Memorial service honors 13 alumni victims of 9/11

Last Sunday on Cannon Green, several hundred University faculty, students and members of the public gathered to reflect on the 10-year legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and honor the memories of the thousands who perished, including 13 Princeton alumni.

The hour-long ceremony featured a welcome address by President Shirley Tilghman; musical selections from the Glee Club, Chapel Camerata and Chapel Choir; and speeches by philosophy professor Kwame Anthony Appiah, former trustee and U.S. senator Bill Bradley ’65, Chloe Wohlforth ’07 and Charlie Metzger ’12.

Each speaker encouraged the incoming Class of 2015 to internalize the lessons gleaned in the aftermath of 9/11 by practicing tolerance and being receptive to new ideas, valuing individuals’ shared humanity and maintaining an attitude of humble service and civic engagement.

Following an invocation by the Dean of Religious Life Alison Boden, Tilghman noted with pride how students at the time of the attacks had reached out to classmates whose families had been directly affected by the tragedy.

“[We should seek to build the] strongest possible bridges between ourselves and others,” she said. Tilghman also reaffirmed the University’s dedication to commemorating 9/11 by retelling the story of the memorial garden on the west side of East Pyne. The garden was constructed in 2003 and features bronze stars with the names and class years of the 13 deceased alumni.

Wohlforth honored the memory of the deceased alumni in her speech, noting that the 13 individuals were literally stars — physicists, economists and war veterans who had “each made an outstanding and critical impact” in their respective fields. As a 16-year-old junior in high school, Wohlforth received news that her father, Martin Wohlforth ’76, was one of the 13 alumni who had been killed while working in his investment bank office on the 104th floor of the South Tower.

“I’ve been to a lot of memorials since then,” she said. But the University’s ceremonies are different, she explained, because they are “well meaning” rather than impersonal and “acknowledge fallen alumni with grace and reverence.”

“Grief is one of [those] things with the power to silence us,” she said. “No one will ever forget.”

Appiah noted that the tragedy of 9/11 prompted “not just commemoration” but also academic contemplation and analysis by social scientists, politicians and philosophers. Describing ideologies in the Middle East that motivated the attack on the Pentagon and World Trade Center as well as the often irrational anxieties Americans have developed towards Islam, Appiah urged tolerance and understanding, warning that “identities with sharp edges are more likely to draw blood.”

“We must decide [who] we want to be,” he said, adding that he encouraged members of the audience to be open to learning about new ideas and accepting new identities.

Metzger, who is also a senior columnist for The Daily Princetonian, spoke of the millennial generation’s unique approach to coping with the aftermath of 9/11 by quoting messages from Twitter and Facebook. A girl who turned 13 on Sept. 11, 2001 remarked that she has “not had a normal birthday ever since,” and another wrote that “the courage of the men and women who tried to get in to rescue the victims while everyone was running out still amazes [her],” he said.

Arguing against the notion put forth by The New York Times columnist David Brooks that the millennial generation is politically apathetic, Metzger said that it was instead possible that the events of 9/11 came close enough to home to trigger a “wave of civic engagement.” He encouraged incoming freshmen to practice tolerance and seek education so that “such events will never be repeated.”

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Bradley, the day’s final speaker, argued that the chaos and fear unleashed by 9/11 made individuals more open, vulnerable and aware of their need for human connection.

“Our target and source of anger, al-Qaida, was clear,” he said, adding that what was less clear was how the nation would unite to cope with its grief. The answer is in the actions of the volunteers who immediately flew to New York City to aid in rescue missions, he noted, such as the EMTs who handled the devastation of the Oklahoma bombing as well as residents from Omaha, Bridgeport, New Jersey and many more places. Following a tragedy, the divisions and ethnic stereotypes we create “vaporize” and leave only our humanity, an entity “too often covered by our pursuit of material possessions, our relationship anxieties or the grind of everyday living to make an A, get a job or climb up the [corporate] ladder,” Bradley explained.

“There is a deeper servant-self that lies in each of us,” he said. “We stay in touch with it through the encouragement of a leader, or through tragedy, but we will only change the world when we can tap into that power ourselves.”

Student responses to the event were very positive. “I thought the commemoration ceremony was beautiful, well done and a lot deeper than expected,” Luba Margai ’15 said. Vivian Gao ’15 agreed, noting that she was happy that the speakers approached the tragedy from psychological, philosophical and social perspectives.

Anthony Paranzino ’14 also said he appreciated the speeches, nothing that 9/11 holds personal significance for him because his New York City apartment complex in Battery Park had been damaged by the blast.

“If you look at photographs from that day,” he said, “my apartment is in the foreground, obscured by smoke. When your hometown experiences an attack like that, it’s personal and easy to sympathize with others. I mean, any geography can be attacked ... everyone thought theirs was next.”

Collin Berger ’14 said he remembered being in his home in Connecticut at the time of the impact, hoping that his father, who frequented New York City train stations, was safe

“We came together as a community in that momentous and dark day in our history,” he said. “We were loose before with security, but 9/11 made us more aware of potential dangers.”

“Everyone seems to know someone close to them directly affected by 9/11,” Lizzie Martin ’14 said. “It’s nice to take a pause today and just think about how, for the last decade of my life, I’ve been aware of terrorism. I’ve learned that people really do come together in tragedies.”

In addition to the memorial service, for the remainder of the year University and community arts institutions are partnering to produce a series of concerts, exhibitions, theater performances and lectures exploring the relationship between art, loss and collective memory. Upcoming speakers in the series, titled “Memory and the Work of Art,” include neuroscientist Eric Kandel, architect and artist Maya Lin, “The History of Love” author Nicole Krauss and French artist Christian Boltanski, who will appear in conversation with biographer Mark Stevens.

According to Director of the Art Museum James Steward, planning for the project began two years ago when museum staff “began to consider what theme or themes would both lend themselves to collaborative work on and off campus and be topical in 2011.”

“We quickly recognized the opportunity to bring together a cross-disciplinary investigation that would be inspired by the 10th anniversary of 9/11 although not directly about 9/11,” he said in an email. “We probed the idea of memory and the power of the arts in shaping memory of the past (thus the ‘work’ of art) with a few other arts organizations ... and found that the theme resonated, and went ahead — inviting many other organizations to consider how they might participate.”

“Ultimately about 15 organizations developed programs,” he added.

Steward said he believed that the scale of the series — which is larger than that of typical arts programming — makes clear the frequent cooperation of the University and borough.

“Recent discussions between the University and the Borough tend to lose sight of the fact that our cultural organizations on and off campus have long worked together and do so all the time,” he remarked. “The Arts Council, the Princeton Symphony, the Art Museum and the public library have long partnered to develop exhibitions, performances and other programs. One of my hopes — supported by a collaborative grant from the University’s Arts Initiative — was to develop a program that would be collaborative on a larger scale and that would make better-known the fact that working together in the arts is something we already do and want to do more often.”

University partners in “Memory and the Work of Art” include the University Art Museum, the Lewis Center for the Arts, McCarter Theatre, the Department of Music, the Council of the Humanities, University Concerts, the University Library, French theater workshop L’Avant-Scène and the Wilson School’s Bernstein Gallery. Community partners include the Arts Council of Princeton, Princeton Public Library, Princeton Singers, Princeton Sympathy Orchestra, the Princeton Regional Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Westminster Choir College of Rider University.