Before they enrolled in the new World Trade Center class at Villa Julie College, most of the students knew little about the history that led to that deadly day on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I didn?t really know what the World Trade Center was when it happened,” said Lauren Gordon, a sophomore visual communications major.
“I was interested in ground zero. I don?t want to say I found it fascinating because it was a terrible thing, but I wanted to learn more.”
Junior nursing major Emily Cahill said she had waited six years to learn more about Sept. 11.
After a field trip this month to the Big Apple, the nine students in the honors course now know how Robert Moses helped build modern-day New York, how Osama bin Laden became the mastermind behind the attacks and how New York still reels from the effects of 9/11.
“There?s a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions when you talk about terrorism, al Qaeda and Sept. 11, so it?s important to dig deeper to get at the truth,” said David Lingelbach, a business professor who taught the class with art professor Lori Rubeling.
“Many students at the beginning of the semester probably had knee-jerk reactions to Sept. 11 and had a black-and-white perspective, but we showed there are lots of shades of gray.”
The course, “Ground Zero: Change Agents,” examined the towers, the attacks and Islam through the lens of architecture, history and culture.
Students compiled journals about their visit to New York and wrote first-person accounts from the vantage points of the major players, including bin Laden and Todd Beamer, the passenger who led the revolt on Flight 93, the jet that terrorists crashed in Shanksville, Pa.
Lingelbach, a former exchange student in the Middle East and a venture capitalist who worked in one of the towers just a year before the hijackings, offered firsthand accounts and shared Arabic artifacts.
As an artist, Rubeling encouraged students to use a wide variety of media for class projects, from movies to scrapbooks to dances.
“When you think about it,” Rubeling asked, “why has it taken this long to get these conversations started?”
