The terror attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, were a defining moment for America, and even more so for the New York metro area. But for most students, 9/11 isn’t a memory.
It’s a history lesson.
WSHU’s Molly Ingram spoke with Sacred Heart University Associate History Professor David Thomson about how teaching about 9/11 has changed as fewer students have lived experience.
WSHU: Every year, leading up to the anniversary of 9/11, we in the newsroom have conversations about the attacks, and every year, it ultimately leads to the fact that there are a growing number of people, myself included, who have no recollection of the event. And I assume it's probably the same for you as a college professor, which means you probably have to change how you teach about it. Is that right?
DT: Yes. And so, it's actually interesting. I was thinking about this because we just started classes, and the first day of classes, one of the kinds of icebreakers I do with my students is I actually ask them, what is the first thing that they remember as a historical event that they define as historical? And so year after year, it's really interesting to see. You know, I remember, for instance, people remembering when Obama was elected to his first term. That is long gone, if we're talking about the conventional age of college students. So 9/11 is no exception.
We have to kind of look at it and understand that what we're encountering now is moving away from that lived experience, and we have for quite a while now, and transitioning and shifting into that kind of land of true historical analysis. Memory is really important. We also talked about the context of memory with the students and how events are sometimes remembered or misremembered. But yeah, it's very much trying to get them to have a sound understanding of the basic nuts and bolts, frankly, and the larger context. Because I think if there's one thing that I always like to point to is the fact that students, at times, can see 9/11 as happening in a vacuum, and it's really important to provide that kind of fuller context in order to bring us up to September 11th.
WSHU: Do you notice that you're getting a different kind of emotional reaction from students as you talk about it now, versus as you talked about it maybe 10 or 15 years ago?
DT: Absolutely. Yeah, we've kind of shifted away. I mean, I can take it back even further candidly -- my very first job out of college was actually teaching middle schoolers here in Connecticut, and so, being told specifically who had lost a parent on that day, kind of leading up to the school year, just in general. And that was, that was 2008-2009, so just getting a sense and being aware of it, that kind of emotional connection definitely has shifted over time, from a close family member of some sort to hearing about it from family members, right? Maybe an uncle was in the FDNY, and he was there that day, and he's told you about it, but that's kind of the connection.
So I don't want to say it's a step removed, but it kind of feels as almost if it's a step removed for some of these individuals. And so it's not that there's a significant amount of emotional distance. Still, we definitely see that it doesn't have as visceral a reaction, even though, you know, Sacred Heart University, of course, is located here, not too far from New York City. This student body disproportionately pulls from the area as well. So, those familial connections definitely still exist.
WSHU: As you mentioned, 9/11 didn't happen in a vacuum. There's a broader context here. Has opinion about the United States' involvement in wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq changed as time has gone on, too? Because for people who lived through 9,11, at first, the invasions may have seemed warranted, but as time passed, public opinion changed. I'm wondering about the reaction from students studying the events through a broader lens here.
DT: Yeah, and certainly, this comes up explicitly in my course on the history of U.S. foreign policy in a couple of different ways. One way, of course, is that we have veterans who are coming in and attending, who may have been deployed as a result of the war zone terror, either to Iraq or Afghanistan. In some instances, I've had both of those students. And so it's an invaluable window of insight. I never force anyone or push anyone to share that story if they don't want to, of course. So that's kind of one component of it. And you know, I think in particular, in the last couple of years with the kind of the ultimate withdrawal from Afghanistan, it kind of renewed that debate, and so it synced up, well candidly, with a class or two that I was teaching to talk with students again, make sure that we were all on the same page and we had that context. But to understand that this is also part of what it means to study historical events, that opinions and assessments of those events can change over time, and that's a really important context to understand, and for them to go through that exercise as a student is also incredibly important.
WSHU: What are some of the things that you talk about in the sense of, this didn't exist before 9/11? Some young people don't realize that things like the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security didn't exist before then.
DT: I think one thing that we often talk about, I'll show them clips of things like the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan with the students, just to give them a sense of like, this is what cable news. It kind of was birthed out of this in some regards. And you know, if you have a particular partisan affiliation, you're going to be shocked that, like, MSNBC is, like, really championing the invasion, right? In 2003, by and large, there were some who weren't. So I always like to talk with the students about some of the media. I even talked with them about the TV show 24, which was one of the most popular shows, right? And it frames it all as right, that there are no rules, essentially. Kiefer Sutherland was this renegade agent who could do whatever he wanted to get the bad guy, and the bad guy often took a very particular form that very much encompassed, like, the narrative of the time in the war on terror in the Middle East. I always kind of start with, in different classes, some variation of saying to them, you know, your brains would probably melt, explode, whatever, if I told you. And in fact, right, you could just walk into an airport and waltz through it, either with no security or next to none. You didn't have to have a boarding pass. If you were meeting someone, you didn't have to wait behind the doors that magically open, and there are the people with the signs and all that stuff that you could just walk up to the gate. You could be waiting for them at the gate.
And I talk about the security state apparatus. I will talk about the TSA. I talk about just DHS in general, and the various elements of Homeland Security, the apparatus that's been built out around there, with Customs and Border Protection now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, kind of falling under these umbrellas, is something that did not exist before. And I like to point out that, you know, the governmental agencies that we have are not set in stone; these can evolve, they can be born out of circumstance, and they can also disappear just as easily, but it was a totally different landscape.
I tend to, for instance, also talk with my students about things like the Patriot Act. And, you know, for instance, I couldn't help but think about the fact that when the announcement came out here of Jerry Nadler deciding not to run for re-election in New York City, Nadler was one of the most vocal opponents of the Patriot Act. He's still in Congress now, and that got referenced by more than one individual who kind of put out press releases commending him for his decades of service to the city, the state of New York, and the country as a whole. But that was a really contentious period within parties, right? So that you do not have all Democrats on the same page. I think, for instance, the Democratic party today, you you have kind of the usual suspects that you might think would dissent on a particular topic, right, and that there were some people taking a pretty, pretty significant stance in the early 2000s post 9/11 voting against whether it was the authorization for the use of military force in Iraq or Afghanistan, whether it was things like the Patriot Act that they took a lot of flack for it and they and a lot of them, not all, but a lot of them stuck by it, you know, up to today.
So it's really important to explain to students just the layers of what comes out of all of this, that you know, terrorism as a threat was not new in 2001, that Osama bin Laden, if you were certainly paying attention to the news at that time, was a name in the news. That it wasn't totally obscure, but it was still, nevertheless, a tremendous shock and a horrific vulnerability that cost the lives of 1000s of individuals of several dozen different nationalities, between the actions in New York, what happened at the Pentagon, and the tragic plane crash in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, as well. So just trying to give them that fuller, broader context can be a lot to take in for them.
