Remarks by Steven Knapp
September 11 Memorial Event
2007

Many universities across this great nation are pausing today, as we are, to remember and to reflect on the appalling attacks that took place six years ago. But few universities have quite the same kind of relation to those events as this one does. The George Washington University was a witness to the events from the beginning. People on this campus could stand in their dorm rooms and offices and watch the smoke rise from the attack on the Pentagon. No one knew when or where the next plane might strike, but the possibilities certainly included our near neighbors, the White House and the State Department. So it must have been with a chilling anxiety, as well as deep shock and sadness, that those who were here that day stood watching that ominous plume.

But we were not just spectators. In the days that followed the attacks, armed military police were stationed on every street corner of our campus. Many GW students raced to the Red Cross to donate blood, only to learn later that the blood could not be used, because there were almost no injured survivors. Professors departed from the published syllabi for their courses and devoted their lectures to the geo-political, military, religious, and legal dimensions of the attacks and the larger conflict they portended. Non-Middle Eastern students took special care to embrace their Middle Eastern classmates.

We also came to learn that our University community was involved in the events of September 11 in a far more terrible way than we had imagined. We learned that nine alumni, nine members of our own GW family, had perished in the attacks. Every year, we come together to remember them and to mourn their loss, along with the loss of thousands of their fellow victims. This evening’s ceremony had its first antecedent in a candlelight vigil held in this very Yard on Wednesday, September 12, 2001, when some 3,000 members of the University community sat quietly for hours holding lighted candles in memory of that loss.

The consistent message of these memorial events has been a call to renew our commitment to mutual understanding and to the toleration of those differences that divide a world they ought to enrich. As students at a university that is blessed by its location in a truly diverse and international city, and that welcomes students from every faith, every region, and every nation around the world, you have untold opportunities to express that commitment. You have opportunities to learn from faculty who understand the complex histories that so tragically separate human beings into warring camps. You have opportunities to learn firsthand from your fellow students the intellectual and emotional content of beliefs and customs that differ from your own. And by the respectful and attentive way in which you converse with others and share with them your own beliefs, you have an opportunity to play a direct and important role in moving the world toward the kind of dialogue and understanding that alone can save it from the passionate ignorance that otherwise, sooner or later, will destroy it. I urge you—I urge all of us—in a spirit of respect for all and hope for our common future, to seize that opportunity and keep that commitment close to our minds and hearts.

Thank you.