DeKALB – 9/11 is the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil. For many current and former NIU faculty and staff, they can remember it like it was yesterday.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the United States suffered an attack by the extremist group al-Qaida. The tragedy resulted in the death of 2,977 people, according to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum.
Since the tragedy occurred 22 years ago, many around the United States feel the lingering devastation.
Laurie Elish-Piper, the interim executive vice president and provost of NIU, on the day of 9/11 gathered her elementary education students in the Learning Center at Gable Hall to watch the TV when her students began to ask questions.
“They started asking me questions like ‘how do I explain this to the children that I’m going to have in my clinical classroom? What if they ask me questions, and I don’t know how to answer that? Or, if I was in my classroom and this was happening, what should I do to make my students feel safe?’” Elish-Piper said.
She thought it was remarkable that these students, who were soon to be teaching in clinicals and hadn’t even met their students yet, were already thinking about the student’s well-being.
“It really just let me know that they were in the right major,” Elish-Piper said. “They were really caring about others and thinking about the well being of children while we were in this incredibly difficult, confusing, scary situation.”
After the chaos of the day, Elish-Piper was about to begin her commute home when she stopped at a gas station and suddenly the impact of the event hit her.
“There’s hardly any cars on the road. There’s no airplanes flying. No one is talking,” Elish-Piper said. “I’m standing there at the gas pump, filling my my car getting ready to head out of town …to go to my house, and that moment really struck me that this is such a profound moment that it felt like the world stopped.”
Stanley Arnold, an associate professor in the history department, was teaching at Le Moyne College, a Jesuit college in Syracuse, New York, when 9/11 happened.
“We had class the next day, and even though the school is five hours from New York City, maybe about 30% or 40% of the kids were from the New York City area,” Arnold said. “One young woman, when we started to talk about it, ran out of the class crying. I had a student who had a relative who was a court officer who was missing. I don’t know whether they found him or her.”
Being from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and working at different jobs throughout the Northeast, Arnold was close to people who lost their lives or lost someone close to them.
“I worked on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in foreign currency options. My last supervisor was killed,” Arnold said.
Arnold had other friends and family close to the tragedy, including a work associate and his son who died on one of the planes, a step-brother who was supposed to fly one of planes and a friend who was housing first responders a mile out from the World Trade Center.
Having lost so much from the tragedy, Arnold felt a mix of emotions.
“I think it was a combination of shock and anger and sadness and fear,” Arnold said. “We had one small child who was four and another one on the way. What’s going to happen in the future?”
Jim Killam, the Northern Star adviser from 1995 to 2012, and the Northern Star staffers had to navigate through the swirling emotions and try to provide clarity to the ongoing tragedy.
The front page of the Sept. 12, 2001, edition of the Northern Star was a photo of the World Trade Center before its collapse. The apocalyptic looking photo showed the second tower right as it was hit, an explosion of debris and hurling heaps of smoke could be seen profusely pillowing out of the tower.
Alongside the front page, a timeline of the events and coverage of the downtown area of Chicago and O’Hare were covered with a headline titled “Chicago falls silent…”
The back page of the newspaper that day was a full page American flag. NIU students would reportedly tear the flag out and put it in windows all across campus.
To learn more about the tragedy, visit the 9/11 Memorial and Museum website.
