University Editor Acy Jackson spoke with Cori Dauber, a professor in the communication department, about the impact of 9/11 on students and how remembering 9/11 has changed. Dauber teaches a class on terrorism and political violence.
The Daily Tar Heel: In a general sense, how do we remember 9/11?
Cori Dauber: So, you guys, all the students on campus are probably the last cohorts that will have a memory. And your memories are very vivid. But they’re somewhat decontexualized. Because you’re old enough to have memories but you are young enough that people kept sending you out of the room. Because people’s memories are, what people call a flashbulb memory, so literally like a flashbulb went off — you remember every detail but a lot of what you remember is going to be adults around you being very upset, tense, scared. And then sending you out of the room because the news was on. You remember what you remember very vividly, but there are gaps in your memory, there are holes in your memory and what you remember may be out of order.
DTH: How have you seen students remember?
CD: It’s very powerful, it’s very emotional. People remember differently depending on where they’re from. So students from the Northeast, some of them literally remember looking out the window of classrooms and seeing the towers burning. Students from North Carolina, some of them will remember being very frightened because if they had parents at Fort Bragg, the base went on lock down ... So it’s a powerful, emotional thing and then obviously students who lost loved ones, that’s a different kind of memory all together.
DTH: Each year, it’s a new group of students and each year it’s a year removed from the event, and how do you think students deal with knowing this is a big event that happened and not being able to remember it?
CD: The vividness of the memory has not changed. You guys remember it as vividly as the students who were on campus that day. What has changed is how much you remember again because of this sending kids out of the room thing or teachers not allowing televisions in the room. So your memories tend to be more about what the adults around you were saying and doing and less about what was on the news. But your memories are every bit as vivid. In the next couple of years we’ll start to see students who have no memory.
DTH: How do you approach 9/11 in your class?
CD: So what we try to do in the large class ... I’ve never found a documentary that I liked particularly, so what I’ve done is the first chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report is the best minute by minute breakdown of what happened and there is enough material now that has been declassified that you can do an audio visual version of that with tape recordings and visuals ... What I have learned is that you have to be respectful of how emotionally powerful that is and give people the space to approach that material because you all did not have the same relationship to it at the time. You are coming to much of it new. Particularly, as a teacher, you have to remember there will be people in the room who lost family, there will be people in the room who were watching the towers burn and so forth — You’ve got to give people the space to respond to it emotionally and be respectful of what that means.
