Bonnie Morris is a senior fellow at the Global Women’s Institute.
Five years ago, in a special ceremony commemorating the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, University President Steven Knapp invited me to share notes from my Sept. 11, 2001 experience on campus, and I read aloud from my journal to the crowd. What can’t be shared too often is the sense of obligation to my community that I felt during the crisis.
After 22 wonderful years teaching women’s history here at GW, I had my position abruptly terminated last year as part of steep cuts to the humanities. But that hasn’t changed what I remember from that day and how much I appreciate that the GW community came together then.
Huddled in our wee women’s studies townhouse – that my program had just moved into that week — my faculty colleagues, my graduate teaching assistants, our custodian, our administrative assistant and her partner formed a tight circle that reflected GW’s diversity in age, race, class, position, sexuality, nationality and temperament. Soon I emerged to tack a large sign on our front door: “COME IN IF YOU NEED A HUG.”
I had occasion to give many hugs in the panicked days that followed when classes, having barely begun, were interrupted with vigils, evacuation drills and National Guard tanks on campus. In due time when my big history survey course resumed, I offered whatever counsel I could muster to my first-year students, many of whom hailed from New York or were living away from home for the first time. I candidly admitted my own fear, just as I had on another sorrowful occasion just four years earlier — after the murder of Matthew Shepard in a gay hate crime.
It’s easy to state the obvious: At GW, as in other distracted or fragmented institutions, we all become a family when threatened. Yet that family feeling of human care should be a given and year-round in normal practice. That sense of community is what must be knit back together as we begin a new year frayed by brutal job cuts, the ejection of longtime staff and faculty, and allegations of homophobia in the athletic program.
Not so long ago, that physical attack on the World Trade Center and locally on the Pentagon reverberated for all at GW — it incited better levels of caring and outreach. Now, 15 years later, I hope we’ve learned that affirming every individual’s humanity should be a daily value, not just a response to crisis. As GW moves forward through its challenges of budget cuts and homophobia, remember it costs zero to be kind and to offer up that hug to those in our large campus family.
