Not long after United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into the World Trade Center, I was in Frist Campus Center. I hadn’t heard the news when I happened upon a group of students watching a replay of the crumbling towers on CNN. I didn't immediately grasp what had occurred. It seemed like a computer-generated scene from a blockbuster movie. After a few minutes, I had to leave. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was scheduled to go to Dillon Gymnasium to register for classes for my freshman year at Princeton.
What had happened only truly began to register as the day dragged on. In Blair Hall, I sat in my neighbors’ suite watching the news. I couldn’t reach my family, who lived in Manhattan. President Shirley Tilghman announced that classes would go on. I wondered whether that was the right decision. Was it disrespectful? She said that we do not want to let terrorists disrupt our lives. I downloaded a rendition of “America, the Beautiful,” burned a CD and played it loudly enough that everyone who passed my room could hear. A residential college adviser asked me to turn it off. On Sept. 11, had I already gone too far wearing patriotism on my sleeve? I worried that I had. It seemed like I’d have a lot to learn, a lot to work out, in the post-Sept. 11 age.
Princeton would also face challenges—especially as a school whose motto speaks so directly of service at home and abroad. The summer after Sept. 11, the Robertson family, the heirs to the benefactor of the Woodrow Wilson School, sued the university. They claimed that Princeton had ignored the Wilson School’s mission of training students for jobs in government service, particularly in foreign policy. And whether that was true or not, there was little doubt that the Wilson School’s international affairs program had atrophied. This was particularly glaring—and problematic—in light of the renewed focus on global affairs after Sept. 11. Princeton committed to reversing the trend and went on a binge of hiring prominent foreign relations professors. A specialist in international law, Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, became dean. The lawsuit dragged on for six and a half years. Princeton ultimately settled it for nearly $100 million. Today, the dean of the Wilson School is a health and well-being economist—the precise type of research focus that, however valuable, had helped prompt the lawsuit.
Sept. 11 also had a profound impact on some of Princeton’s most famous alumni. On the one-year anniversary of the attacks, I wrote a story for this newspaper profiling several graduates involved in the government’s response. One was then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ’54, who at the time was celebrated as a “secretary of war” as he waged a military campaign in Afghanistan and planned a second in Iraq. Another alumnus was Robert Mueller ’66, a former marine who became FBI director days before the attacks. I traveled to Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2002 to interview him. He told me how he had first been inspired to enter public service after an older classmate joined the marines and then died inVietnam. Today, Mueller remains as FBI director. Even though his term expired, President Barack Obama petitioned Congress to extend it. Rumsfeld, of course, has a far more controversial record.
The weekend after Sept. 11, I took New Jersey Transit back to Manhattan. I could smell the burning remains of the towers from my mom’s apartment, about half a mile away. The contrast could not have been sharper. I had just left my home city—the center of the attack—and moved to Princeton. There were immediate questions about how to change my college plans. Should I study Arabic? Should I join ROTC? Unlike several other Ivy League schools, Princeton still had such a program. The head of Army ROTC told me people ought not sign up for military service just because they were moved by the day’s events. "It's easy to rally patriotism but the greater war on terrorism will be about police work, intelligence gathering and law enforcement," he said in October 2001 for an article I wrote in The Daily Princetonian. As it happened, two wars became the centerpiece of America’s response to the Sept. 11 attacks. Many young men and women of my age cohort went off to fight. A number of courageous Princeton students joined. But most of my classmates and I returned relatively quickly to the routine of classes, eating clubs and extracurricular activities. As I think about it 10 years later, that rapid return to normalcy was perhaps the most chilling thing about being astudent at Princeton after Sept. 11.
Zachary Goldfarb’05 was editor-in-chief of the 128th Managing Board of The Daily Princetonian and is the secretary of the‘Prince’ Board of Trustees. He is currently a staff writer for The Washington Post.
For more coverage commemorating the 10th anniversary of 9/11, please click here.
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