A Message on the 25th Anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001

Dear Orange Community:

Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed in the span of a single morning. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in New York, at the Pentagon and in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

They were office workers, first responders, airline passengers and crew, colleagues and neighbors, parents and children. In the days and years that followed, the effects of that morning rippled outward across the United States and around the world.

I carry my own memory of that day. On 9/11, I was a young Air Force officer assigned as a faculty member at the U.S. Air Force Academy. I was just beginning my first class of the morning, when word came that a plane had struck the World Trade Center—and then another.

I remember looking at the students in front of me. They were young men and women just months away from graduating from the academy and beginning active military service. And, even in that first confused hour, it was clear to me that those students understood that the world they were stepping into had just changed. Forever.

A great many of those students went on to serve in the conflicts that followed 9/11. Some who graduated from the academy that year, and then went to war, did not come home. I have thought of those students often in the 25 years since, and I think of them today.

I share that memory not because it is unique, but because it is one thread among millions. Nearly everyone old enough to remember that day carries a version of it. They remember where they were, who they were with, what they understood in that moment.

Our Syracuse University community includes people who lost family members and friends that day; veterans and service members who answered the call in the years that followed, and the families who supported them through deployments and losses of their own; first responders and their families; students and colleagues from nations that bore their own losses and consequences in the two decades of conflict that followed; and many others for whom this anniversary carries weight.

On this 25th anniversary, Syracuse University pauses to remember all who were lost, to honor those who responded with courage that day and in the years since, and to hold in mind the families and communities—in this country and beyond it—whose lives were permanently altered by what happened and by what followed.

As a university, our particular responsibility on a day like this is to remember honestly and to teach carefully. Our obligation is to help our students, most of whom were not yet born on Sept. 11, 2001, understand not only what happened that morning, but the full and complicated history that followed, so that they inherit this history with clear eyes.

We remember, too, that in the aftermath people from every background and every corner of the world found common cause in supporting one another. That is a gift and a poignant reminder to the Orange community of what we owe each other in moments of grief, loss and tragedy.

Sincerely,
J. Michael Haynie
Chancellor and President