When Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn stepped in front of the hundred-plus crowd gathered in the Knorr Student Center, he was thinking about World War II.
The fire and panic from the TV screen he had just turned off was still reflected in the faces of his audience.
“I just want to say something,” The Collegian reported him to have said on Sept. 11, 2001. “We are going to watch the campus carefully. We will keep in touch with the airports. But we must go on with our work.
“We’ve all got a job to do, just like everyone else in America,” Arnn said. “London continued to function (during the blitz). We’re going to act like that, too. We have to have the strength to keep ourselves together. In the meantime, each one of us should do his part.”
He began to walk toward the door of the union. He needed to find the state police and make sure the campus was secure. He wanted to know if the country was under attack.
But just as he walked away, he added:
“Everyone go to your classes.”
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Eleven years ago the college was hosting a Center for Constructive Alternatives titled “One of Freedom’s Finest Hours: Statesmanship and Soldiership in World War II.”
The attack was launched on the third day of lectures and scores of visitors to campus were temporarily stranded, throwing the administration into a scramble looking to find them housing and food until the airports reopened.
Over the next few days, students held several prayer services and memorials. More than 300 students and faculty gathered on the quad for a candlelight vigil on Sept. 14.
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On the morning of the third day of the CCA, Professor of English Patricia Bart was walking on crutches. Recently she had undergone massive orthopedic surgery and was, as she put it, “luxuriating in handicapped parking spaces.”
She settled into the desk of her Hillsdale College office at 8:40 a.m and turned her coffee machine on. Her computer booted up, she logged on the internet to check the morning headlines. The Pentagon was reducing its staff or something. She wondered if a friend of hers might see some changes.
She shut down the browser and started up a project she was working on at the time. She moved to the top of the screen and entered at the head of a long file of code: “20010911:0857–Resumed work on the Ht project today.”
A few minutes later someone burst into the room with news of the attack.
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On the morning of the third day of the CCA, Alexis Allen, now a Hillsdale College freshman, was in second grade.
She remembers feeling excited for being let out of school early. Her mother picked up Allen and her brother and they drove home, where she fully understood something was wrong. All the TVs in the house were on and
every member of her family that could be let off work was there.
“My family was very distraught,” she said. “That I definitely remember – just crying. I had yet to lose a relative very close to us; I had yet to experience any sort of tragedy.”
In the last decade, a few of Allen’s cousins joined the Army and served in Afghanistan. Her brother currently serves in the Army.
Allen said 9/11 was one of the most influential moments in her life, like it was for all Americans.
“It’s impossible for me to think that that was not a defining moment for anybody who was alive regardless what age you are, even if you were a baby, because it changed America as we knew it,” she said.
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On the morning of the third day of the CCA, Matteo Moran, now a sophomore, said goodbye to his mother at the Chelsea, N.Y., train station and drove with his father to school. This happened everyday and Moran remembers seeing the trains filled with people riding into New York City passing through the station.
At school, Moran and his classmates watched a movie. When it ended and the teacher removed the VHS tape, a news report flashed onto the screen. One of the World Trade Centers was on fire. The teacher turned off the TV Moran later found out official school policy was not to tell any students younger than fourth grade.
Moran’s uncle worked just a few blocks from Ground Zero. Moran’s father told Moran in advance his uncle was safe but later admitted more than 10 hours went by before they actually knew.
“It was scary not knowing where my uncle was,” Moran said. “You go into tunnel vision. All you can focus on is if he got out of there alive – if everything’s OK.”
Moran, unlike many students in the NYC area, attended school in the following days. As usual he and his father dropped off his mother at the train station before continuing to school – but now the trains in the station were empty.
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On the morning of the third day of the CCA, Paul Rahe, professor of history, was not in Hillsdale, Mich. He was in Tulsa, Okla., where he taught at the University of Tulsa.
At home, he logged onto his computer to check stock prices. The prices indicated something was wrong and he turned on his TV.
The class he was teaching that evening was titled “Historical Studies in the Origin of War.” He didn’t like the idea of politicizing a class and, after walking to the front of his classroom, began his planned lecture on the Peloponnesian War.
About five minutes in a student raised his hand.
“We don’t want to hear about this,” the student said.
“Well, what do you want to hear about?” Rahe asked.
“We want to hear about today.”
Rahe paused and thought it was really pretty stupid to not address the beginning of a war in a class about the origins of war and complied with the young man’s request.
Rahe discussed the day with his class. We are now at war. This is something like Pearl Harbor. Who did this? Maybe Islamic extremists.
Rahe ended the lecture by asking his students if they planned on enlisting in the military. No one raised his hand.
“Something to ponder,” Rahe told The Collegian in 2012.
