To the Editor:
I read with interest your staff editorial on the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and its legacy impact on the University.
It likely goes without saying, but it’s impossible to sum up the far-reaching consequences of that tragic day in a few paragraphs, even with the benefit of a quarter-century of perspective. Nonetheless, I feel a particular call to respond as on that day, 25 years ago, I sat in one of the figurative seats that you now occupy — as editorial page editor on The Daily Pennsylvanian’s 117th Board of Editors. I was thus responsible for penning that other staff editorial (concerning the initiation of hostilities against al-Qaeda and its sponsors in Afghanistan) you cite as reflecting a sort of naive willingness — to countenance the whims of our elected officials, maybe? To entertain unrestrained militarism? To indulge a range of systemic abuses of our personal rights? — characteristic of those of us who came of age in pre-9/11 times.
Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and with an additional 25 years of accumulated life experience, perhaps I can look back on our reactions during that turbulent, terrifying autumn with a more critical eye. A few themes thus strike me as worthwhile as we reflect on those events and all they’ve wrought in the years since.
First: Even with the benefit of hindsight, I suspect there’s little of substance that our board would change in our message regarding the then-unfolding war that “must be fought” against the perpetrators of 9/11. Certainly, we’d join with yours in offering a full-throated, direct warning about the dangers inherent in pursuing justice without restraint (it would be impossible, after all, to succinctly address the vast costs we continue to pay for such policy — whether in the form of diminished national moral stature, lives and fortune lost to wars of score-settling, or even just in the countless hours we all spend indulging the theater of airport security). But please consider our early perspective in the context of its time. Even before we published our October editorial, the chain of events following 9/11 had already begun disrupting our lives in profound and permanent ways — undermining our sense of individual security, blunting our economic opportunity, and, before too long, eroding our trust in our leaders, institutions, and very sense of unified nationhood. We were threatened. We were terrified of what we understood would surely come next. And we were anxious to begin a process of repair.
I know, too, that it can be tempting to look for direct-line connections between the events of that time and the “campus politics” of today (and believe me, as a former editor of this publication, I appreciate more than most the instinct to apply the “What does it mean for Penn?” lens to virtually all forms of such analysis). Could we foresee, in those days, all the ways in which unfolding events might one day come to impact our exercise of individual rights? Of course not. But we were not, as you suggest, simply oblivious to potential “implications for surveillance, privacy, and expression” so much as focused on supporting any and all solutions that might help us find our way back to a world where we could board an airplane, cross a bridge, or even open an envelope without concern for the dangers that may lie ahead. Many have yet to rekindle that kind of simple peace. And so I suspect we would all have signed up for a lifetime of College Green “Rules and Regulations” if they would play even a tiny role in helping that cause.
You suggest, too, that our generation’s collective response to these events was at least partially rooted in a sort of “undisciplined” approach to protest and advocacy. But that’s simply not the case. Penn of the early 2000s had robust movements on campus focused on ending the University’s affiliation with sweatshops, unionizing graduate student workers, pursuing better representation of marginalized groups, and a host of other issues. True, the political temperature of the time was substantially lower than that which we’re all enduring today. (Just as the economic growth of the 1990s ushered in a sort of societal quiet across our nation, so too did the great institutional leaps forward accomplished during Judith Rodin’s presidential tenure bring a sense of relative calm to our little West Philadelphia corner of academia.) But in 2001, the University was less than a decade removed from the tumult that would characterize the latter years of Sheldon Hackney’s presidency, when Penn was very much at the center of the nation’s culture wars. As undergraduates at the time, that may have been ancient history to us — but the building blocks of organized resistance were very much all around us.
(And for better or worse, these waves of campus advocacy appear to be cyclical. I often recall, after all, that my editor colleagues and I regularly lamented the lack of big campus news for the entirety of our 2001 DP board year — up to that horrific Tuesday morning. A reminder, as always, to be careful what you wish for.)
Perhaps most remarkably, it bears repeating that even 25 years later, we still aren’t yet in a position to take full accounting of 9/11 and its myriad impacts, whether on campus or in a global context. But I, for one, remain immensely proud of the work that my DP friends and colleagues did during that turbulent time; all of us — and I would mention them by name if possible, but they know who they are — look back on the experience as one of the most meaningful of our lives. I’m similarly proud to call myself an alumnus of a publication whose staff clearly remains committed to making sense out of such events in ways that resonate globally as well as locally, all these years later. To paraphrase yet another staff editorial from that era — which appeared on the campus racks (very, very late) on the morning of Sept. 12 — “Please, take advantage — and take care — of your University’s greatest resource: each other. When the rubble has been cleared and the history books closed on this day, the legacy of September 11, 2001 will rest heavily on whether or not you do.”
JONATHAN MARGULIES is a 2002 Wharton graduate and served as editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian’s 117th Board of Editors.
