It was a beautiful Tuesday morning, sunny and warm, when I reached my faculty office at 7:45 to complete preparations for my first lecture of the new semester.  As always, I was excited for a new year of teaching:  who would my students be, how would they surprise and inform me, how would my teaching evolve as I learned their personalities and levels of engagement.  Having introduced the course and myself to the class at our first meeting a few days earlier, I felt ready for my initial lecture at 9:30 that morning.

It was September 11, 2001, and I was in Boston.  Less than five miles away, planes were leaving Boston Logan International Airport on their routine schedules, many of them heading as usual to New York City.  As they lifted off the runway, these planes would fly low over my son’s new school, where he was in his first week as a high school freshman.

Classical music played on the radio as I focused on reviewing and making small changes to my lecture notes.  I became only vaguely aware at some point that the music had stopped, and that some news–of a crash or an explosion somewhere?–was being reported.  I worked on.

******

Shortly before 9 a.m., I walked to the nearby convenience store for a second cup of coffee.  There, I slowly became aware that the store’s speakers were carrying news rather than their never-ending loop of pop and other music.  I became more conscious of that when I recognized the speaker’s voice.  It was Peter Jennings, the evening host of ABC Television News.  Why would he be on radio broadcast in the morning?  I tried to focus on what he was saying as I paid for my coffee.

Pieces began to come together for me.  A plane had crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan at 8:46.  It was not clear why.  And I did not yet know that it was American Airlines Flight 11 that had left Logan Airport at 7:59 that morning.

As I took the two-minute walk back to my office, I thought about the awful news and the unanswered questions, and I figured that I would make an initial comment to my first- and second-year students, many of them away from home for the first time.  I would advise them that the authorities and reporters would clarify matters as the day wore on, and then give the first lecture of my course on Law and Society.

What I couldn’t know was that, as I was taking that short walk back to work, a second flight out of Boston, United Airlines Flight 175, had crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m.

******

This I learned from the radio news just after returning to my office.  My focus immediately changed.  I did not need to be told that the twin crashes were not accidents.  It must be terrorism, and who knew when and how it would end. The nation was under attack, and the Boston connection to the terrorism only added to the alarm.  I realized then that I would not be lecturing that morning.  Instead, I would meet my new students in the classroom and offer to discuss with them whatever they wished about the developing horrors.

I began to understand how little I was prepared for this mission as I walked down the busy hallway of the large classroom building just before 9:30.  As I neared the room, a female student rushed toward me anxiously, urgently calling my name.  “Professor Yeager,” she said through tears, “is it alright if I miss class today?  My mother works at the World Trade Center, and I can’t reach her!”

I had not at all anticipated this sort of desperation, this close connection to the tragedy, and I felt strangely guilty.  Guilty that the requirements of my course had added stress to this student at what was one of the worse moments of her young life, guilty that she felt she had to clear things with me before she could get on with what truly mattered that day.  “Yes, of course,” I said, still trying to shake off the shock of this heart-rending reality check.  “You need to take care of your family business.”   Immediately I realized that my reply did not adequately meet the moment, but at least it freed her to continue her search for her mother.

She had just rushed away when a young male student approached me, his face etched with fear.  “Professor Yeager, I’m sorry that I have to miss class, but my father is an ambassador to another country and they’re sending a car to pick me up.”  “They” I assumed to be the U.S. State Department, and his report sent another chill down my back.  The nation had not only been assaulted, but the breadth and next targets of the attack were entirely unknown.  The federal government was handling this young man as a potential target himself.

******

I entered my classroom in a bit of a daze as I was trying to reckon with the immensity of the circumstances.  Most of my 50-plus students were there, seated on risers in u-shaped formation.   Taking a few moments to reorient myself, and as calmly as possible, I switched into performance mode and announced that the plan for the day had changed.  Instead of the introductory lecture, I would stay as long as any students wanted to discuss the frightening and ongoing news.  Anyone who wished to could leave now or at any time they chose.

Virtually everyone stayed for the length of the 80-minute class period.  The students were eager to talk and listen.  We reviewed the known details as I and some of the students had learned them.  About the Boston flights that had just crashed into the Twin Towers.  About the uncertainty as to the ‘why,’ but with the early government assumption that the terrorists were Al-Quada.  More often we spoke about what we did not yet know.  Mostly our conversation was calm, deliberative and thoughtful.

Near the end of our class meeting time, a young woman on the highest riser at the back of the room raised her hand.  Her question was as bracing as it was simple.  “Are we safe here, at Boston University?”

At this very sensible question, my mind began to race.  Early in my teaching career I had become comfortable answering student questions with “I don’t know.”  I would then tell the class that I would find the answer and report back to them.  I had long ago abandoned the naive idea that the professor should know all of the answers.

But this question was different.  I clearly did not know the answer to it, but I immediately realized that I had to answer it.  These were people’s children, they were in my charge at the moment, they were away from home, and they were rightly afraid.  Nothing in my experience or training had prepared me for her question.

As I searched for the right words, my mind detoured to my son.  Was he safe, would he be safe, and how would I know?  I pushed those concerns aside and returned my attention to the roots of the student’s question.  Here she and her fellow students were, many living in the University’s high-rise dormitories only a few seconds away by jet aircraft from the airstrips that had launched the fatal strikes on the World Trade Center.

With no best answer available, this is what I said:  “Yes, I believe we are all safe here.  We know that the federal government and the military are now on full alert, there are military jets already in the air defending the skies, and no aircraft are likely now to get close enough to other civilian targets to threaten them.  Especially in Boston.  Yes, we are safe now.”  I wished that I knew so.

******

I arrived back at the office and dropped into my chair.  The morning had been a disorienting and exhausting blur.  As I sat there, I learned from the radio broadcast what had occurred while we were in class, and which we did not know then:  that a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon (at 9:37 a.m.), that the South Tower of the World Trade Center had collapsed (9:59), followed by the collapse of the North Tower (10:28), and that heroic passengers on a fourth flight had attacked its hijackers, who crashed the plane in a Pennsylvania field, killing all aboard (10:07).

The nation was at war, and would never be the same.  I picked up the phone and called my son’s school to see that he was safe.