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December 7, 2001
What have you learned
in school today?
By Ari L. Goldman
NEW YORK - The greatest advantage teachers have over their students - after knowledge - is experience. We've been where they are, struggled with the same materials, confronted the same challenges and come out on top. In the case of the journalism school where I teach, I've always felt that I've covered the election campaigns, the race riots and even the wars that my students aspire to write about. I can show them the way.
But teaching this academic year has been different. Just days after the opening of school, New York was shattered by the World Trade Center disaster. My journalism students were in the field that morning, covering what we thought was the big story of the day: the primary race for a new New York mayor. When the second plane hit, my first instinct was to send my students to ground zero (although we didn't call it that back then). But I quickly changed course and sent out an urgent email to the effect of: 'Assignment canceled. Get to a safe place, turn on CNN and watch history unfold.'
In my almost 30 years in journalism, I never covered such a story - an act of war in my hometown - and I didn't expect them to. I just wanted to be sure my wife and children were safe. I didn't run downtown to cover the story.
But some students simply didn't listen. They headed downtown, running against a tide of thousands who were trying to get north to safety. They saw bodies falling from the sky, felt the earth shake, saw the towers tumble and then turned around and ran for their lives. They came back covered in dust and ashes.
In the days that followed, more and more students ventured downtown to talk to frantic family members looking for survivors, to rescue workers, to grieving firemen, to bewildered schoolchildren. All the students came back transformed.
Some of our students, especially those from overseas, were pressed into service by their hometown news outlets. In many cases they found themselves the only reporter in New York from their country. With the airports closed, the more experienced correspondents couldn't even get into town. Lauren Quintance, 27, filed articles for New Zealand newspapers, television and radio.
'I slept an hour that first night,' she said.
When, on the third grueling day, she suggested a station find another English-speaking correspondent, they said, 'But we need someone with a New Zealand accent!'
Mariana Van Zeller, 25, got an urgent call from a television station in Portugal where she had been an intern. They told her she should meet a news crew on top of a midtown office tower that had a view of the burning trade center towers. 'Prepare yourself,' they told her as she stepped in front of the camera. 'The whole of Portugal is watching you.'
Alberto Armendariz, 28, who came to New York from Buenos Aires to learn to be a better journalist, told his editors back home that he'd occasionally file an article. He has been writing virtually every day since September 11. He counted 45 articles in the first nine weeks, many of them Page One stories for La Nacion, one of Argentina's largest newspapers. He told me he barely sleeps.
'All adrenalin,' he explained.
Of course, not all students kept up that pace, or even covered the story at all. Some couldn't face the horror and just stayed in their apartments under the covers. One of my students went home to Tennessee and never came back.
Another out-of-town student sorted through dozens of emails from worried friends.
'I never knew so many people loved me,' she said.
Another student was plagued by dreams.
'I dreamed that I was digging through the rubble for bodies,' he said.
A student from Scandinavia, alone in New York, chose not to leave her apartment.
'I just wanted to be safe and talk to someone who loved me,' she said.
'This can_t be a test of courage,' said the school's academic dean, David Klatell. 'This can't be a test of anything.'
He said that students, almost all in their 20's and with barely a semester of journalism training under their belts, could not be expected to cover a story that is simply unprecedented. The school, he added, is prepared to 'honor their fears' and has made accommodations for those who cannot bring themselves to cover issues related to September 11.
I'm sure that just about every school in New York has been changed by the events of September 11, but a journalism school - with its mandate to teach students how to cover the great issues of the world - has to be changed even more. September 11, Klatell said, 'is the lens through which everything is now seen.' It drives everything in our curriculum. And it reminds me, at least, that regardless of my decades of experience, I am learning every day alongside my students.
Ari L. Goldman is an associate professor
at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism
The World
Israel and the Middle East
Ground Zero
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