Waiting in the London tube during his junior year abroad was just one of the times when Tufts senior Andy Swanton realized how Sept. 11 changed his world.
"I was uneasy when I saw someone in the London Underground with a big backpack," Swanton said. "I know that it's kind of unrealistic that it would happen in your life, but it's still a scary thing."
Five years later, Sept. 11 is recognized by many as a watershed moment for the current generation of young Americans. Aside from moments like the one just described, however, most Tufts students acknowledge that they rarely think of the fateful events of five years ago.
"It's weird because it's so huge for everyone, but it's not the kind of thing that you dwell on every day," Swanton said.
Still, members of the Tufts community realize that their lives changed irreversibly over the past five years.
Professor Hosea Hirata was teaching a class on the cultural legacy of the atomic bomb on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001.
"The students completely changed that day," Hirata said. "All of a sudden, what we were reading became an intense reality. I was walking around the quad, and I swear I could have imagined a mushroom cloud right there."
As the Chairman of the Department of German, Russian and Asian languages at Tufts, Hirata is in a position to notice quantifiable change in Tufts' classrooms since Sept. 11: enrollment in Arabic classes, he says, increased 400 percent from roughly 65 students in the fall of 2001 to over 250 a year ago.
Nationally, enrollment in Arabic has more than doubled since 2001, according to the Modern Language Association.
Senior Kelli Harrison is one of the new generation of Sept. 11-influenced Arabic students. She also spent two months traveling in Egypt this summer and says that Sept. 11 contributed to her interest in the Middle East.
I think it definitely helped to bring that part of the world to my attention," Harrison said. "In high school, I don't remember ever studying the Middle East or Islam. When I came to Tufts, I started taking Arabic and became fascinated with that culture. I was really interested in that stuff, and Sept. 11 helped bring it to everyone's attention."
Hirata says that Sept. 11 made Tufts students realize that the world extends far beyond the classroom's walls.
"That year, students realized that learning is not simply for knowledge's sake," Hirata said. "They realized that you study the world not for grades and a degree. That sense of what we call 'active citizenship' became larger. It became sort of a global issue, that the world is a community. Those issues became very acute and realistic."
Harrison feels that Tufts is particularly attuned to a more global way of thinking that has developed since Sept. 11.
"You have such a large international student base here and so many people studying international relations that you do have kids coming in with more of a global mindset," Harrison said.
While students like Swanton might not think about Sept. 11 every day, that doesn't mean that they think the impact has diminished over the past five years.
"When I do think about it, it hits me fresh each time," Swanton said. "The magnitude of what it means for this country has just as much impact as ever."
