For UNC students, 9/11 is history — not memory
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UNC-Chapel Hill associate professor Eren Tasar. Illustration: Mary Helen Moore and Shoshana Gordon/Axios; Photos: Courtesy of UNC-Chapel Hill and Andrea Nieto, Susana Gonzalez, Mario Tama/Getty Images
It's been 25 years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and historians today are teaching college students increasingly disconnected from the earth-shattering event.
The big picture: UNC-Chapel Hill associate professor Eren Tasar teaches 9/11 in World History to undergraduates too young to answer the question most other adults turn to first: "Where were you?"
Zoom in: Since the course was introduced about a decade ago, Tasar has asked the same two questions on the first day: What do you know about the attacks? And do you have any personal stories?
- The number of raised hands, he says, decreases every year.
- "The more granular knowledge about what happened has declined, which isn't surprising. That's what happens as time passes," he tells Axios. "Obviously their parents would remember the day, but it isn't something they've grown up talking about."
What they're saying: Tasar says students are "aware of it as an important event that needs to be commemorated. They're aware of it as a tragedy and a crime, of course, and an attack on America. But in terms of a personal connection, that's become much less visceral than in the past."
Understanding 9/11, Tasar argues, means starting decades before 2001.
- "The premise of the course is that you can't really understand this event just by starting on this one date, so we actually spend most of the semester looking at the longer history that culminated in these attacks, and then we try to unpack why it had such enormous consequences."
Inside the room: The class I attended on Sept. 10 focused on the Saudi Arabia into which Osama bin Laden was born in the 1950s. Bin Laden would later found and lead Al-Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for 9/11.
- Students discussed Saudi Arabia's vast wealth disparities, the growing American influence on the country's oil-rich and increasingly isolated elite, and how the combination contributed to the rise of violent Islamist movements.
- Later in the semester, the undergrads will spend several weeks discussing the day itself before eventually working their way toward the rise of the Islamic State group, or ISIS.
Between the lines: As artificial intelligence becomes more prevalent in college life, Tasar says, his discussion-based honors course with a "MOUNTAIN of reading" (per the syllabus) has been somewhat insulated.
- "The impact I feel much more in my lower-level courses, where many of us [professors] are going back to not allowing computers and having handwritten essays and that kind of thing," Tasar says.
Flashback: Tasar remembers 25 years ago dropping everything to watch coverage of the 9/11 attacks from high in a Silicon Valley office building. The room was frozen, shocked and silent.
- "Not everybody ends up living through an event of world historical importance of this magnitude," he says. "This was something that made me interested in unpacking why. Why did this happen? And why did so many innocent people die for no reason?"
The bottom line: Tasar says he hopes his students will emerge with an indelible memory of the event and its historical context.
- Maybe some will turn to history themselves. Today's college students certainly have their own events of historic importance to recall someday.