Judging by Chancellor Kenneth A. Shaw’s outward appearance, one would never know the strain the past year put on him.

At Saturday’s home opener in the Carrier Dome, Syracuse University’s leader jumped up and down, trying to incite the orange-clad crowd of students to cheer for the football team. Like the university heads, Shaw appears to be the same as before. But looking beyond the surface, one will see that the year, which started with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and included the murder of a student, took a toll on the institution’s leader and led to subtle changes in academia, security and support systems on campus.

‘It was not a typical year,’ Shaw said. ‘But people are amazingly resilient. They bounce back.”

‘Life’s going to go on here.’

As time went on, the university’s initial response of pain slowly faded into former routines.

‘In the first few weeks after September 11, the majority of people kept it in the forefront of their thinking,’ he said. ‘But at a certain point, it’s not the first thing that you think of when you wake up in the morning.’

But despite the return to everyday life, the campus was left with reminders of the intensity of the event.

The attacks and the actions to follow in Afghanistan sparked a need to discuss these events in classrooms, forums and small campus groups. The discussions helped develop a firmer sense of community, he added.

‘It forces us to focus again on what we are,’ he said. ‘Universities have to be a place where you can discuss what’s going on.’

While overall campus security changed little after the event, and major policies such as the South Campus Welcome Center were more a result of the murder of student Simeon Popov, Carrier Dome officials instated new rules in an effort to prevent incidents. Shaw said police dogs inspect the Dome several times a day before games.

Manager Pat Campbell said the Dome hired about 50 new staff members and has more security officials at games to increase security presence. Spectators cannot bring books, backpacks or coolers into the building, a rule that the Dome has had for years but is now more strictly enforcing.

‘We had to re-emphasize things to the public,’ he said.

And though the university experienced several hate crimes after Sept. 11, the event forced the campus to focus on appreciating diversity, said The Rev. Thomas Wolfe, dean of Hendricks Chapel. The chapel, in a partnership with the Counseling Center, formed the Grief Group to deal with the heightened need for counseling after Sept. 11. While the chapel offers students spiritual guidance to deal with post-trauma grief, serious cases have been referred to the Counseling Center.

But grief and fear did not seem to hurt the university’s enrollment this year, Shaw said. Enrollment stayed about the same, despite predictions that students would choose to stay closer to home this year rather than attending larger schools. Students came from the same areas geographically, and the university actually received about 150 more freshmen than it anticipated would accept admission offers, he added.

Enrollment did suffer, however, in the university’s study abroad programs, Shaw said. After the Pan Am Flight 103 bombings in 1988, when a bomb exploded in a plane killing 270 people, including 35 students studying in SU’s Division of International Studies Abroad program, enrollment in study abroad programs suffered for about two years, he added.

This fall, enrollment is down about 5 percent from last fall, said Jon Booth, deputy director of DIPA. But Booth said he does not think the numbers will stay down for long.

‘There was the immediate impact of students last fall being fearful of going abroad,’ he said. ‘But my sense is that students are resilient and that students realize the importance of studying abroad.’

Most of the DIPA sites changed their security measures after the Sept. 11 attacks, Booth said. All of the European centers now have improved security systems in the academic buildings and the schools post security warnings on bulletin boards and e-mail listservs, Booth said.

On the flip side of international studies, the university has also had difficulty securing visas for both international students and faculty, said Melvyn Levitsky, a professor at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Also, many international students are afraid to go back home because they aren’t sure whether they will be allowed back in to the United States, Wolfe said.

Levitsky, who teaches a graduate student class on drugs, war and terrorism, said the school has had to make some adjustments in its curriculum after the attacks. Maxwell introduced several new classes and added sections to other classes that had a newfound popularity. Other professors, teaching topics such as foreign policy, political science and regionalism, added new substance to their syllabuses, Levitsky added.

‘This brings home that you can’t forget the past,’ he said.

At the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, the faculty structured the papers for COM 107, an introductory course for communications majors, around the anniversary for Sept. 11, Dean David Rubin said. The topic for papers in the COM 107 classes changes every year, and this year the Sept. 11 anniversary provided the perfect opportunity to train incoming students to analyze the news, Rubin said.

‘We like to get them watching and thinking about the media as soon as possible,’ he said.

While it is too soon to tell whether the Sept. 11 attacks affected enrollment in the journalism school, Rubin said the events forced many students to think about their potential role as reporters in the time of crisis.

The way the university dealt with the attacks this past year reflected how the country as a whole reacted, Levitsky said. But in some ways, SU reacted more efficiently because it has an institutional knowledge from the Pan Am 103 bombing of how to deal with a terrorism attack.

‘In a certain way, having gone through that experience, terrorism itself meant something quite a lot to the university,’ he said. ‘They understood what was going on. They understood what needed to be done.’

Even for students who were not here at the time of the Pan Am bombing, the constant reminders on this campus of that attack, including the memorial in front of the Hall Of Languages, help reinforce that institutional memory.

‘I’ll bet people look at (the Pan Am memorial) in a much different way now,’ Levitsky said.

But the campus will change as the country prepares to enter a new era, Wolfe said. What the era will characterize, however, remains uncertain, he added.

While he fears that the attacks will force students to become isolated in their thinking, watching students prepare for the anniversary of the attacks by planning a candlelight vigil, Wolfe said he is confident that this generation of college students will carry its hope into the future.

‘There is this need to light a candle in the dark and see it glow,’ he said. ‘There is a need to see light through the darkness.’

Published on September 10, 2002 at 12:00 pm