By Laura Donnelly-Smith
It was the lack of verifiable information that was most unsettling, Joe Bondi recalled. By midmorning on Sept. 11, 2001, rumors and facts were mixing and racing through campus, fueled by fear: A plane had hit the Pentagon. Another was headed for the White House—or the State Department. There had been a car bombing at the State Department. Metro was the next target.
“Our biggest fear was what was going to happen next,” Mr. Bondi said. A 2001 graduate of the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, Mr. Bondi had just started his first semester as a Presidential Administrative Fellow and graduate student in the Graduate School of Political Management. He could see the State Department from his apartment window. “The scariest moment, for me, was realizing that something had happened at the Pentagon. It’s in your backyard. This was no longer a New York City thing—it was literally right there across the river.”
With phone lines jammed and a crisis of inconceivable proportions enveloping the country, GW students, faculty member and staff members watched as their ordinary Tuesday at the beginning of the academic year became a day of national tragedy. While most members of the university community counted themselves as lucky to not be directly touched by the terrorist attacks, GW’s location in Washington, D.C., meant that the entire campus felt 9/11’s reverberations.
Moments of Realization
Like many GW students, Brett Kaplan, B.A. ’03, M.PA. ’05, learned about the attacks from television. When he woke up that morning—pretty late, he admits, but he didn’t have class until 11—he went downstairs in his Scholars Village townhouse, where his roommates were eating breakfast and watching TV. The first plane had already hit the north tower, and Mr. Kaplan remembers watching in horror as the second plane hit on live television.
“At that point I knew it wasn’t an accident,” he said. “I immediately started making phone calls.” Home for Mr. Kaplan was Rockland County, N.Y., just 30 miles northwest of Manhattan. Cell phone networks were already jammed, and Mr. Kaplan couldn’t get through on landlines either. Throughout the day, he used instant messaging to confirm that his friends and relatives and their friends and relatives in New York were OK. He also emailed the professor for his 11 a.m. course and requested permission to miss class. The professor later wrote back and confirmed that missing class was fine.
“Looking back, it seems kind of funny that I took the time to correspond like that. I really didn’t realize how big this was,” Mr. Kaplan said.
Caitlin Holland DeLuca, B.A.’05, didn’t realize either. She was a freshman in September 2001, living in the Hall on Virginia Avenue, which at the time housed all first-year students. “We were all so confused that morning, and we didn’t realize the magnitude of what was happening,” she remembered. “People were saying, ‘Is this just what happens in big cities like D.C.? Do we just need to get used to it?’ I remember my biggest concern was whether to go to my 9:30 class. We were mostly nervous we’d get in trouble for missing class!”
Erin M. Morse Biggs, B.A. ’03, a junior at the time, was in her apartment in the West End at 2124 Eye St. when she learned that a plane had hit the Pentagon. “After that, there were rumors going around that another plane was en route to the Capitol, and maybe even one to the White House. We lived four blocks from the White House, so we were starting to get really concerned, but we weren’t sure what to do.”
When she and her roommates went outside, they found military vehicles parked across the street from their building, and heard sirens and saw camouflage-clad military personnel spreading out across campus. “It was pretty chaotic,” Ms. Biggs said.
Mike Freedman, director of the GW’s Global Media Institute, was vice president for communications on 9/11. He first heard of the terrorist attacks when his wife called his office. Like so many others, he turned on the TV in time to see the second plane crash. He realized immediately that the attacks would be hugely relevant for GW, both because of the university’s D.C. location and because of the large percentage of students from the New York City area. First he called his son, who was working at the Associated Press’s Washington bureau as a reporter. Then he began calling the other university vice presidents, as they checked in and began to formulate preliminary plans.
“Our most important concern was the safety of our students, faculty and staff. We needed to first keep essential services running,” Mr. Freedman recalled. “But no one knew whether it was better to stay or leave. Very few people had a sense of what was going on.”
Near Misses and Strange Silences
Then-president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg wasn’t in his office and couldn’t be reached. At the time, he was a member of the board of the Chief of Naval Operations, and that morning, he was scheduled to attend a board meeting in the Pentagon, said Helene Interlandi, his executive assistant. “We were terrified for his safety.” At the last minute, however, the board meeting had been moved to an off-site location due to ongoing construction at the Pentagon. “We were all under the impression that he was actually inside the Pentagon,” Ms. Interlandi said. Mr. Trachtenberg was finally able to get a phone call through to his office, though it took him hours to get back to campus. “After that, I didn’t leave for two days except to shower and change clothes,” he said.
“It was a day marked by confusion,” Mr. Freedman said. “There was no prescribed evacuation plan. There was no rulebook in existence of how to handle an event of that magnitude. Prior to 9/11, our worst fears were a residence hall fire or contagious illness. We were dealing with issues of safety and security like nothing we’d dealt with before.”
The university canceled classes for the afternoon, and by midday, hundreds of students had congregated at the Marvin Center, watching live coverage on the large-screen TVs in J Street. Similar scenes were repeated throughout campus in residence hall common rooms and apartment living rooms.
Dean of Students Peter Konwerski, B.A. ’91, M.A. ’93, Ed.D. ’97, was executive director of the Marvin Center at the time, and initially, his team had the building evacuated, not knowing whether the smoke coming from the direction of the Pentagon was actually coming from the National Mall or some other location even closer to campus. Soon after, they let students back in and secured the Marvin Center. His employees—most of whom were desk workers more accustomed to answering emails than to crowd control—fanned out with radios, ensuring that only students and other GW community members were able to enter the building.
“There was a real sense of teamwork from the beginning, with event planners, Greek Life staffers and everyone grabbing radios and helping to secure the building,” Dr. Konwerski said. “9/11 was such a tangible event. It was such a local story—everybody knew someone who was in New York or who worked at the Pentagon. It was personal for us.”
It was especially personal for Joan Mitchell, now the business manager at GW’s Center for Civic Engagement and Public Service. In 2001, she was a financial analyst for the Student Activities Center, and that Tuesday morning, she had sent her two daughters—ages 15 and 12—off to school and said good-bye to her husband, Randolph, a master sergeant in the Air Force who worked in Chantilly, Va.
“Every morning, my husband and I would brief the girls on our days and who would be picking up who,” Ms. Mitchell remembered. “That morning, he was scheduled to go to a meeting at the Pentagon.”
When the news broke about the Twin Towers, Ms. Mitchell went into Dr. Konwerski’s office with some colleagues and watched the news coverage on a small TV. “I thought that first plane was an accident,” she said. “But then I saw the second one and immediately thought, ‘That’s not an accident.’ I walked out of the office. We didn’t even know about the Pentagon yet, but I wanted to call my husband.”
She wasn’t able to get through. “We had students here in the Student Activities Center trying frantically to reach their families in New York,” she said. “It was chaos all day.” When she heard the news about the Pentagon, she left. She still couldn’t reach Randolph, so her next thought was to go get her daughters. She had commuted into D.C. across the 14th Street Bridge, but that route was now blocked. She crossed the Roosevelt Memorial Bridge instead and took Route 66 west, eventually taking back roads to make her way south. It took her more than three hours to make the normally 30-minute drive home to Lorton.
When she arrived home, her husband and daughters were already there.
“He said that at the last minute, they had changed their meeting and decided to do a teleconference instead,” Ms. Mitchell said. “He knew the girls knew he’d planned to be at the Pentagon, so he went straight to get them so they’d know he was OK. He had been trying to call me all day.”
His meeting would have taken place on the side of the Pentagon where the plane hit. He lost friends and colleagues. “It’s a day we’ll never forget,” Ms. Mitchell said.
Back in Rice Hall, Mr. Freedman and the other university VPs were working to ensure that the university was secure. Outside, campus was mostly deserted, remembers Director of Young-Alumni and Regional Programs Maggie Wilson, B.A. ’03, who was a junior at the time. “Mid-day was like the worst rush hour ever, and then by 2 p.m. it was silent on the streets,” she said. “You could hear a pin drop. It felt like we were the only people downtown, it was so quiet.”
That afternoon, Ms. Wilson and some other students went to the roof of their building, the Statesman apartments at 2020 F St. “We could see the flames from the Pentagon from the roof of our building,” she said. “I’ll never forget that.”
Mr. Bondi had gone into his PAF assignment in Quincy Hall that morning after hearing the news—mostly to get a few blocks farther away from the State Department, and to maintain some sense of normalcy. After finally reaching his mother in Connecticut to let her know he was OK, he made the walk back home to his apartment in Columbian Plaza.
“When I left, it was really the weirdest I’ve ever seen Washington, D.C.,” he said. “It was surreal. There was literally no one anywhere. No cars on the streets, no people. It was absolutely eerie. Other than the occasional jet flyover and police sirens, there were no sounds.”
Mr. Kaplan spent the afternoon inside, watching TV and seeing the same images of the Twin Towers falling, over and over. “No one wanted to go outside. It was really eerie. Before GW built the [1957] E Street building, you could see the Pentagon smoke right from campus. We heard about the [Shanksville, Pa.] flight and didn’t think as much about it, until we realized that it had been heading for D.C.”
Coming Together and Getting Prepared
The university was open on Sept. 12, and a candlelight vigil was scheduled for that evening in Kogan Plaza. More than 3,500 people attended, according to the Sept. 25, 2001 edition of By George!, the university’s faculty and staff newspaper at the time.
Dr. Konwerski said it was the largest gathering of the university community he had ever witnessed, then or since. “The campus moved very quickly from being in a haze to feeling resolve,” he said. “There was a sense of, ‘We’re GW, we live in D.C., and we’re all in this together.’ People were really looking out for each other.”
What Ms. Mitchell recalls most clearly from the days after 9/11 was how the university community united around students who were directly affected by the tragedy—those who had lost loved ones, those from New York City, and those who had friends who had lost loved ones. “We tried to support the students as much as possible. The ones who had lost people were identified, and the housing staff really rallied around them.”
Ms. Biggs remembers what she called a “we can do this” attitude developing among the student body. “Everyone seemed to come together,” she said. “There was more community spirit.”
Being on campus with his fellow students helped Mr. Kaplan regain some sense of normalcy, he said. “It was nice to be on campus and feel camaraderie with other people. It’s a good community. But everything was still hard to grasp, especially the stories of the near misses—people who switched their meetings or didn’t go to work that day,” he said.
The events of 9/11 also prompted the university to overhaul its emergency-readiness plan, starting from the most basic premises and extending to minute details.
An experienced emergency manager, John Petrie, was brought on staff, and among other plans, he created detailed hypothetical situations using real campus locations for planning emergency exercises. The university created the Office of Emergency Management in December 2001 to coordinate GW’s preparation for, response to and recovery from incidents. A variety of methods—campus advisory e-mails, the GW Alert desktop system, a dedicated information phone line and social media alerts—now communicate pertinent information to students during emergency situations.
In the months after 9/11, students, staff members and faculty eased back into a “different sense of normal,” Mr. Kaplan said. The increased police presence on campus and the armed military personnel outside Metro stations and government buildings took some getting used to, he said, but eventually, students began thinking about other things. Classes resumed on Sept. 12, and before too long, it became acceptable again to do things like make jokes and watch sports, he said.
But 9/11 will always be a part of GW, Ms. Biggs said. “One thing I always remember is when I went back to class—that same 8 a.m. history class that I was in on the morning of 9/11. The professor said that one day in the future, he’ll be teaching a class about 9/11, and they’ll be just as bored and uninterested as we had been about World War II and other things we’d been learning about. That really woke me up,” she said.
GW President Steven Knapp created the Freshman Day of Service in 2009 to encourage first-year students to commemorate 9/11 with community service projects and reflection.
"The Freshman Day of Service provides an opportunity for our students to give back," Dr. Knapp said today during a media briefing sponsored by the Corporation for National and Community Service that highlighted GW's service activities. "It helps students make sense of Sept. 11 and what the events of that day mean to them, to the nation and the world beyond….By placing service right up at the front of the freshman experience, it makes a powerful connection between our students’ academic experience and their commitment to service."
This year’s Freshman Day of Service will focus on beautification of D.C. public schools. It will be followed by a 9/11 candlelight vigil in University Yard.
“The GW community came together quite beautifully over the course of 9/11 and the following days,” Mr. Freedman said. “This incredible shared experience brought the campus together, and it’s now deeply embedded in our souls.”
Do you have memories of 9/11 you would like to share? Visit the GW Remembers 9/11 web page and submit your own memories.