Teaching and Learning during Catastrophe

By Stacy Torres

The unease that greets me each morning, as I brace myself for the latest chaos erupting in higher education, listening to the radio and eating my oatmeal, feels both new and strangely familiar. I recognize this dread and the chronic fear of further attacks from living through September 11, 2001, in New York City.

But now that terror comes from my own government, with a torrent of executive orders and memos banning DEI, freezing communication, canceling research funding opportunities, terminating active grants, and capping NIH indirect research costs. The recent ICE detentions of Tufts doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk and Palestinian activist and legal permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University, my alma mater, sends another chill through me as I consider the repercussions of such intimidation for dissent and free speech.

As in those scary movies I once found so deliciously frightening, before growing up and enduring real horror, the call is coming from inside the house.

With my brain struggling to process the relentless onslaught of very bad news, to put it mildly, I consulted the U.S. government’s definition of domestic terrorism. Much of the code’s language around the apparent intention to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” and “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion” resonates with me as I digest the bureaucratic cruelty meted out now in daily firings, funding freezes, disappearing data, people, and words scrubbed from government websites and offices, and the creation of bone-chilling registries to track others, such as undocumented immigrants.

As I ponder how best to support my students and colleagues amid the Federal government’s unrelenting anti-trans, anti-immigrant, anti-DEI crusade, I’m reaching back to my own experiences learning amid sudden catastrophe.

I once had a view of the World Trade Center from my family’s apartment in Manhattan, 2.5 miles north of the Twin Towers, until the morning of September 11, 2001, a few days after beginning my senior year in college at Fordham University. My youngest sisters had just enrolled at the High School for Leadership and Public Service, one block from the South Tower and so close that the second hijacked plane’s engine landed on its roof.

Despite vast differences, echoes of that disaster reverberate for me today. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” Mark Twain’s credited with saying. Folded into history’s rhymes, now on the other side of the university classroom lectern as a professor, I draw lessons from those teachers that helped my classmates and I process our collective grief and anger when life as we knew it fell apart. Buried in that time of despair, fear, blame, and politicization, I find hope and a powerful model for reconciliation, courage, and healing.

That September 11^th morning, my professor, Dr. Orlando Rodriguez, who died last year, called me. He worried about my sisters and me, given our proximity in Manhattan. His 31-year-old son Gregory worked on the 103rd floor of One World Trade Center. He calmly said he hadn’t yet reached Greg but hoped he’d been evacuated to New Jersey. I also couldn’t locate my sisters and feared they’d come home in body bags. They returned in the late afternoon covered in dust. But it soon became clear that Orlando’s son remained missing. Greg never came home.

Four days later, in a widely circulated open letter, Orlando and his partner of nearly six decades, Phyllis Schafer Rodriguez, called on the United States government to resist military retaliation:

We see our hurt and anger reflected among everybody we meet. We cannot pay attention to the daily flow of news about this disaster. But we read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands, dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son’s death. Not in our son’s name.

Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times.

I don’t remember a single reading from Orlando’s syllabus that semester and couldn’t recall the course title, Hispanic Policy Issues, until I checked my transcript. But we diligently covered the class material that fall when the World Trade Center wreckage burned for 99 days, amid nonstop news coverage, blaring ambulances, and missing posters hung on lampposts and plastered on hospitals’ exterior walls. What I do remember are some of the greatest lessons of my life.

Reeling from shock, at first, I felt deeply unsure and conflicted about Orlando’s stand. We were attacked. From my bedroom window I’d watched buildings collapse and the safety I took for granted disintegrate in less than two hours. Thousands died because they went to work one morning, including his son. I wanted someone to hurt. Someone had to pay—right?

But his peaceful objection to retribution showed me the possibility of another way. He didn’t force his position on anyone. In his grief, he made space for us in class to share our fears and anger. With him by our side, we began learning how to live in this brave new world. Given the criminal justice focus of many of our courses, I had bleary-eyed classmates in law enforcement who attended class after 12-hour shifts on “the pile,” as they called Ground Zero’s smoking rubble. One woman confessed her worries about traversing tunnels and bridges. A Puerto Rican classmate who got pulled over on the George Washington Bridge surmised that his olive complexion, black curly hair, and thick beard, or “Muslim look,” raised suspicion.

Inspired by Orlando and Phyllis’s letter, a month later my sisters and I marched in anti-war protests. No, we didn’t stop the United States from entering wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But we learned to show up. To take the unpopular stand. To stand up for the sanctity of all human life.

They told us then to fight terrorism by carrying on and not caving to fear. We went to school, rode subways, shopped, protested. We didn’t hide. Today, as tempted as I am to shut down and crawl under the covers, I’m forcing myself to climb out. To stand up in this new era of terror, I latch on as tightly as I can to those examples of leadership from a terrible September day decades ago that anchor me now at this time of deep global pain, war, loss, numbness, and division.

I have few answers for myself, let alone for my students, and no illusions that they will learn one-tenth from me that I have learned from my very best teachers like Orlando. But I will walk this road with them to the end. I’ll try my hardest not to compromise my integrity out of fear. I’ll affirm my values of equality, empathy, and mutual respect. “No” is a complete sentence, and I will object when necessary. And I’ll keep my bloody foot jammed in the doorway to help keep opportunities alive for those who still wish to follow in my path, despite forces trying to slam and bolt that door shut on too many of us.

Comments

[Corenet]

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[kronosglobal]

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[Survival Race]

Your connection between past and present struggles is incredibly moving, and it’s a reminder of the resilience and compassion we must hold onto during times of fear and uncertainty