9/11 @ Stanford

Some com­ments on how Sep­tem­ber 11th, 2001 touched Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.

It’s already been a full year. It’s hard to believe. I was sched­uled to preach at an AGTS chapel ser­vice that morn­ing. As soon as I saw the planes hit I began chang­ing my mes­sage, although I ful­ly expect­ed the phone call that came short­ly after­wards: “We’ll reschedule–we just feel like we need to devote the full ser­vice to prayer.”

In that year I’ve moved from there to here, and I was sur­prised to learn how Stan­ford was affect­ed by the ter­ror­ist attacks on our cul­ture.

A few items in no par­tic­u­lar order:

I found this brief sto­ry about the 40 Iran­ian nation­als who study at Stan­ford inter­est­ing. I also thought this admin­is­tra­tor’s per­spec­tive on their plight was inter­est­ing.

I also was shocked to learn that Stan­ford received fake anthrax mail­ings last Octo­ber. Those inci­dents spawned an emer­gency response force. I did find it mild­ly humor­ous that the biosafe­ty man­ag­er had to get spe­cial per­mis­sion to just ana­lyze every­thing her­self. I’m sure the Stan­ford research lab­o­ra­to­ries were much bet­ter equipped (and the researchers more high­ly trained) than at the San­ta Clara coun­ty facil­i­ties.

The com­mu­ni­ty as a whole seems less trau­ma­tized and polar­ized than many oth­er cam­pus­es: both Berke­ley and San Fran­cis­co State have seen some pret­ty angry encoun­ters over Mid­dle-East­ern issues, but tem­pers at Stan­ford have been much cool­er.

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