9/11: 20 years later, campus remembers – Käri Knutson

Charles L. Cohen Emeritus professor of history; then, professor of history and director of the Religious Studies Program Where were you and what were you doing when you found out the news? I was climbing the steps of the Humanities Building on the way to my office prior to teaching my 9:30 a.m. class. What do you remember about that day and your reaction? I remember looking up into a lovely sunny sky and scanning for airplanes. Since I am from New York City and had family in Manhattan, I called my brother to find out how he was, just in (the unlikely) case that he had been downtown. We tried to process what was happening. Campus held several events and remembrances. Did you attend any? If so, what do you recall? As director of Religious Studies, I thought that the program should do something to allow people to learn more about Islam, so I organized what (harkening back to my own student days in the 1960s) I called a “teach-in” on Sept. 19 in 3650 Humanities. We had an overflow crowd in the 500+ seat hall. We had a dozen speakers. Did 9/11 impact your teaching? If so, how? Not my teaching per se, but my entire career. The event led Milwaukee businessman and benefactor Sheldon Lubar to propose to Chancellor Wiley that UW create an organization dealing with Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Between 2002 and 2005, I negotiated the formation of what became the Lubar Institute for the Study of the Abrahamic Religions, which I led from 2005-2016. Running the institute shifted my focus from early American history, which is what I had originally been hired to teach, to comparative religious history, and culminated in my offering a course on “Braided Histories: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” I published a book based on the course, The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction, with Oxford University Press in 2020. I had been trying to develop Islam academically on campus in the years prior to 9-11, and the event only intensified my efforts. It also gave me a commitment to fighting Islamophobia that continues to the present. The majority of our students either weren’t born yet or were too young to remember 9/11. What’s one thing you think they should know about that time? As a historian I would routinely tell my students that we cannot judge the importance of events until we can gain historical perspective; our culture and its media are overly quick to pronounce judgments that in history’s light quite frequently prove at best uninformed, at worst completely wrong. Still, I remember a colleague saying on 9-11 that he could feel history shifting under his feet, and that we were entering a new era. 9-11 was a rare event whose importance was immediately apparent. But how it was (and continues to be) important is an ongoing story. So, if I were still teaching, I would tell my students not to make settled judgments about 9/11 even now.