Sept. 11, 2001, began as a “perfect day,” Jack Nagel recalls. Later, he watched “these planes against the sky and the horrors that followed.”
At 8:46 a.m., the first hijacked plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Nagel — who, at the time, was serving as the chair of Penn’s Political Science department — was sitting in his Stiteler Hall office when a colleague drew his attention to a small television.
He remembers wondering whether the first collision could have been an accident.
News spread throughout campus unevenly, disseminating through television and radio reports in dorm rooms, frantic calls from family members, and announcements from professors who paused their lectures to provide updates. As the scale of the attacks on the twin towers and Pentagon became clear, Penn canceled afternoon classes, tightened campus security, and transformed Houston Hall into an on-campus crisis center.
Twenty-five years later, conversations with those who taught, reported, and cared for students that day offer a firsthand account of how news of America’s deadliest terror attack reached campus — and how Penn responded.
***
Ian Lustick, a Political Science professor at the time, was at home when his phone rang. A reporter was calling to ask for his assessment of the attack.
“What attack?” Lustick recalled asking. The reporter told him to turn on the television.
Then a faculty member at Northwestern University, Penn President Larry Jameson happened to be visiting the University that morning for a meeting. When he stepped out for a moment to call his wife and wish her a happy birthday, she asked if he had seen the news.
“I had no idea what was happening until she told me that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center,” Jameson wrote in a statement.
He rushed back into the meeting and told his colleagues. They gathered around a television to watch the news.
At 9:03 a.m., the second plane struck the South Tower.
At that point, “we knew it wasn’t an accident,” Nagel recalled.
The second strike instantly changed how people understood what they were witnessing, recalled Ilene Rosenstein, who directed Penn’s Counseling and Psychological Services for 18 years.
“In the beginning it was shock and confusion. People didn’t know if this was just an airplane dysfunction,” Rosenstein said. “Then came really strong feelings.”
Then-Penn President Judith Rodin was watching from inside College Hall. After the first strike, her chief of staff rushed into her office. The board of American Airlines — which she served on — was convening an emergency conference call, according to an excerpt of Rodin’s forthcoming memoir provided to The Daily Pennsylvanian.
During that call, the board learned that at least four planes had been hijacked, two operated by American Airlines. Like much of the nation, Penn’s then-leader sat waiting for more news as a final flight remained unaccounted for.
Lustick, meanwhile, was scheduled for a speaker event at the Solomon Asch Center that day. Before it began, he stopped by the Annenberg Center lobby in search of a television.
Standing side by side with a security guard, Lustick watched the burning towers collapse.
“What was most remarkable to me was all those people dying in front of my eyes, and there was not a scream, nothing you could hear; there was not even an announcement or a comment,” Lustick said. “It was just the crushing of these buildings together. First one, and then the other, as I remember. And it was soul-shaking.”
The event continued as planned around noon. Lustick remembers little of what was said.
***
In Center City, then-University Chaplain William Gipson was unaware of what had happened.
Gipson had attended a routine meeting of the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations near 13th and Market streets that morning. It was a beautiful day, he remembered, and he had no reason to rush back to University City. He stopped at a grocery store on South Street to pick up items his wife had requested for dinner, dropped them at their home near Fitler Square, and continued on his walk to Penn.
As he walked back to campus, Gipson — who did not carry a cellphone — heard fragments of conversation about a bombing, but could not parse what they meant.
Soon after, Jameson’s meeting on campus had concluded and he was making his way to 30th Street Station, intent on returning home.
“I encountered a scene that seemed almost apocalyptic,” Jameson wrote. “Crowds of frightened people were desperately trying to find a way out of Philadelphia.”
Trains were not running, and a nearby rental car agency had closed. Jameson eventually secured a car and began driving toward Chicago with some colleagues. Their vehicle had a faulty radio, and roughly every hundred miles the group pulled off the highway to hear the latest developments.
By the time Gipson finally reached Locust Walk — still unaware of the morning’s events — passersby were visibly agitated and he found students waiting on the porch outside the Office of the Chaplain, then located near 37th Street.
It was from those students that Gipson learned about the attacks.
“In what I would call typical student mode at Penn, it was, ‘What do we do now?’” Gipson said. “Students immediately wanted to know what could they do to help other students on campus.”
***
Earlier that morning, at 9:15 a.m., Rodin, then-Provost Robert Barchi, and other administrators had met to determine how Penn would respond. Their first concern was identifying people within the community who had been directly affected while determining what support the University could provide, her memoir recounted.
“That day, my first responsibility was, of course, to the Penn community,” Rodin wrote. “The university had a large number of students with family in the New York area, so our first order of business was figuring out who was directly impacted, and what we could offer in terms of help.”
In Washington, Penn officials were trying to account for the 15 students enrolled in the semester-long Penn in Washington program. Nagel, the Political Science department chair, contacted the program’s on-site director and confirmed that the students were safe. Students working near the White House and Capitol — buildings where “we usually felt safe” — had been evacuated.
About an hour later, Penn administrators had drafted a plan to secure campus and expand the resources available to students. The University canceled afternoon classes and sent nonessential employees home, while off-duty police officers were called to campus and vehicles were barred from Locust Walk.
The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania implemented its disaster plan, discharging 49 patients to make space for possible victims arriving from New York. Its three PennSTAR helicopters were placed on standby — one had prepared to travel to a triage area at Teterboro Airport before being told not to depart.
Houston Hall became the center of Penn’s support efforts.
Rosenstein and the CAPS staff first considered who might have been directly affected. Reaching out across Penn’s schools, they offered drop-in counseling and met with faculty and staff who were unsure how to best support their students.
The Red Cross quickly set up phone banks in Houston Hall for students who could not reach their families, Rosenstein said. At an information session, one student stood up and addressed the room. She had not heard from her husband since around 9 a.m. and wanted to know how she could reach him.
More than 100 people were present, Rosenstein recalled, but the hall went silent.
As the afternoon continued, food began arriving at Houston Hall. Rodin stayed in the building with students and repeatedly asked Rosenstein for advice.
“‘Are we doing enough?’ was actually a very touching and beautiful statement from a president of a university,” Rosenstein said. “She cared that much.”
At Houston Hall, students watched the news, others waited to contact relatives, and many remained at the crisis center simply because they did not want to be alone. Counselors, faculty members, staff, and student volunteers prepared to stay through the night.
Gipson remembered a number of religious communities around campus opening their spaces to anyone who needed them. That afternoon, he and other religious leaders organized opportunities for people to gather.
When one attendee began speaking, Gipson was struck by the grace with which others responded. He recalled someone saying, “We understand what you’re feeling. That’s why we’re here in silence.”
“What really impressed me about that day was how absolutely nimble and agile such a large institution had become,” Gipson said. “It was just a wonderful sense of camaraderie, of community, of care, of consolation that I’ve never ever experienced before in life, coming out of a terrible, terrible incident.”
***
2004 College graduate Steve Brauntuch, then a sophomore and DP reporter, was getting ready for class when he found his roommate sitting on their couch watching the news. The New Jersey native stayed in the dorm, called his parents, and tried to confirm that everyone he knew was safe.
Brauntuch did not go to class. Instead, he contacted his fellow reporter Tristan Schweiger, a 2003 College graduate, and together they decided that they should go to the newsroom.
2002 College graduate Jo Piazza, then a senior and DP reporter, had the same instinct. After seeing what happened that morning on the television, she headed straight to the newsroom.
Reporters filed in without assignments or a clear sense of how a student newspaper could contribute to covering a national catastrophe.
“We were these kids reporting a story in real time while also terrified that our college campus and that our city could also possibly be under attack next,” Piazza said.
The newsroom sprang into action when then-managing editor Rod Kurtz addressed his staff, emphasizing the gravity of the subject and the need to report it accurately. As editors divided assignments, staffers rolled in a television and left a live feed of CNN playing.
Later, the president’s office invited Brauntuch and other DP reporters to a briefing with Rodin, the provost, and then-Executive Vice President John Fry.
As Brauntuch crossed Locust Walk to attend the meeting, he remembers that the people around him were like “ghosts.”
Administrators told reporters that while they had no evidence Penn was a specific target, they still remained concerned because of the University’s national symbolic significance and proximity to many of Philadelphia’s historic landmarks.
At one point, Rosenstein recalled Rodin asking whether Penn needed to place cots in Franklin Field and move students out of the high-rise residence halls. The attacks appeared to be targeting tall buildings, and administrators had to consider every possibility.
“It sounds kind of crazy now,” Rosenstein admits. “But it was at that level.”
As the afternoon drew on, students retreated into their residences. Locust Walk, normally a hub buzzing with campus activity, remained empty.
***
That evening, around 8 p.m., people began emerging from their rooms.
Around 500 students and faculty members gathered on College Green for a two-hour interfaith vigil. Music played as the crowd listened to excerpts from the Quran, Hebrew and Christian scriptures, and poems.
Gipson and then-Vice Provost for University Life Valarie Swain-Cade McCoullum invited students to speak. Members of the crowd shared fears they had for relatives, grief for strangers, and uncertainty about what the attacks would mean for the country.
Throughout the day, reporting had given Piazza something to focus on, and some distance from the emotions surrounding her. That distance broke down on College Green as she covered the vigil for the student paper, and she burst into tears.
In the excerpt from her memoir, Rodin recalled that students visited the rooms of frightened Arab and Muslim students to make it clear that they were not merely invited to the vigil but needed to be there.
As the group “cried together, prayed together,” Rodin asked students to consider what they would carry forward from the day.
“You need to figure out, from this horrible moment, what you can do to make the world a better place, a safer place, a place where more people feel valued, and a place where different perspectives are heard,” Rodin wrote.
For Gipson, while many of the exact details from that day have since faded, the emotions have not.
“It was so long ago,” Gipson said. “But what it felt like — that’s so palpable. Even today.”
Senior reporter Phoebe Anagnos covers student life and can be reached at anagnos@thedp.com. At Penn, she studies architecture and earth science. Follow her on X @phoebeeanagnos.
