by Kaitlyn Hughes | features editor
Not even a week after Sept. 11, 2001, Theodore Corcovilos, an associate professor of physics, took a trip to New York City to visit a friend.
The two took a walk through the city and arrived three blocks from Ground Zero. Firefighters returning from their shift were covered in ash, looking exhausted and defeated. Fences were covered with the faces of missing people. Memorials were everywhere throughout the streets of downtown Manhattan.
“You could smell and taste the dust in the air,” Corcovilos said, who was in graduate school at California Institute of Technology.
In honor of the 23rd anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001 The Duke asked professors to recount where they were on that day.
Professors were scattered throughout the country during the time of the attacks. For some it was prior to their time at Duquesne.
Everyone remembers where they were.
Corcovilos was in Pasadena on the day of the attack. He awoke to a phone call to his friend who was living in New York City. His friend sounded upset and told him to turn the television on.
“Two or three minutes after I turned on the TV, the second airplane hit the second tower,” Corcovilos said. “It kind of blows your mind because you’re like ‘No way this is coincidence. There’s something bad going on here.’”
Corcovilos and his roommates watched the events unfold on television. His university had canceled classes that day, although they were on the opposite end of the country.
The day of the attacks, professor of nursing Alison Colbert had started her first day of an internship with the Texas Department of Health. She was working directly with the state epidemiologist.
“We were in a big meeting,” Colbert said, “and everybody’s beepers started going off.”
The energy changed in the room. This was an activation of the emergency response system after the country realized there was more than a single plane that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Colbert said she was more in the way than she was helpful.
“There was a lot of trying to figure out what was going on, [and] what the response would be,” Colbert said.
A muted atmosphere
As the day went on, people were in a state of confusion. The feeling of the country had shifted.
“What was surreal to me is I remember walking outside later that morning, and everything was dead quiet,” Corcovilos said.
Usually in Pasadena there was a constant roar of commercial jets overhead.
Within a couple hours all of the noise had stopped and was replaced by the sounds of military jets.
“That was just eerie looking up and seeing fighter jets circling the city,” Corcovilos said. “All this was for stuff that was happening thousands of miles away.”
Associate Professor of History Jotham Parsons was living in the North Side of Chicago in 2001.
“Like most people, I have a pretty strong recollection of that day,” Parsons said.
Parsons had watched the events play out on the news while he was at the gym. Eventually, he cut his workout short after the second tower was struck.
He had a friend who was evacuated from his office building in the Chicago Loop. The two spent the day wandering around the North Side calling people they knew who lived in New York City.
“We didn’t know what to do,” Parsons said. “The other thing that everybody remembers about it, is that it was this very beautiful, sunny, early fall day. It was good to be outside.”
The constant flights from Chicago O’Hare International Airport had suddenly stopped.
“People were quiet,” Parsons said. “They didn’t necessarily stay inside, but it was a hushed atmosphere.”
Bravery of first responders
The actions of the first responders on the day of the attacks and the sacrifices they made were meaningful to Colbert.
“It’s truly unbelievable, people who are first responders, whose lives are dedicated to that,” Colbert said. “They were ready and absolutely did exactly what they trained for and what they were committed to doing.”
Associate Professor of Pharmaceutical Science Carl Anderson was living in Kansas City, MO, at the time of the attacks. They occurred one year before he came to Duquesne.
Anderson said that the respect for first responders that came after the events was appropriate.
Though the attacks were an exceptional event for firefighters, their actions were not exceptional. They were doing the job they always do.
“The one good thing is to see a recognition for how truly special that job is,” Anderson said.
Fear of hate crime
After the events on Sept. 11, 2001, were deemed terrorist attacks, Corcovilos’ friends who were international students felt unsafe.
“They were seen with some suspicion, even if it was folks from places that weren’t directly involved in terrorist attacks,” Corcovilos said.
Professor Norman Conti was teaching at West Virginia University at the time.
Conti tried to better educate his class on what Islam was and explain that it’s not what people who are terrorists make it out to be.
“I was really worried about hate crimes against Middle Eastern folk,” Conti said.
America was changed
When Corcovilos took the trip to New York City, he said the airport was filled with military and their dogs.
“Everybody was being hyper vigilant,” Corcovilos said.
The amount of security in the airport was a shock to many Americans at the time because prior to the attacks, anyone could walk up to the gate of the flight.
Airports were not the only entity that experienced modifications. The events of 9/11 changed everything in the world, Conti said.
Conti remembers going into work on Sept. 12, 2001, and there were American flags taped onto the window of every building. Everyone cared not only about the country, but each other.
As the controversy of war began to arise the country began to fracture.
“America came together right afterward. We had this tremendous sense of grief and this tremendous unity. It was very powerful,” Conti said. “But then, of course, we fell apart because some agreed with the political military response, and some people didn’t.”