It does not occur to me until later that this is the first week of term, or that frosh will forever mark their first year of university by this event. Or that it was 20 years ago that I started university here.

There is an emptiness and silence on campus, even as students and professors hurry to class. Shock has hollowed us out, shut down time and thought, and even feeling. I am reeling from a first gush of anger directed at the terrorists. Then, as I stand in front of UC, a second surge of anger hits – this at the university.

What is the university doing, going about its business? I want U of T, the leading school in the country, with possibly the most diverse student population in the world, my school, to do something. Organize a blood-donor drive. Shelter stranded travellers. Declare a state of emergency. Declare a state of intellectual emergency. Because the world, complicated and frantic before, makes no sense now. Because coursing through my mind, compressed as it is between sorrow and anger, is one question: Why? Why did this happen, when there is so much knowledge in the world?

Paradoxically, in times of crisis, people seek comfort in their faith, even as they question it.

I believe in education.

And so I turn to U of T, 20 years after my frosh year, again seeking understanding of the world.

Week 1

Before the second World Trade Center tower is hit, U of T public-relations staff alert faculty such as Wesley Wark, a security and intelligence expert. Over the next several weeks, Wark faces a deluge of media calls, and spends five hours a day, seven days a week providing commentary and background.

“It’s a time for realism, not abstract philosophizing,” he says bluntly. “This will go down in the history books as the most difficult war any state or coalition has ever fought. The challenge is not just to destroy terrorism, but to destroy sympathy for terrorism.”

That, he says, will require simultaneous action on many fronts: intelligence, security and military measures and also diplomatic, educational and aid initiatives. “Globalization,” he says, “will have to prove itself to this problem.”

After the second tower collapses, Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict, who predicted terrorist strikes on major financial institutions in his recent book, The Ingenuity Gap, rushes the first of a series of articles to the Globe and Mail explaining the attack. His thesis: narrow, short-term interests of the economic elite have provoked economic disparity, social unrest and political instability worldwide. Add to that maelstrom the easy access to technological advances that enables a few people to cause terrorism and great destruction. September 11 woke us up to this exceedingly complex, dramatically unstable world. Homer-Dixon questions whether we’re smart enough to solve the problems we have created.

It is apparent, immediately, why the university carries on with business. Its business is public education. And the whole world, it seems, is going back to school. The insatiable demand for knowledge quickly outstrips the supply of experts. It is part of what happens after a major trauma, says Cheryl Regehr, academic co-ordinator for the Centre for Applied Social Research and also former director of the critical incident stress team at Pearson International Airport. “Something like this strips us down, makes us vulnerable,” she says. While some become hypervigilant, seeking more information, others – overwhelmed – simply shut down.

Some academics avoid commenting publicly in the first days, begging time for analysis or for thinking through their role as a public intellectual. Chemistry professor Ron Kluger worries about discussing theoretical possibilities of chemical terrorism, lest that serve as a kind of “intellectual terrorism.” His job, he says, is not to put ideas into people’s heads or scare them.

Others admit they’re still stumbling. Abbas Azadian, a staff psychiatrist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, observes trauma professionals exhibiting signs of trauma while working with patients. The deluge of media images, he says, can trigger a second wave of post-traumatic stress in anyone who has experienced past trauma, a death of a loved one. Is that not all of us?

Marginal note: How clearly are world leaders and strategists thinking?

We need a place to put our grief. On Friday afternoon, September 14, students, staff and faculty gather for memorial services on all three campuses, organized by, among others, the president’s office, the Muslim Students’ Association and the Campus Chaplains’ Association.

More than 1,000 people gather at the Great Hall in Hart House and present a tangible reminder of the university’s diversity: 50 per cent of all students self-identify as “visible minorities;” a little over 40 per cent were born outside Canada; 45 per cent speak a non-English language as their first tongue. That diversity, President Robert Birgeneau tells the mourners, not only defines U of T, but is its strength. Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Wiccan – the campus grieves together.

Later, addressing a group of undergraduates, the president finds himself talking about September 11. With so many communities represented at U of T, he says, “we have a tremendous opportunity to contribute to an understanding of how this happened, how we can make changes and what we should do in the future.

“At times like this, leadership matters,” he tells the students. “It sets the tone, guides the response.. Leadership will be even more critical as we move forward, because whatever happens, it will be controversial. We don’t want our community to break into groups. We want reasoned debate.”

Week 2
The Arts and Science Students’ Union hosts a forum at Convocation Hall. Called “A Campus Discussion on Peace and Tolerance, Responding to the Events of September 11,” it is more a lecture on tolerance than a discussion of issues, and a call to spread that message to the city beyond.

One student, questioning the participants on how we should respond to Islamic fundamentalism, is criticized for muddying Islam with terrorism. He rushes from the forum, furious.

Janice Gross Stein, Harrowston Professor of Conflict Management and Negotiation, director of the Munk Centre for International Studies and due to appear on national television as CBC’s Middle East expert, catches up with the student in the foyer.

She insists that when he describes the terrorists, at the very least he modify the term “Islam,” with the word “militant” or “extremist.”

Students crowd around. Voices ratchet up. Somewhere in the middle of the fray, Stein insists on careful language as a starting point to reasoned analysis. Finally, one student suggests that calling the terrorists Islamic fundamentalists would be like calling the Nazis Christian fundamentalists.

“Okay, I get it,” says the irate student. “So what do we call them, then?”

“I don’t know,” says Stein, challenging him. “I don’t have all the answers. What do you think?”

The group falls silent. Stein turns, addressing the students directly. “You have to think,” she says. “This is a very complicated problem, and it is going to get more complicated. Your freedom and civil liberties are going to be challenged as we respond to terror. You all have to take time to learn, think and reason very carefully.”
A student rocks back on his heels, as if finally locating his responsibility in the disorienting days after the crisis, and his sense of purpose as a student.

Marginal note: Think!

Rick Halpern, Bissell-Heyd-Associates Professor of American Studies, leaves the same forum feeling depressed. He despairs at the shortage of critical, informed thinking, especially in the mainstream media, the impulse to set up simplistic oppositions: good/evil, civilization/terror, East/West.

“To understand why this happened,” he says, “we have to think critically about American foreign policy since the Second World War and the Cold War. The U.S. supported authoritarian regimes that were open to the U.S. and hostile to the U.S.S.R. Popular democratic movements in the Middle East and the Third World were stifled. It’s important to understand these issues historically. We must struggle against societal, media and political pressure to label terrorists as evil or irrational, as if their actions took place in a historical vacuum. Warlords and extreme fundamentalists believe Islamic society is already under attack.”

Halpern also exhorts the university and his colleagues to snap out of their collective shock, to get thinking. “It is important in this eerie period to begin debate and to air as many views as possible. Once shooting begins, the ground we have for exchange may narrow.”

Week 3

Debate begins, on eggshells. It is marked not by tolerance, but by hypertolerance. With the wound of September 11 still open, whole conversations lurk in the shadows: rampant anti-Americanism in the Middle East, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, American military presence in Saudi Arabia, oil. And there is anxiety in the air that this time for intellectual analysis will not last.

Discussions, panels and lectures occur across campus, organized by departments, peace groups, student associations. The president calls for an ongoing seminar series. The Munk Centre for International Studies brings together “instant” panels of experts from a variety of disciplines.

As part of one panel, Stein says our great challenge is to balance ethical conversation, to analyse and critique “the other” while also analysing and critiquing “the self.” She urges us to keep all sides of the conversation simultaneously aloft, yet somehow resist paralysis and act to protect what is right and good: the diverse, pluralistic, democratic communities we have created.

David Welch, who will hold the George Ignatieff Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies starting in July, states the same challenge in other words: “One of my main interests is why smart people make mistakes. A common cause is that they are incapable of understanding how others see the world. We’re prisoners of our own world view.”
Welch is clearly the optimist here. He rates the risk of repeat terrorist attacks in the United States fairly low. He is encouraged that the U.S. is planning its response carefully, with “political effectiveness in the forefront, not military showmanship.”

Others are less optimistic. Ron Pruessen, professor of history with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and international relations, sets the crisis in the context of a global management issue. The United Nations – as an organization to vent and respond to international complaints such as the struggle to resurrect a Palestinian homeland – is not just weak, but dominated by the U.S. “The U.S. consciously sets an international manager role for itself – politically, economically and culturally – but it takes too much authority onto itself,” he says. “It talks about multilateral decision-making, but when push comes to shove, it acts unilaterally.” Consequently, when the Middle East’s frustration with oppression and deeply rooted conflicts erupt, the U.S. becomes a target. Pruessen doubts that the U.S. will change its style, present coalition-building notwithstanding: “Self-reflection happened post-Vietnam, but that did not produce dramatic changes.”

Paul Kingston, associate professor in political science specializing in the Middle East, could not be bleaker. The Middle East, he says, is in a state of crisis, suffering the effects of authoritarian regimes: political stasis, an absence of socio-economic reforms. He believes the intent of the terrorist attack was to produce a unity of identity and purpose in the Middle East and to provoke US military reaction, both of which could set in motion a series of events leading to major upheaval and revolution in the region.

Will it be a revolution toward freedom and democracy? Or toward more repression and authoritarianism? Or continued, painful stasis? Along with the security and civil liberties of Western democracies, at stake in this crisis is the very future of the Middle East.

Marginal note: So what do we do?

I call Aurel Braun, specialist in international security, law and terrorism. He has no time for discussing root causes for the attack, calling it intellectual laziness that confuses the issue at hand: terrorism. Indeed, he believes such debate psychologically disarms us and concedes the moral high ground required to respond. “Terrorism has occurred throughout history. One man’s terrorist is not another man’s freedom fighter. Stalin and Lenin were terrorists. The members of Hamas, Islamic jihad and Hizbullah are terrorists. Terrorists make a deliberate decision to kill innocent men, women and children to achieve their goal,” he says.

“Gandhi and Mandela were freedom fighters. Freedom fighters may or may not condone violence as an act of resistance, when directed against military or police forces that use violent means of suppression,” he says, “but a freedom fighter avoids deliberately targeting innocent individuals. Don’t dignify terrorism with some cause that seeks to better the lives of people, because terrorist action sets back that cause.

“We have to think of terrorism as the worst kind of disease. You do not make excuses for it. You give it no harbour. You have no dialogue with it. You seek to eliminate it.. They want us to cease to exist. That is why we have no choice but to prevail.” To prevail, he says, we must use all the tools at hand: politics, diplomacy, intelligence gathering, with military action being “a tool of last resort.”

Marginal note: What exactly are those tools? Who should apply them? And how? And how do we know when we have exhausted alternatives? When do we reach for that “tool of last resort?”

Discussion is just beginning.

Week 4
Still no military action. There is an odd excitement building on campus. In these three weeks, we have schooled ourselves in languages, histories, cultures, religions, politics and geography. The air fairly snaps with intellectual energy to think. I, however, feel a spiritual crisis coming on. Maybe I went to one too many panel discussions. The one on Afghanistan.

Marginal essay: Why can’t I really be back in school? I need beer. I need pizza. I need to stay up until 4 a.m. to talk all this out. It’s hard to find anyone who cares what’s going on under the bullshit of mainstream media propaganda. How could the West have once supported the woman-hating Taliban? How could we have abandoned Afghanistan after the Cold War, leaving it too weak to resist terrorists? What if we had invested in schools and hospitals there rather than the terrorists setting up training camps? I am so sick of this phrase: “It was in our best interests at the time.” Is it not time for a new diplomacy, one that serves the interests of the other, not just of the West? Is that not the responsibility of a stronger power, a moral power? Are we really protecting freedom and democracy, or hoarding it for ourselves?

I wait until morning, and then I call a philosopher.

On September 11, Brian Pronger, assistant professor of philosophy in the Faculty of Physical Education and Health, was introducing his fourth-year seminar students to postmodernism. For him, the philosophy acts as a lens for focusing the events of that day: modernism’s master narrative of progress and control is struck a massive blow by those resisting globalization. Now, in place of the West’s nice, neat version of civilization, we have this mess of postmodernism: multiple voices and cultures competing for audience and power.

So then, academia saw this attack coming years ago, I say. They’ve even been studying it. Isn’t it what could be called post-colonialism?

Marginal note: Did no one think to tell the Pentagon? Where did they go to school?

Postmodernism and post-colonialism are still theory, Pronger suggests. Materially, globalization is still a modernist project. It is a Euro-American program of development and control, which dominates and seeks to overwhelm competing voices.

To enter a true post-colonial era, with a harmony of cultures, will require a vast intellectual rethinking about how we share wealth and power. Pronger believes there’s little will for such change, although it possibly could happen among future generations. “That’s why the university has a critical role to play in these world events,” he says. “There has been a real denigration of the power of reflection. To be a wise person has come to mean you know how to make a smart investment. It’s about being shrewd, not about having an advanced capacity to think about the meaning of life or the human condition. The university should be trying to resurrect this mission of reflection.”

Marginal note: What is the cost of real security in the West? What meaning does September 11 have? Will its meaning depend on how we react?

I can no longer put off talking to representatives of the Muslim and Arab communities. In the early days of the crisis, they were called on to defend their faith and culture, to differentiate themselves from the terrorists. I wanted the air to cool so that we might have a meaningful conversation – to simultaneously analyse self and other. The air has cooled – to a chill. One professor tells me that one of her students involved in human rights groups was approached by CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) for an interview.

It is difficult to critique a problem when one faces racial profiling and diminishing civil liberties. It’s even more difficult when the community lacks experienced and tenured academics from an array of cultures and races. It is a weakness of the university that the diversity of its student population is not adequately reflected in its faculty, a shortcoming the president acknowledges and has vowed to redress.

Amir Hussain (BSc 1987 UC, MA 1990, PhD 2001) studied comparative religion at U of T and is now teaching Islamic thought and religion at California State University’s Northridge campus. He is the only Muslim in his department. “I’m new to this professorial thing, but there are so few of us who study Islam it’s not like I can slough off media calls to six other faculty members,” he says.

And so when Politically Incorrect sends a limo to pick him up, he appears on the TV talk show to chat about the crisis with host Bill Maher, Will & Grace star Eric McCormack, author Robert Young Pelton and actor Lynn Redgrave. What ensues is at best a superficial discussion, but Hussain credits the show for trying. “People don’t know the basics of Islam, even though there are seven or eight million Muslims in North America. Immigrants came here for a better life, and now they’re being attacked as being representatives of the governments they fled.”

Shahrzad Mojab escaped from Iran in 1983, a political refugee, and is now an associate professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of U of T. She is a staunch critic of political Islam and also of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. “Islam is fine as a personal choice, but if a political system is based on religion, it automatically excludes people and makes it impossible to create universal citizenship rights,” she says. “In the Cold War, the U.S. had a policy of supporting the fundamentalist groups, as opposed to more liberal and secular groups. I have a friend who refuses to speak about Afghanistan. She says the country she knew was ruined, that this is not her country. She says you [Western powers] created this country and this regime, this misery and this displacement.”

As a peace activist and feminist, Mojab says her position in the current crisis is awkward: “When I look at it on the surface, my choices are war or this repressive regime of the Taliban,” she says. “I have to work very hard to put myself in a place where I can think of more than those two choices.

“As citizens of the world, we ultimately have to take governments to task and put international mechanisms in place to discuss and remedy the situation, use international tribunals to bring people to justice and create a unified economic and social justice policy toward these countries.”

MuchMusic came to campus this week to do a story on Prof. Ron Deibert’s Networks, Nations and Global Politics class. Last year, Deibert secured funding from the Canadian government, chose six students from the first-year international relations class and gave them an assignment: change the world. The students formed a coalition to bring neglected diseases to the attention of world leaders at a G-8 summit. The assignment was taped for a reality-based TV series that aired on TVO last fall, called Activist TV. It’s like Survivor, only with brains. And heart. Oh, and a point.

“I have been arguing that material forces are pushing us toward a single global polity,” says Deibert. “We live on a planet that has a kind of loosely organized, top-down, top-heavy governance regime run by the U.S. and the other G-8 countries. I have been exploring ways of making global governance more democratic. I have been trying to make students more active, to feel that they have a say. Anti-globalization activists or, a better term, activists for a global civil society, have been energized by this crisis. We are going to see very large social movements in the areas of peace and global security.”

Serendipitously, this year’s Activist TV assignment is peace and security. And the scope is broader, to include six teams of six students, chosen from schools around the world.

Thanksgiving weekend. I leave campus for the break, hopeful. It may take time. And it may take a whole university. But the scope and dimensions of the problem are finally coming into focus, so that we can begin to think of solutions. I can’t wait to get back to school to hear what Deibert’s students come up with.

October 7
The US and Britain start bombing Afghanistan. The next day, Canada commits to sending military support.

Shortly after the attacks, President Robert Birgeneau sent an e-mail offering his condolences to all of our U.S. alumni. A flood of responses ensued: some were brief expressions of gratitude, while others told long tales of lives changed forever that dreadful date.

The following stories represent only a fraction of those we might tell. Fortunately, most people were not touched in such a direct way as the alumni profiled here.

Arron Dack (1961-2001)

Arron Dack, who earned a bachelor of applied science in 1987 while attending Victoria College, was many men in one: a business executive, husband and father of two young children. He spoke several languages, travelled widely and was a master of the one-liner. He was only 39 years old when he perished in the World Trade Center’s North Tower while attending a conference on the 106th floor.

Dack came to Canada from England at the age of eight with his mother, Selena Dack-Forsyth. He was an overachiever from an early age, but when he encountered the Canadian “new math” curriculum, he was stymied. But math, which had been his bête noire, became a source of joy in high school. It propelled him onto the dean’s list at the University of Toronto, and to his subsequent success in capital-markets technology.

Dack “loved New York,” Dack-Forsyth says from her home in Port Hope, Ont. “And, ironically, he particularly loved the World Trade Center – partly because the word ‘world’ was in there, but also because it epitomized the kind of work he did.”

Dack-Forsyth remembers the week of her son’s death as a time of unspeakable pain, alleviated somewhat by the overwhelming kindness of strangers. She describes the atmosphere at the Lexington Armory – where relatives went to register missing loved ones and to tape up their pictures – as “surreal;” a place of hideous grief, where roses decorated every table, and a battalion of babysitters, therapists, translators and counsellors did everything they could for the bereaved. The townsfolk of Montclair, N.J., where Dack lived with his wife, Abigail, and children, Olivia and Carter, took turns delivering meals to the family.

Larger than life. Those three words serve as the most fitting epitaph for a man who enjoyed playing lacrosse as a youth, passed the Ontario Securities Course exam “in his spare time” and even fooled a roommate, who later served as best man at his wedding, into thinking he was a spy. “My world will never be the same,” Dack-Forsyth wrote in her weekly column for the Port Hope Evening Guide. “But I have wonderful memories of a son who has, unwittingly, become a part of history.”

Will Jarvis
From time spent on military aircraft as part of his job at the Pentagon, Will Jarvis (who graduated with a bachelor of applied science in 1987 while attending New College) knows what aviation fuel smells like.

Then I saw little bits of silver from the sky - Will Jarvis

That smell was his only clue that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon, where he works as an operations research analyst for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Jarvis, who was around the corner from the disaster, tried but failed to see the plane when he left the building. “There was just nothing left. It was incinerated. We couldn’t see a tail or a wing or anything,” he says. “Just a big black hole in the building with smoke pouring out of it.”

For someone sitting only 300 metres away from the carnage of American Airlines Flight 77, Jarvis and his officemates were surprisingly well insulated from it. “We thought the plane was a dump truck backing into the building, because there was a lot of construction going on,” he says. The group noticed that the sky was darker than normal, but still didn’t think much of it. “Then I saw little bits of silver falling from the sky,” says Jarvis.

Evacuation, when it came, was a decidedly orderly affair, since no one sensed the magnitude of what had happened. Nor could they have known that one person from their department, a man named Brian Jack, was actually on the plane.

In informal conversations, Jarvis and his colleagues often speculated on how terrorists could attack the Pentagon. “We were thinking they could poison the water or food supply,” he says. “Or get in by joining a tour group. But no one ever thought a hijacked plane would crash into the building.”

The American-born Jarvis still has family in the northern Ontario town of New Liskeard. “I went up to Canada shortly after this incident,” he says. “Whenever I’m up there, I feel like nothing like this could ever happen.”

Livon Neil
Sure, Livon Neil is one of the lucky ones. He was in the North Tower on September 11, but he survived. He was only on the 38th floor, and well out of there by the time it fell. But while Neil may have escaped unharmed, he is most certainly not unscathed.

I do have some dreams, but they

After diving under his desk in response to what he thought was an earthquake, the 30-year-old systems analyst (who graduated with a bachelor of science in physiology and human biology in 1994 while attending New College) heard “screaming coming from the elevator shaft, like ladies screaming. And I saw dust coming out, smoke.” He ran toward the stairs, only to hear more yelling from below. There seemed to be no way out for anybody. He huddled in the stairway for some 20 minutes, until a phalanx of firefighters – many of them soon to sacrifice their own lives – arrived and opened an exit for him and his group. “While I was coming out,” Neil says softly, “it was like a war zone. I looked up and saw a person in mid-air. I looked to my right in the courtyard and there were body parts.”

Thanks to counselling and the healing properties of time, Neil’s nightmares about September 11 have eased somewhat. “Now I do have some dreams,” he says, “but they’re not as bad.” He’s still in a state of heightened observance at airports, though, and admits it’s difficult to relate what he’s seen and heard.

Neil lives in Toronto and commutes regularly to New York, where his company implements software for financial institutions. Six weeks after the attack, he hesitantly boarded a subway to Ground Zero, in search of some closure. “I just had to go back and see it. It helped to go down there, to realize what I’d been through. To give thanks.” And to offer a silent thought, he says, “for those people who are still there.”

Chief Coroner Dr. Jim Young and Deputy Chief Dr. Barry McLellan

There’s no book written on how it should be done, and nothing you can call on as far as previous experience - Barry McLellan

When the American disaster’s enormity became clear, Canada was prepared to offer a full range of medical assistance. Its citizens, too, donated blood by the gallon. But as dusk fell, the black truth dawned: New York was importing only coroners.

Ontario’s coroner system is internationally recognized, which is why Dr. Jim Young (MD 1975), chief coroner and head of Emergency Measures Ontario, and Dr. Barry McLellan (MD 1981), deputy chief coroner of forensic services, found their services in demand. It was also thought, initially, that some 300 Canadians might have died, a number that has since been reduced to 24.

The coroners were charged with helping Canadian families identify their loved ones. To this end, one of their tasks was to collect DNA samples from each family and send them to labs to develop DNA profiles. DNA came from various sources: toothbrushes, makeup, razors, hairbrushes. To date, though, only three of the missing have been identified; others may have vanished in the rubble, though Dr. McLellan remains “cautiously optimistic” that further testing will result in more identifications.

Naturally, he cannot make predictions; this event transcended the bounds of what he normally does. Even though Dr. Young has previously headed a number of high-profile investigations, including the 1998 Swissair crash off Peggy’s Cove, N.S., and the Walkerton, Ont., inquiry into the E. coli deaths of May 2000, the mass grief and confusion of September 11 left both doctors stricken with pain. “There’s no book written on how it should be done,” says Dr. McLellan, “and nothing you can call on as far as previous experience.”

Toward the end of their two-and-a-half-week stay in the city, Dr. Young and Dr. McLellan tried to relieve some of their tension with a trip to Yankee Stadium, where the team was playing for the first time after the tragedy. Everything about the game was tinged with reminders of what had happened: tributes to the rescue workers, a speech by the mayor, the seventh-inning stretch conducted to the tune of “God Bless America.”

“Throughout the entire game, there was a recognition that this wasn’t just good old-fashioned baseball,” Dr. Young relates, obviously moved by his final vision of the trip: a great city stirring, with aching slowness, back to life.

Brian Clark
On the morning of September 11, Brian Clark (who earned a bachelor of applied science in 1970, and a master of business administration in 1971) sat with colleagues in his office on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower and watched their sister building burn. He knew a terrible accident had happened there; he heard co-workers exclaim that people were jumping from windows. But neither Clark nor anybody else in the New York office of the international brokerage firm Euro Brokers had any idea what had caused the dreadful accident.

Nor did it occur to them that they would be next.

Suddenly, United Airlines Flight 175 crashed into their tower, only five floors below. “I did not see the plane coming,” says Clark, “and all we felt was a tremendous rumble as if it was an earthquake. Our floor fell apart, the lights went out, the ceilings collapsed – it was instant chaos.” In the end, only three of the 60 or so Euro Brokers employees left on the floor (the other 220 had already evacuated the building) would survive. One of them was Clark.

At random, he chose the one stairway that was left passable after the crash. The stairs “buckled in a few places,” he says, “and you could peek through the cracks and see flames.” On the 81st floor, just above the conflagration, he and several co-workers began arguing with a couple who were heading up. “You’ve got to go up,” Clark quotes them as saying. “We’ve just come from a floor in flames.”

As Clark was pondering which way to go, he heard a plaintive voice behind the wall, calling for help. It belonged to Stanley Praimnath, an employee of Fuji Bank and a complete stranger. Clark squeezed through a hole in the wall to assist him; in that time, all but one of his colleagues were persuaded to go back to their floor. Descending through drywall debris and rubble in a deserted stairway, Clark and Praimnath somehow got under the fire. On floor 68, though, Clark encountered Jose Marrero, another Euro Brokers employee who was, fatefully, on his way up to try to help others. “I saw a hero making a bad decision,” Clark recalls. Clark tried to convince him not to go, but Marrero was adamant. He was the last person the pair encountered on the stairway before escaping to safety minutes later.

A week to the awful day, Clark had a dream about Marrero that salved his troubled soul. “Jose came to me in a white, loose-fitting shirt,” he recalls. “He came to the foot of my bed and looked down at me. I said, ‘Jose! You’re alive! How did you do that?’ And he gave me a knowing smirk as if to say, ‘You’ll figure it out.’”

Clark is back at work now, in new office space in lower Manhattan. His company lost 61 employees that day. In support of their families, he presides over the Euro Brokers Relief Fund. “I feel like I’ve been given additional time – to do what, I’m not sure,” he says.

Jordan Zed

When he didn’t come home that night, I got this sick feeling in my stomach - Jordan Zed

We’re living in a very unusual time now,” says Jordan Zed, as he contemplates the current climate of war and hypervigilance. For Zed, 22, the pain of this “unusual time” was immediate: his 30-year-old roommate, Thomas Pedicini, was lost in the World Trade Center that day.

Pedicini was a trader with Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond-trading company that lost 733 of 1,000 employees at its World Trade Center office. As soon as news of the disaster hit, Zed, a former Faculty of Music student who had attended Victoria College, was deluged with “a flood of calls.” “I didn’t know what tower he was in or what floor he worked on,” says the singer/songwriter and pianist. “It was just something we never talked about.”

It turned out that Pedicini worked on the 104th floor of the North Tower. “And when he didn’t come home that night, I got this sick feeling in my stomach,” says Zed. “You know, when you can’t swallow.”

For weeks, Pedicini’s mother, Nancy, clung to the hope that her son was alive under the rubble. “When we went into his room, everything was exactly the way he’d left it that morning,” says Zed. “It was just heart-wrenching.” One of the nicer surprises was a tape of songs that Pedicini – an aspiring singer and guitar player – had recorded, unbeknownst to his family. “They were so happy to have it,” says Zed, who recently performed a benefit concert and raised $15,000 for the New York State World Trade Center Relief Fund in his home town of Saint John, N.B. “You listen to it, and it sounds like he’s really in the room.”

Ann Schofield

Nothing was visible but pitch black soot with business papers swirling around - Ann Schofield

It’s a miracle that Ann Schofield’s apartment building is still standing. Home for Schofield, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and criminology in 1993 while attending Victoria College, is a mere 50 metres from where the World Trade Center once stood. It’s also where she was trapped for several frightening hours, hoping her complex would not be destroyed by the deadly rain of steel and glass.

Schofield, a lawyer with the firm of McDermott, Will & Emery, would ordinarily have been at work when the planes hit, but she was awaiting a furniture delivery to her 26th-floor apartment. Facing south onto the Hudson River, she could not see the crashes half a block away that rocked her building.

After the first tower was hit, and later when the buildings were burning but still standing, Schofield made phone contact with her husband, Jim Barton, who had landed earlier that morning at Newark International Airport and was driving to his office in Princeton, N.J. He convinced her to leave the building.

As Schofield was packing a bag, she heard an “ominous rumbling that sounded like an avalanche.” Her building became enveloped in thick, black smoke. Then all light vanished, power, water and phone lines were lost, and nothing was visible outside but “pitch black soot with business papers swirling around in it.” She began her escape, but in the hallway a neighbour intercepted her. “He said, ‘You’re absolutely out of your mind! You can’t leave now.’” She stepped into his north-facing apartment and was shocked to realize that what had caused the “ominous rumbling” was the South Tower collapsing. Staring out the window in disbelief, she then saw the second tower crumble. The two ran back to her place and took refuge in the bathroom, the only windowless room. Then they crept to her living room and waited four hours until firefighters knocked on the door and told them to leave.

Schofield spent that time “sick with worry” for Barton. She realized the guilt he’d feel for advising her to step out into a potentially fatal situation. “I made it to a rescue boat at 1:45 p.m., and I really can’t describe the phone call we had, that kind of relief. He felt so helpless… he had made up his mind that he was going to swim the Hudson if he hadn’t heard from me by three o’clock.”

After staying two months in a condo owned by one of her firm’s partners, Schofield and Barton returned home. Air quality in the neighbourhood is still a concern. “At the same time we have a good healthy dose of perspective,” she says, “because it’s a lot worse for about 3,300 other families than it is for us.”

Ian MacRae

Banks of phones filled; everyone on earth had a cellphone to their ear, telling their wives and husbands that they loved them - Ian MacRae

As a PhD student in comparative literature, Ian MacRae (MA 2001) knows how a simple piece of writing can give shape to senseless events. MacRae, who was in LaGuardia Airport at the time of the attacks, was discussing them one night with his friend Matt Smith. Smith had lost his good friend Jeremy Glick, a “black belt, strong, leader kind of guy,” who had heroically attempted to overtake hijackers on the doomed United Airlines Flight 93, which ultimately crashed in a Pennsylvania field. “He [Smith] was very shaken up by that,” says MacRae. “He said, “You’ve got to write this stuff down.’” So MacRae sat and wrote a long diary piece about New York City in the strange, hushed days following its devastation.

First, he described the airport: “banks of phones filled; everyone on earth had a cellphone to their ear, telling their wives and husbands that they loved them.” Rumours flew: eight planes hijacked; the Federal Reserve Building in Cleveland destroyed; the Washington Mall bombed. MacRae believed all these, but did not believe the one about the World Trade Center falling.

He wrote of riding his bike downtown the following day: “this city that never sleeps is one thing it never, ever is: silent.” Soon, though, people re-emerged, and acts of viciousness were countered by acts of beauty. MacRae heard tell of lootings, buthe also saw impromptu park concerts, where “people formed human chains to ferry free food from arriving trucks.”

For MacRae, who is a field producer and writer for Canadian Geographic Nature Televison, storytelling has proven the most powerful antidote of all. “People were brought together by this,” he says. “Everybody has a story to tell, and everybody’s in the mood to share it.”

As part of her master’s thesis project, Vance is working on an inventory of insects in the forest canopy some 2 1/2 hours north of Toronto. When compared to bug populations living at ground level, Vance’s baseline catalogue of creepy-crawlies along the half-kilometre walkway will provide a piece of the puzzle about the overall understanding of the forest ecosystem. Her data will benefit the forest industry, but, more important, the experience will place her on the leading edge of conservation-minded professionals trained in sustainable forestry practices.

Ideas like “conservation” and “sustainability” are the watchwords at Haliburton Forest, although they may fly in the face of commonly held notions of forestry. At 60,000 acres, the land is the largest privately owned property in central Ontario. It is rich in hardwood forests, features 50 lakes and supports a host of wildlife species including bear, deer, wolf, moose, fox, beaver and birds of prey. It is also home to a 10-member wolf pack that lives in captivity, and a wolf research centre. Throughout the year, recreationists flock to Haliburton Forest to enjoy camping, hiking, angling, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, mountain biking, orienteering and climbing in a wilderness setting.

Haliburton Forest, however, is neither ivory tower nor environmental theme park. The forest supports a thriving eastern-hemlock timber business and is the source for EcoLog building kits, which become rustic structures most commonly sold as cottages, cabins and camp buildings. With its multi-use mandate, the reserve is a community bulwark, an international leader in education and sustainable management and a recognized forestry model for the future.

The mastermind behind the operation is 40-year-old U of T adjunct forestry professor Peter Schleifenbaum, who has been managing the land for a dozen years since leaving his native Germany. When Schleifenbaum’s father bought Haliburton Forest 40 years ago, it had been a high-grade operation where only the biggest, best trees were harvested for lumber. The large parcel of land had been all but stripped of its valuable white pines by the end of the 19th century. And the records from a nearby mill between 1946 and 1971 show that some 150 million board feet of its lumber came primarily from Haliburton Forest trees.

Haliburton Forest is proof that it is never too late to restore a wild landscape. Schleifenbaum’s management plan puts the health of the forest complex first by posing questions such as: How do we log and do minimum damage? How do we protect cavity or seed trees? How can we open an area to light for new growth? How do we log so that we will not only have trees but a complete forest into perpetuity? “We still don’t understand our forests very well,” says Schleifenbaum. “They are a complex of life forms into which we have surprisingly little insight. So we have to constantly evaluate the relationships among the trees, soil, wildlife, fungi, water and sunlight that make the ecosystem work.”

Logging continues on a large scale, but Schleifenbaum has reversed the high-grade approach. Rather than the wholesale clearing of stands, foresters tag mature and low-quality trees for cutting. Typically, half of the trees are processed into lumber and the rest are used for pulp or firewood. “Peter doesn’t hide the fact that logging is going on,” says Vance. “Other companies try to hide what they’re doing, but he is not ashamed because he is doing great forestry. It’s the best forestry we know possible.” After years of sustainable management, the region that comprises Haliburton Forest looks much like it did in the 1860s, long before it was exploited for commercial logging.

For seven years, students have benefited from the facilities, field camps and the artful science of forestry at Haliburton Forest. Now a bequest from retired Ohio engineer Carl Brown and his wife, Susi, guarantees that the collaboration between Schleifenbaum’s one-of-a-kind operation and the U of T Faculty of Forestry will continue for generations to come. Brown, a lifelong naturalist and a regular visitor to the reserve, already provides $15,000 U.S. in research money for graduate students each year. A substantial portion of his estate will also be directed to the Haliburton Forest via the Faculty of Forestry and will underwrite research costs, sponsor academic conferences and workshops, and pay for the establishment of permanent field stations in the forest. “Over my lifetime, I’ve seen the spread of so-called civilization – clearcuts on a mountainside and the destruction of the natural world,” says the 81-year-old Brown. “I think the world of Haliburton Forest; it sets an example for all forestry operations and will be internationally renowned one day.”

For student Christine Vance, the opportunity to study at Haliburton Forest has opened her eyes to the future of sustainable forestry. These are ideas that she and her peers from the U of T Faculty of Forestry can put to use at home or in forests around the world. “We can always be asking: ‘Is there another or better way of doing this?’” she says. “Now we are working with a world leader for change right in our own backyard.”

Laurel Aziz is a freelance writer based in Kingston, Ontario

The result was the formation of the FSC in 1993, which has more than 500 members in 48 countries and sets criteria to certify environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable forests worldwide. Certification criteria cover a wide range of values from compliance with the law to the impact of “cuts” on an ecosystem. FSC standards, which are assessed by independent auditors, also address unique regional needs. Haliburton Forest, for example, is home to one of the few remaining tracts of red spruce in Ontario. As part of the certification process, Schleifenbaum had to include research proposals in his management plan to study and regenerate the species.
In Canada, some 900 communities are primarily economically dependent on forests. Sustainable practices will liberate workers from forestry’s vicious boom-and-bust cycle.

Until as recently as 15 years ago, the prime mandate of forestry schools was to support the forest industry in its quest to produce timber and fibre. By the 1980s, however, Canadians began to realize that plantation forests could not reproduce all the conditions of natural forests, which were rapidly being lost. The real turning point came at the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992, where the concept of sustainable development had matured to include protecting wilderness and biodiversity into the future, even as we satisfied our need for wood and fibre in the present.

In response, the U of T Faculty of Forestry re-evaluated itself and decided to concentrate on new graduate programs. So in 1996, the undergraduate program was closed. In the same year, a new master’s program in forest conservation – which included the first university course in the world on forest certification – was added to the existing MSc and PhD research streams. A master of wood product engineering program was then introduced, focusing on the role of new products in reducing pressure on forest resources. In the near future, a third master’s program on international forest policy and trade analysis will be added. In 2000, the faculty introduced three new undergraduate programs in forest conservation and forest conservation science, taught in the life sciences division of the Faculty of Arts and Science. “The demands for fuel and fibre increase by 10 per cent each year,” notes Bryan. “There has been a realization that for education to meet industry demands, we must involve academics in practical issues of forest management. We want to train students so we can mesh these two needs.”

In 1908, Stewart spearheaded the building of a U of T observatory that would support formal meteorological and astronomical studies. He took much of the masonry from the old Toronto Magnetic and Meteorological Observatory, located on King’s College Road and demolished in 1907. The new observatory, hard by University College, was vital to U of T’s astronomical pursuits. For more than 40 years – until 1953 – it laid the groundwork for U of T’s increasing expertise in exploration of the heavens. This endeavour would have its grandest moment yet in Ian Shelton’s 1987 discovery of a new star – a supernova – in a neighbouring galaxy. He discovered it at the university’s former Southern Observatory in Las Campanas, Chile. But with the opening of U of T’s larger David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill during the 1930s, the observatory’s days came gradually to an end, and it found itself with new occupants. Out went the spiritual sons and daughters of Galileo and in came their earthbound cousins, the Students’ Administrative Council (SAC).

Today, the observatory’s original hardware is a distant memory. The dome through which the vault of the heavens was viewed is sealed, the telescope long gone. But the building betrays its characteristics in other ways: a rabbit’s warren of rooms; the thick stone lightened by a century-and-a-half’s worth of sun; the windowed tower, topped by the dome; and the clock room in the basement, which provides a nod to the measurement of time and where some of U of T’s big public clocks are controlled.
Externally, the building has maintained its original integrity. The only alteration of note is a memorial on its back wall. Here, in a tableau of a twisted bicycle, tank treads and abandoned shoes, the Chinese democracy movement and the 1989 student deaths in Tiananmen Square are memorialized. A students’ memorial on a students’ building, which was built to inspire big dreams. Perhaps the Stewart Observatory remains a place to gaze upon the stars after all.

Brad Faught (PhD 1996) is a Toronto-based freelance writer and historian.

That incident, says Jenkins, perhaps Canada’s most influential nutritional scientist, crystallized his personal ethics about food. Shortly after that, at just 13, he became a vegetarian. “I thought I might want to take another look at what I was eating,” he says with a genteel British accent that has survived 25 years in Canada. He jokes that some might call this decision “flaky,” but doesn’t apologize for it. After all, what happened that day sparked an enduring interest in food, which later evolved into a distinguished career researching the intricate processes that transform food after the first bite.

Jenkins, a professor in the Faculty of Medicine, is internationally recognized for his research on nutrition and chronic disease. He has run hundreds of dietary clinical trials at the Clinical Nutrition and Risk Factor Modification Centre at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto on the potential of diet to prevent and treat diabetes, heart disease and cancer. One of his most influential breakthroughs came in 1981, when he led the team that developed the glycemic index, which classifies carbohydrates according to their effect on blood-glucose levels. Jenkins and his team found that many aspects of a carbohydrate, including its physical form and the way it is cooked, determine people’s glucose response.

Today, almost any discussion about healthy eating includes some mention of fibre, but it wasn’t always so. Jenkins pioneered investigations on dietary fibre and cholesterol levels more than two decades ago. “Back in the early ’70s, if you went into the supermarket you wouldn’t have found much brown bread,” he says. “It was something you saw only in health food stores.”

In 1992, he co-wrote a study that compared the cholesterol-lowering abilities of oat bran, rich in soluble fibre, with wheat bran, rich in insoluble fibre; the results helped make oat bran a household name. More than 80 people went on low-fat diets for the study and consumed daily supplements of either oat bran or wheat bran. After two weeks, the oat bran group had significantly greater reductions in total cholesterol and harmful low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels than the other group. Last year, Jenkins further boosted soluble fibre’s health profile by showing that men on a diet high in soluble fibre had lower levels of prostate specific antigen (PSA) – an indicator of prostate cancer risk – than men on diets high in insoluble fibre.

Recently, Jenkins has been exploring the healing properties of another food that used to be relegated to health food stores. In 1999 he made headlines with the finding that soy foods, especially in combination with fibre, cut the risk of heart disease by lowering cholesterol. Since then, soy has become the new brown bread for the health-conscious. “The findings may explain why heart disease is so rare in East Asian countries, where soy consumption is high,” he says.

From his research Jenkins has assembled a “portfolio,” as he calls it, of dietary factors that he believes, in combination, may reduce cholesterol as effectively as some drugs. The model diet is low in saturated fat and high in soluble fibre, and includes soy protein and plant sterols, which are the plant equivalent of cholesterol.

Showcasing the portfolio is his “Garden of Eden” diet, which consists of copious amounts of fruits and vegetables, with some nuts on the side – similar to what our prehistoric ancestors would have consumed. After just one week on this diet, which contains a whopping 100 grams of daily dietary fibre (more than three times the current recommendation), plus vegetable proteins and plant sterols, participants experienced a 20-per cent reduction in their total cholesterol and a 30-per cent decrease in their LDL cholesterol levels. Jenkins joined participants and foraged caveman-style to test his thesis. “I always like to bite the bullet with the first crowd to see whether what we’re giving quite significant numbers of people is feasible,” he says. He admits the menu is not suited to 21st-century humans who don’t have time to consume 10 pounds of food daily. But eating more plant food is a good first step, he says, when obesity and diet-related ailments are becoming epidemic in the West.

Jenkins understands that the pace of modern life makes healthy eating a perpetual challenge. So, to give busy people a fighting chance at health, he often translates his research into convenient supermarket products that not only protect against disease but taste good. Last summer, Loblaws, the supermarket chain, launched a new line of soy-enriched foods based on his research.

Janet Polivy

Janet Polivy, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto at Mississauga, is passionate about how and why people eat. After several decades of research, often in collaboration with U of T psychology professor Peter Herman, one certainty pervades her findings: weight-loss diets generally fail. “If any of these diets worked, they wouldn’t keep coming up with new ones. There would be one, it would work, and that would be what everybody used,” she says.

Over the years Polivy has made some surprising discoveries about people who continually battle the diet odds. There are real psychological differences, she says, between women who diet and women who don’t. Her studies of primarily female university students show that dieters and non-dieters in the same situations have distinct cognitive and emotional responses. In a 1994 study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, Polivy put a group of dieters and non-dieters in an anxiety-producing situation. Some of the women received palatable food and some received unpalatable fare. The dieters increased their eating regardless of how the food tasted, a finding that supports other research by Polivy showing that dieters overeat when they are distressed to comfort or distract themselves or mask the true source of their stress by attributing their negative mood to overeating.

In a 1998 study, young women were told they weighed five pounds more, or less, than their real weight. The dieters who heard they were heavier reported lower self-esteem and more negative moods than the non-dieters who received the same information. These depressed dieters ate significantly more in a staged “taste test.” “It’s clear that their thinking processes are different, and this is consistent over time, so that’s why we see dieting as a personality variable, not just a behaviour restricted to eating,” says Polivy. “Dieters seem to be more conforming, more emotionally responsive and more neurotic.” Many are also susceptible to the “false-hope” syndrome, believing that losing weight will radically improve all aspects of their lives.

Specific personality traits coupled with social factors make it more likely that a woman will diet, says Polivy. “Our suspicion is that there are predisposing characteristics – one is lower self-esteem – that interact with environmental pressures. Our society, for the past 30 or 40 years, has said, ‘Fat is bad. You’ve got to be thin.’” This message also plays a key role in eating disorders, she says.

Early in her career Polivy observed what she calls the “what-the-hell effect,” where dieting leads to binge eating, a shocking finding at the time. “If you’re trying to lose weight, pigging out every time you break your diet a little bit is about the stupidest thing you can do,” she says.

At the other end of the spectrum, she has observed that people who haven’t eaten in 24 hours eat sparingly when in the presence of others who are also eating little. Her studies on the social aspects of eating show that it is the presence and behaviour of others, much more than hunger, that affect what, and how much, people eat. “Food is tremendously ritualized,” she says, and part of the ritual is that people eat like those around them.

Polivy considers diet a four-letter word – no diets are allowed at her house – but she does believe it’s important to maintain a healthy weight. And the best way to do that, she says, is to tune out the noise from the media and the diet industry and start listening to our bodies. “To eat in response to internal, not external, cues, you have to stop and think about what you’re eating and whether you’re actually hungry,” she says. She stocks her cupboards with every kind of food – including some junk food – because she is teaching her children that no food, eaten in moderation, is taboo.

“I think people waste a lot of time and energy – a lot of themselves – on dieting. Think of the productive things they could be doing with that energy.”

Megan Easton is a news services officer in the Department of Public Affairs.

The devastation of September 11 echoed throughout the Western world – even on the tranquil campuses of the University of Toronto. On that brilliant day, students and professors seemed in suspended animation, even as they scurried to begin the new school term. In my own office, we sat transfixed in front of the television set, unable to believe that the images we were seeing were real, rather than some 21st-century version of Orson Welles’ radio play The War of the Worlds.

The university could not afford stunned inaction, however. A September 11 Group, made up of 16 administrators from all three campuses, quickly assembled. Their immediate concern was the security and well-being of our students. The group reviewed emergency response procedures, circulated a memo on U of T’s policy on privacy rights and primed the university’s counselling services. At a remembrance service held September 14 at Hart House, more than 1,000 joined together as shock turned to grief.

The group’s other mandate was a call for tolerance. At all times, and especially in times of crisis, we must strive to ensure that not just the university, but society at large, behaves in a civilized fashion. We were determined that the people in the U of T community of the Muslim religion or Middle Eastern descent would not be victimized through the misdirected anger of a few, and we are proud to say that this has not happened. Indeed, our academic and student leaders alike came forward with strong public statements and organized cultural events such as Innis College’s film series “Understanding Islam.”

In the face of international crises, a university’s role is to bring reason and wisdom to bear on the human condition. I believe that our faculty members have a duty to share their wealth of knowledge and influence public debate, and they indeed take that duty seriously. For example, the Faculty of Law held a public conference featuring many of Canada’s leading experts to analyse the federal government’s proposed anti-terrorism legislation. The proceedings were published within a week and had a real impact on the parliamentary debate of Bill C-36.

In keeping with our traditions of free speech, we cherish the belief that no voice should be silenced, but all must be willing to submit to reasoned debate. Reason devoid of empathy, however, is an abstract best left in the Ivory Tower. In the days that followed the calamity, we corresponded by e-mail and letter with as many of our alumni and alumnae in the United States as possible. I am overwhelmed by the hundreds of responses, and I thank all who replied for sharing their impassioned reactions and stories. Many knew people who died, and indeed some of us had close family friends among the victims. All were moved by the show of sympathy from friends abroad. “To see 100,000 Canadians on Parliament Hill today was something I never expected to see and will never forget,” wrote one alumnus from New York City, after viewing Ottawa’s national memorial service on TV.

Sadly, Arron Dack, a 1987 graduate in computer science and molecular biology, lost his life in the World Trade Center. We will not forget him, nor that horrific day.