One month later, Hopkins community still in shock

A month has passed since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Since the attacks, the Johns Hopkins community has continually been forced to respond and adapt to new stimuli caused by the lingering effects of Sept. 11. As students and groups learned to cope with the lose of graduates, friends and relatives, many found they had to occupy new roles to find the best way of reaching a common goal: getting back to normal.

Both the attacks and the more recent U.S. retaliations have caused a new wariness among some international travelers and international students at Hopkins. Senior Mekha George, a resident of Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, will continue with her plans to return home for winter break but has new concerns about potential hassles on her return flight to the United States.

Others have attributed much graver consequences to these events.

"I think it's going to have a big effect on my country because they're already having riots there and my family is not safe there anymore," said sophomore Ali Altaf Saleem, whose hometown is Lahore, a city in northeast Pakistan.

For Saleem, the concerns about his home and family have been compounded with new discomforts felt within the university community.

"The thing that I have noticed the most is that a lot of the white people in Hopkins are now uncomfortable around me, knowing I'm from Pakistan," said Saleem.

He has felt uncomfortable when other students cast nervous or fidgeted glances around campus. More directly, he overheard offensive comments in a history class and a comment about bombing Arab countries made by a Hopkins security guard.

One of Saleem's suitemates, Shahrukh Malik, also from Lahore, said, "I've noticed on the Hopkins campus people will - maybe it's because what I look like: I have a beard. They sometimes will come towards us and walk away; stuff like that.. Even in the elevators sometimes."

Both Pakistani students and their Egyptian-American roommate said that when recent incidents such as vandalism or prank calls have occurred on their dorm floor, the members of their suite have been falsely identified by other students as those responsible.

"Anything that is wrong that happens on our floor, we are the first suspects," said Saleem. He had not reported any of these events to university authorities since "the University can't control how anyone behaves."

International students, especially those from predominately-Muslim countries, have also voiced concern about protection of civil liberties after some national media reported that federal authorities such as the INS and FBI had been requesting and receiving confidential information about students from University administrators.

Hopkins spokesman Dennis O'Shea reported that there has already been one limited instance in which the FBI requested information about a small number of students or employees of the Hopkins Institutions after the attacks. The University complied with this request for what was referred to as "Directory Information," not educational records or private information.

Nobody at Hopkins is aware if or how the information was used and has not been contacted about investigations from the FBI or other agencies since that time. The University will not say what division of the university the affected group came from or whether they were students or employees.

ROTC

Sept. 11 brought new attention, occasionally new responsibilities, to many long-standing Hopkins institutions, organizations, and officials.

"The day after the attack we decided, very briefly, to not appear in uniform," said senior ROTC member Marc Rohman about the suspension of the group's weekly practice of wearing official camouflage attire on Wednesdays. As a safety precaution, the ROTC leadership also removed the organization's Hopkins Web site from the Internet. The site had pictures and information about students.

Since then, ROTC activities and training have continued as normal.

"Our training has remained pretty much unaffected," said Rohman. "I can't say that we've been affected much more than other students, who are all horrified. I think with our reprisals most Americans feel that perhaps [the retaliation is] deserved, or maybe we're being too hard. Who knows?"

Lieutenant Colonel Charles Roller claimed that one student had left the group since Sept. 11, most likely due to concerns about these events.

Approximately seven new students have joined ROTC during the same period, although none of those interviewed cited the recent attacks as the reason for their enrollment. Since Hopkins students in ROTC are bound to the university, undergraduate cadets would not have to be concerned about any potential activation for reserve duties.

Counseling

Dr. Michael Mond, director of the Office of Counseling and Student Development Center, said that on Sept. 11 only two students with "very close ties to New York" came to the office, which was open late for counseling.

Since then he and the staff counselors have reported 12 students arriving to seek counsel about "that specific crisis." Nevertheless, Mond noted that at the Center, which gets over 100 students every week, "one way or another everybody's talking about it a little bit."

Mond said that an experience that is diagnosed as trauma, rather than other stress or tragedy related cases, is usually one in which a person has been physically involved in a disaster, suffering from "real personal injury or being close to someone with real personal injury."

"Those people probably need to deal with that trauma," said Mond. "How people deal with that varies from person to person."

Mond explained that, for some, the experience of trauma or other tragedy-related feelings may not surface until a considerable time after a event.

"People might need some assistance in order to get back to normal," he said.

Mond was concerned with many students who had felt the need to keep up with every new piece of information that appeared in the news media, particularly on the television, and suggested that students "try to make sure you do some normal things."

This week the counseling center sent out informational packets to all faculty and staff so that students' emotional concerns might be better noticed and treated.

Alumni

Prior to the attack, alumni officers had scheduled an event in New York with Hopkins alumnus and journalist Richard Ben Kramer. What was supposed to be a reading and signing event for Kramer's biography of baseball hero Joe DiMaggio became a discussion on heroism in general and a chance for New York-area alumni to meet and share information and grief.

Emily Richards, Assistant Director of Alumni Relations, estimates that over 60 alumni attended this event and said "people were very happy it hadn't been canceled."

Other alumni, like 2001 graduate Josh Buckley, found their transition from the academic to the "real" world suspended by disaster. Buckley was arriving at a training session for his new job at Lehman Brothers when the first plane struck the nearby World Trade Center. Buckley, who graduated with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, soon found himself in the midst of confusion, "weird ash storms," and the thought that he wouldn't survive.

After running away from the scene in hopes of escaping Manhattan, since no one knew yet whether the attacks had actually ended, Buckley watched people dived into the Hudson River to escape the encroaching clouds of dark air as the sounds of fighter planes and foghorns blasted around them in the dark.

The next morning, after staying at a friend's house, Buckley wanted to return to his apartment near the vicinity of the disaster to retrieve his cat.

After being escorted through army checkpoints into an area that "was still really quite unstable" and feeling that he was "the last person on earth," Buckley was able to get his pet and some belongings before hurriedly leaving the area and residing at a Hilton hotel "for the better part of three weeks."

Bothered by the "constant reminders everywhere in New York" and needing to get away, Buckley returned to his home in Cleveland this week and soon will resume training for his new job.

Many Hopkins alumni were not as lucky as Buckley, and the status on Hopkins-affiliated victims has continually been updated by the office of alumni affairs.

Sneha Philip was a New York City doctor now listed among the victims of the Sept. 11 attack in New York. Philip graduated from the School of Arts and Sciences in 1991. Philip was married only last year to a man who had proposed to her in Florence, Italy while she was taking a leave from medical school to paint.

John Sammartino had earned his master's degree in 1990 at Hopkins and was a 37-year-old engineer at Xontech, Inc. who left a wife and daughter in Annandale, Md. Sammartino was on board American Airlines Flight 77 leaving from Dulles airport before it crashed into the Pentagon.

Ronald Vauk, 37, was in the senior professional staff at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and was killed when that same plane struck the Pentagon, where he was serving on naval reserve duty.

Tom Cahill, also just turned 37, was a securities trader for Cantor Fitzgerald who worked on the 104th floor of One World Trade Center. At Hopkins he graduated in 1987 with a major in economics and was a varsity tennis player.

Glen Wall and Matt O'Mahony, both 1984 graduates of the School of Arts and Sciences and both employees of Cantor Fitzgerald were both missing after the World Trade Center attack.

Paul Friedman, 45, of Belmont, Mass., was on his way aboard a flight from Boston when his plane was directed into the World Trade Center. Friedamn, a senior management official for Emergence Consulting of Lincoln, was also a photographer and antique collector who majored in psychology at Hopkins. Friedman left a wife and son in Massachusetts.

David Nelson, 50, was a gold and silver investor for Carr Futures who was scheduled for a meeting in lower Manhattan the morning of Sept. 11. After graduating from Hopkins in 1973, Nelson was a social worker in Baltimore who was shot on the job, then recovered. Nelson was also a runner who finished in the top 50 during one of his two attempts at racing the Boston Marathon. He leaves a wife and two children.