UMass Boston Teach-In
Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2001
Updated: Saturday, September 12, 2009 03:09
A large crowd of UMass Boston students, staff, and faculty came together to fill the Ryan Lounge for a Teach-In on September 13, intending to discuss the repercussions of the tragic hijackings and terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C., events that shook the nation the morning of September 11.
The University, our communities, the country, and the many parts of the world are grieving over the loss of lives, all are trying to make sense of what happened and how the events affect individual lives.
“We have to be critical observers of the social dialogue we have that helps us interpret what happened to us, to all of us, and it helps griev[ing] families to understand what is happening to them because the ethics and integrity of our entire community depends on this conversation,” explains Ester Shapiro, a faculty member in the Psychology Department and grief counselor.
“Families whose blood has been spilled may feel a rage that calls for accountability, but they can be helped by us by working with us to get real accountability and security and real meaning in the shattered lives that have been lost by the destruction of a more just community, not a community where blood is spilled upon blood,” explains Shapiro.
A reoccurring theme throughout the discussion was that the speakers did not want America to engage in a war, and that we may not be able to find suspected culprit Osama bin Ladin, who may be underground in one of many countries. Retaliation was not a response advocated by most of the speakers.
Political Science Professor Primo Vannicelli had a different view. “President Bush has used the word war accurately…a major contradiction of values is an underlying cause. Now is the time to reevaluate our own values within us,” stated the professor.
Hitting close to home, UMB student Mohammed El-Khatib, a Palestinian student living and studying in America, spoke of his concern about anti-Semitism directed towards Arab Americans. His speech rippled through the audience to touch the hearts of many. He talked of who is an American and question of what does it means to be American.
“We need to work together as Americans; as Arab Americans, Muslim Americans, white Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist…We need to all work together because this is what America represents—a diversified democratic society, not a man hunt or an exclusion of one group,” said El-Khatib.
There was an overwhelming understanding that our lives as students and as Americans have changed forever.
“Terrorism is still here and in a more veritable form than we have ever seen it… From James Joyce’s play “The Dead,” in many ways, we live our lives as though we are walking on a pond of frozen ice and are feeling very secure. Then something happens and you break through the ice and you look down and you realize how incredibly precarious it ends and in some sense you delude yourself that things are secure,” stated European Studies Chair Paul Bookbinder.
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