Associate Professor Bethany Schneider and Alums Remember 9/11

On Sept. 11, 2001, Associate Professor Bethany Schneider was teaching the third day of class of her first-year-student seminar (then known as C-Sem) as a brand-new faculty member. She and four of the students from the class share their memories of that day.

Associate Professor Bethany Schneider

I spent my 30th birthday on the New Jersey Turnpike, driving a little truck rattling with books, a mattress, some pots and pans—the belongings of a graduate student, newly and miraculously elevated to assistant professor. I was wildly lucky to have a job (the academic market was already drying up), a good job (tenure track), a good job at a stone-and-cherry-blossom college with a storied name: Bryn Mawr. I was happy, and I was worried, with a variation on the same worries that had accompanied me to school every fall since I was five. Worries about me, about my success. Would the students like me? And what about my colleagues? Would I make friends? In the days that followed I set up my sparse apartment (the work of an hour) and worried over my syllabuses (many sleepless nights doubting and rebuilding the arc of my courses). Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, different plans were being laid. A drama was about to be staged—what we would come to call, with the stark horror that numbers can carry, 9/11.

“Where were you?”

It is the question we have asked one another ever since. For years my answer was, “I was teaching my first-ever class at Bryn Mawr. It was my very first day. A colleague came into the classroom and said ‘you all need to come watch with us.’ We went to a classroom with a TV, and stood together and watched the towers fall.”

And that was, indeed, my memory. I remember very clearly that first moment. Walking into the beautiful, sunny yellow lecture hall in English House and seeing my C-Sem gathered—18 first-year students. And I, a first-year professor. I remember their eager faces, their excitement—this was college. It was about to start. I remember my own excitement. This was my new job. It was about to start. I remember the colleague coming in, hovering at the back of the room. And then I remember us filing out, cramming into the tiny classroom with the television, standing with many others. The cries that went up from us as the tower fell. I remember holding someone’s hand. We returned to the lecture hall to try to talk about what we’d seen. Sat in a tight circle in that big space. Their faces were now so different from earlier—stiff and fearful where they had been open and joyous. The students from New York were terrified. I don’t think anyone had a cell phone to even try to call home. Their voices sounded so young, like children. My own young voice. What on earth did I say to them, I who was still so newly minted? I have no memory of that. But in that way you do in times of extreme duress, as if you are watching your own actions on a screen—I looked at their faces as we sat together on that unearthly beautiful September day and thought, we will all remember each other forever. We will always have been together, sitting in this circle, at this time.

Twenty years later, I reached out to those first-years—a set of email addresses that may or may not have been up to date, a reaching out across distances of all kinds. I am now 50, and they are nearly 40. But while so much has happened, time has also compressed. We are all firmly adults now, those teenagers and that squeaky young professor. And we all knew the world before 9/11, before the internet, before…before…before. “We were together,” I wrote. “All brand new to Bryn Mawr. I think of you when I think of that day. What do you remember? And how has that day resonated through your life?”

Of course it turns out that my memory is a wonky patchwork. September 11th was the third day that we had met together, not the first. And we all knew, already, that something had happened in New York when we gathered for class—though we had no idea of the magnitude. A plane had struck one of the towers, but we thought maybe it was an accident, a little plane. Apparently I began class by saying that anyone who wished to could stay and talk, but if people wanted to leave they should feel welcome. Most stayed. We talked together for a while, and then, indeed, we were fetched by another professor and we went and watched the second tower fall on TV, watched the repetition it made of the first. Or was that how it was? Television is the medium of repeats. There were two towers. Perhaps we watched the first fall, then its identical other? The sirens that would howl for days had already begun, an endless rising and falling wail. And the footage started looping too, until we could no longer know what we saw when—only that we were now in the aftermath. But we did know, together as we cried out, that we were being transformed by that vast theater of devastation—we could feel how terror changed the air we breathed together. We were not yet afraid, as we are in that very same classroom today, to share breath.

I still feel young. I still stay up the nights before the first day of class worrying about my syllabuses. I still love the moment of walking into a class of first years and feeling that excitement—this is the beginning! But I am not young. My hair is white. The students could be my children; I know it and they know it. It’s not a bad distance, but it is a distance, and the teaching and learning is different for it. Most of these young people were not yet born on 9/11. The war has lasted for their entire lives; the world they know is the world partly set in motion on that now long-ago day. The plume of smoke still rises against the blue sky and it cannot be ignored.

And so their first-day-of-school fears are different than mine used to be. They think of themselves as a collective. Will we learn what we need to learn to live together in this world, they ask their professors. How can we love one another enough to do the work that must be done, they ask each other.

My students now, in this post-9/11 world, read what I assign thunderously, as if they are mounted archers charging across the plain. They lean forward in their seats in that formerly yellow (now gray) room, with the tightened energy of drawn bows. They make arguments with the speed and precision of flying arrows. They study and speak and play and love voraciously, courageously. Their eyes are all that I can see above their masks, and they are looking directly at the future.

Biz Damore ’05, History of Art Major from Washington State

I had chosen Professor Schneider’s C-Sem since I was coming to Bryn Mawr from across the country and I was interested in studying something "close to home" while being far from home. Having 9/11 happen so early into my first time away from my family was isolating and intense, and I was terribly homesick for Washington State for my whole first semester. I probably would have been anyways, but the attack drove home how far I had truly chosen to be, and how much closer I was to denser urban environments that could be a target for this type of incredible violence. 

I remember Professor Schneider offering us the option to stay and collectively speak about what was going on, and I chose not to, as I have never been a great group processor and at the time was also not a very open verbal processor. I'm not sure if many people stayed or if most decided to go. On the way out of the classroom I connected with another person who was leaving, and she ended up becoming one of my best friends while at Bryn Mawr. 

Having such a huge national event happen so early into my solo adult life was formative in the sense that the week prior I had been overwhelmed by figuring out how to set up a bank account and buy stamps…then realizing those types of small details are pretty meaningless in the long run and not worth spending stress energy on. My college friends and I are really good about keeping in touch and expressing how much we care about each other, and I think that could come from this shared experience. 

Kate Sann '05, English Major from New York

I actually had an early morning Spanish class that day. At around nine, just as I was leaving, a professor came into the room and she was ashen and said, “a plane has hit the towers.” Having grown up in New York City, I remember being on a playdate when that truck bomb was detonated at the World Trade Center but for some reason I was thinking about a small plane and this being an accident and I walked over to English House not really understanding what had happened.

When I got to our class there were still people that hadn’t heard the news at all and it wasn’t until a few minutes into the class someone came in and told us we had to come look at the TV and see what was happening. It’s hard to imagine it now when I have push notifications blowing up my phone all the time. I think we were all in the room together when the first tower came down and Bethany said, “if you have to go, go.”

I did have a cell phone at that time and I remember trying frantically to reach my parents because they were often in the city for work. But the system was completely overwhelmed and I just kept getting a busy signal. I don’t think there was anyone else in my customs group from New York but there were a lot of students in our class who were native New Yorkers and there was a lot of, “Have you been able to get a hold of anyone, have you heard from your family?”

I also remember, after the plane crashed in Pennsylvania and the other one flew into the Pentagon, there was a lot of, “What’s next? Is Philadelphia a target?”

In a way, I think it was good that I was a freshman because I had just come out of orientation week where it was all like, “You are safe here, it’s a team, this is your tribe.” That really provided me with a tether back to something solid.

I did eventually get in touch with my parents and it was a very quick call. They were just like, “We are okay, and our number one goal is to donate blood.” They went to St. Vincent Hospital to donate blood because they were still thinking there would be survivors and people who needed emergency care.

Samara Schwartz ’05, History Major from Pennsylvania

What happened in Professor Schneider’s class on 9/11 isn’t my first memory of that day.  But it’s the story I’ve told for 20 years whenever a group conversation stumbles into the “Where were you on 9/11?” question—a ghastly but universal icebreaker.

At my French professor’s 9 a.m. office hours, we stared at each other and at a small radio that was narrating the unthinkable. Eventually, because my schedule said I was supposed to go to class at 9:30, I did.

The school year was so new that informal seating arrangements hadn’t yet crystallized, but I remember that it seemed only half of the students were there. When I heard someone whisper about a large group watching the news at the Campus Center, I wondered if I’d made a mistake.  

I’m so glad I went to class.

After making it clear that anyone who wished to leave for any reason was welcome to do so, Professor Schneider invited those who remained to talk—to share anything on their minds. I remember listening quietly, in awe of all who found any words at that time.  

Then, in a somber tone, this question was voiced: “What are they going to do with all of those postcards [depicting the Twin Towers]?” I remember quickly scanning all eyes in the room for validation that this response felt out of place, despite the latitude we’d been given. I looked to Professor Schneider.

She was listening patiently.  And when she spoke, she was respectful of the contribution this student made and of the feelings expressed. Professor Schneider seemed to understand something I didn’t yet: that not everyone processes things, especially really tough things, in the same way.  

I remember feeling thankful to be at Bryn Mawr that day. Using the landline phone in our quad to call my parents (who were in South Central Pa. but thankfully far from Shanksville), I told them about how the College had assembled an impromptu afternoon interdisciplinary panel of experts to speak on Merion Green.  At a moment when answers felt so hard to come by, Bryn Mawr had shored up its best resources to help students make sense of the day’s events, how the world might change, and why what we were studying mattered. 

But it was my C-Sem professor who gave me the indelible personal memory of the day and a lesson I’ve tried to carry with me ever since: give people grace.