20 Years Ago Today: My New York University 9-11 Experience

Originally Published:  9-11-2021

9-11-2001 seemed like any other beautiful late summer day at the New York University campus at Villa La Pietra in Florence, Italy.  I was responsible for the student life of our campus.  Each semester we housed 100 study abroad students in two of the five villas on our 200 acre estate of gardens and groves of olive trees and cypruses.  And we were also responsible for 300 students scattered throughout the city in apartments NYU leased for them.  As you can tell from the pictures, La Pietra was a romantic Tuscan setting that seemed to come straight from a movie. 

Mid-afternoon on the 11th got a call from the Head of Student Life for all the NYU abroad campuses who was situated about 20 blocks from the towers.  He told me that there had been an aviation accident and one of the Twin Towers had been hit.  At that point it sounded like a freak airplane crash.  It was when we learned of the second tower being hit that we knew something much more sinister was going on.

When the second tower was hit, we lost contact with New York.  Our phone system wasn't part of the Italian grid: our system had been created so that it was completely integrated with NYU's phone system. I could pick up my phone and dial the four-digit extension of a colleague on the Manhattan campus and speak with them as if I were in New York too. But, when the towers went down and NYU lost their communications, we lost ours in Italy too.  I had get information about what was happening in New York from a colleague at NYU Buenos Aires, whom I would call every half hour, who was lucky enough to be in contact with an NYU Manhattan colleague somehow.

Immediately, we jumped into action.  There was one really good English-speaking counselor who had a contract with us and two other colleges in Florence.  I called her and got her to come up to our campus, where we set her up in a room to counsel students.  Luckily, I reached out to her five minutes before Syracuse University Florence did and was able to secure her services first, which were much needed in the hours and days ahead.  

In 2001, cell phones were just coming into wide use and most of our students' Italian mobile devices were incapable of calling the U.S.  We had more than 100 students who had family members or friends working in one of the Twin Towers.  Our office had four cell phones capable of reaching U.S. numbers, so we set up stations in our student life office so that our students could use our phones to take turns calling the U.S. to see if their loved ones were safe and sound.  But, often they could not get through, because communications were down across the New York area and they were often left, for up to a couple days even, in a state of frantic unknown.  

We had sent messages to all our students inviting them to campus for a free meal, to use our phones, and to be together supporting each other.  Half our Resident Assistants (similar to SLAs) stayed on campus.  The other half of our team went from apartment to apartment to check on our students living off campus to make sure each of them was OK, if they hadn't decided to come up to campus.  It took 12 hours to track down everyone and check on each of the 400 students in person, but we managed to make sure everyone was OK.  

The most dramatic story I remember is that of our NYU boss from Manhattan, a vice president of finance, who was in Florence visiting that week, on his annual inspection tour.  He was a strict and tough man, with a very serious demeanor.  We found him sitting in an empty conference room in one of the villas, sobbing uncontrollably.  It turned out his partner worked in a financial firm in one of towers and the partner's office was on a floor that had taken a direct hit from one of the planes.  He had tried a hundred times, but his partner's phone was dead.  It seemed as though the worst had happened. In the middle of the following night, his partner finally answered his phone after our boss's 300th attempt.  It turns out his partner had overslept and had missed an early-morning meeting with an incredibly important client.  The partner had hurried to get to the office, but had subway problems and was delayed even further.  When he finally arrived at the subway station next to the Tower that housed his office, he stopped at a coffee shop and was sitting there drinking his beverage, distraught because he figured he was going to get fired the moment he arrived at his office because he missed the most important meeting of the year.  That's when the plane hit his office and killed virtually every person in his company, including all those in the meeting he missed.  Our boss and his partner, I imagine, have spent the years since celebrating the miracle of malfunctioning alarm clocks.

And there was one other miracle.  Though we had over 100 students with loved ones in one of the towers, not a single one of our students lost a parent or sibling on that day.  We were very lucky, though there were many losses nevertheless, and that semester was as difficult a time as I experienced in my career as everyone tried to cope, with varying degrees of success, with what was going on across the Atlantic, separated from those they loved.  Yet, amazingly, only one student abandoned the semester.  The thought of the students and their parents was that a life in Italy viewing priceless art and sitting in one of Florence's beautiful squares sipping cappuccino was preferable to returning to New York, especially as, in the weeks after 9/11, there was still a sense that more attacks might be coming.

So, though I was far from New York, 20 years ago, it felt on that day, we were not far away.  And today we remember and send condolences in honor of those who perished and their families who still keenly feel the loss from those evil acts. And we grieve even further, as we realize that a great many current horrors of the world, from Afghanistan to Guantanamo to the ongoing internal disintegration of the U.S., can be traced, in large measure, to the events of that September day 20 years ago that started out so sunny and bright.