to view the great philosopher as a nuisance, they now are more likely to consider his central questions -- what do you live for and what are you willing to die for? -- as ones of "crucial importance."

"You can never forget what you know now," Mr. Hibbs tells his classes.

* * *

Even if there weren't a giant hole in the landscape just three blocks away, the effects of the worst terrorist assault on America would be impossible to miss at Pace University's Manhattan campus.

For Paula Christakis and Jasmine Bell, seniors and roommates at the college, it's the vaguely chemical odor in the shower each morning when the water hits their hair. On windy days, it's the dust that flies onto their jackets when they walk out of the subway.

But the fallout is far more pervasive than the smell and the soot.

Paula Christakis (left) with Jasmine Bell, her roommate at Pace U.: "It seems like this country is going to have to start from scratch."

Before September 11, Ms. Christakis was "Miss Career." An international-management major, she studied in Italy last summer and now works part time for a clothes-merchandising company. Barely stopping to breathe between sentences and gesturing wildly, she is living testament to a city that seems to run at a faster speed. She may be an extreme case: Her father, a Greek immigrant, once cheekily told Ms. Bell, "Thank you for living with Paula, because I don't think anyone else could."

Ms. Bell, by her own account, was "all about image." A communications major, she had interned at Vibe magazine and Columbia Pictures. She looked forward to a life of attending movie premieres as a studio rep or rubbing shoulders with rap stars as a publicist for Def Jam records.

For these two students, who met sophomore year, the aftermath has not sparked a crisis of faith or patriotism so much as a lot of soul-searching. In that way, they epitomize many students on this campus of 8,200, centered on the dollars-and-power world of Wall Street. It's a place where on the first day of classes, business professors ask where students work, eliciting responses like J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The chirping of cellphones and pagers is so common that Ms. Bell's organizational-communications professor has to remind students that "the off button works."

For those who lived in the shadow of the twin towers, the World Trade Center was a reference point in all the directions they gave to friends -- as in, "Turn right past ..." Now that it's gone, life, quite literally, seems without a compass. "Every night, I went to school down West Street and looked up at the World Trade Center," says Ms. Christakis, as her cellphone rings out a samba beat. "It was an inspiration. I just stood there and took a deep breath every time I walked by."

That world loomed large on September 10, when the friends and two other roommates put the final personal touches on their new apartment on West Street. The mirrors, pictures of New York City, and antique chairs belonged to Ms. Christakis. Ms. Bell added candles, Ikea lamps, and a zebra rug. That night, they watched The Crow, a fantasy tale of revenge and resurrection.

On the morning of the 11th, Ms. Bell dreamed that a gas station exploded. She awoke to a deafening roar and a huge fireball in the sky. Students across the hall called her over. Outside, on their third-floor terrace, was an arm.

In the coming weeks and months, the two women sorted through the rubble of the lives they left behind. Ms. Christakis briefly wondered about the fate of an expensive Louis Vuitton handbag.

Looking back, the triviality of that moment seems like a remnant of another world, like those students of another generation who climbed flagpoles or stuffed themselves into phone booths.

The night of the attacks, Ms. Christakis had a rare argument with her father. Crying hysterically, she could not accept the idea that life in America had changed irrevocably. Her father, steeped in a culture more accustomed to war, tried to shake her out of it. "This happens all over the world, Paula," he said. "Do you really live in such a bubble?"

She acknowledges he was right. Hers is a generation that, before September 11 at least, seemed impervious to even the notion of tragedy. "There's such an emptiness that goes along with this, such an uncertainty. ... I am just 21 years old. I never thought I would be part of something this huge."

The roommates find themselves changing in subtle ways. On the day of the attacks, Ms. Bell had her graduate-school applications filled out. Now she plans to take at least a year off and is seriously considering joining AmeriCorps, the national-service organization. She wants to spend more time volunteering, as she did last spring when she served as a mentor for children on the Lower East Side.

"I've never experienced something so profound and surprising," she says. "The whole thing made me realize that there's a lot more to life."

Before September 11, Ms. Christakis was a huge fan of Sex and the City, idolizing the adventurous and fiercely independent New York women of the popular HBO series. Now she wonders about her connections to people. What would happen if she died tomorrow? She thinks a lot about family and kids. The once hard-charging student suddenly finds herself rudderless. Her dean thinks she should get counseling.

The roommates realize that many of their classmates have moved on; some are on the 10th round of job interviews and seem relatively unfazed by the events of September 11. "My business classes seem so certain about the future," says Ms. Christakis, who once thought of running her own company. "It just seems false. What are we talking about mergers and acquisitions for? It seems like this country is going to have to start from scratch."

The friends have no illusions -- they might go back to their old career paths someday. But they can't go back to being the same people. The hole inside is too big.

This article from The Chronicle is available online at this address:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i16/16a03501.htm

Copyright 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education