Members of the campus community held various events and memorials Friday to commemorate the eighth anniversary of 9/11, honoring those who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks.
To observe the anniversary, a memorial ceremony was set to take place at 8:40 a.m. in front of the Couper Administration Building, and at 8:46 a.m. a bell was scheduled to chime to symbolize the moment when the first plane struck the World Trade Center.
“Several New York State University Police officers [participated] in a flag ceremony, followed by a moment of silence,” said a Binghamton University press release. “Flowers will also be placed in the Memorial Courtyard in the Fine Arts Building at the monument commemorating the 15 Binghamton University alumni killed in the World Trade Center.”
In addition to these memorials, the BU College Republicans and Binghamton Review scheduled a memorial reading of names to commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks in front of the Memorial Flag Garden, across from the Fine Arts Building between the Library Tower and the New University Union, at 9:30 a.m.
The BU community also planned to work with the United Way of Broome County to participate in the Day of Caring activities, according to the press release.
“Faculty, staff, students and alumni have volunteered to work on numerous projects at various locations, including the Endicott Visitors Center, the playground of the Jewish Community Center and the Southern Tier Celebrates Living Landscapes project at the MetroCenter,” the press release said.
Specific student groups also hosted events to memorialize the anniversary.
The Chabad Center for Jewish Student Life, along with Hillel and the Jewish Heritage Program, hosted an annual campus-wide Mitzvah Marathon on Thursday in front of the New Student Union.
“At the event there were many opportunities to do a good deed, or a mitzvah,” said Jacqueline Boroda, special projects coordinator of Chabad. “The main thing that we had to relate to 9/11 was the wall of mitzvot.”
According to Boroda, on the memory wall that was constructed on the walkway in front of the New University Union, students would sign a pledge to do a mitzvah in honor of a 9/11 victim. Each slip of paper had an individual victim’s picture, name and age at the time of death on the front, and a fill-in-the-blank pledge agreement on the back.
“I think this was a great opportunity for students to show that they recognize what happened,” Boroda said. “I know it happened when I was in middle school and I didn’t really connect to the tragedy at the time, but now this is a good way to remember.”
The Mitzvah Marathon event started at Binghamton in 2002 to commemorate the victims of 9/11 and has since been duplicated at 15 other college campuses.
Mitzvahs during the marathon included making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the Salvation Army, holiday cards for soldiers and get-well cards for sick children, as well as purchasing cans to be donated to Community Hunger Outreach Warehouse (CHOW). A Red Cross blood drive also took place in the New Union in collaboration with this event.
Besides the activities on campus, professors often include a moment of silence in their classes to commemorate the anniversary.
“Once or twice I’ve said, ‘Let’s pause for a moment,’ the first few years after 9/11 events were canceled,” said Andrew Walkling, dean’s assistant professor in English, general literature & rhetoric, art history and theater. “But I have noticed over the years how much more mundane events were scheduled on this day, which was not how it was the first few years.”
The terrorist attacks happened during Walkling’s first semester as a professor at BU.
“I remember coming in to work in the morning and hearing on the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and I imagined that it was some small event,” he said. “I had office hours and I could hear people in the hall whispering that something had happened. After office hours, I rushed to my car and turned on the radio and discovered that the story had developed. The University was already closing down, so I went home and saw the remainder of the news on TV.”