Jeffrey P. Clemens ’05 woke up about an hour after the planes hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001 and turned on the TV. After taking in the destruction, he left his Matthews dorm room for a freshman seminar interview in Widener. He returned to watch Lower Manhattan turn into dust.

With the memory of the attacks still smoldering, Clemens and the rest of the Class of 9/11 started school the next day, as planned. Students shuffled between lectures and vigils, shopping classes in the wake of the tragedy.

“Everyone would like to say that their time in college was an interesting time in history,” says Eric R. Trager ’05, who studied Arabic and the Middle East at Harvard. “But having 9/11 occur a day before classes started put us in the center of the academic universe at a real pivotal moment in history.”

In the next four years, students would revisit that day. Sept. 11 changed the tenor of life at military academies and left students in New York City and Washington, D.C. feeling more vulnerable. But at Harvard, the effects have been more subtle and cerebral.

The attacks spawned new courses and increased enrollments in religion and Arabic classes at Harvard. Sept. 11 has manifested itself in the academic interests and career decisions of many members of this year’s graduating class. For others in the Class of 9/11, it was just a day that they will never forget.

LESSONS LEARNED

Social studies concentrator Rebecca Leventhal ’05 chose to write her thesis on social and political discrimination against Muslim and Hindu small business owners in Brooklyn and Queens after Sept. 11.

“I have always been interested in political and economic development in general, but became especially so with the impact of 9/11,” she says. “I was interested in how 9/11 policies treated Muslims as scapegoats.”

Leventhal’s thesis grew out of the tragedy, yet it was not until she reviewed past coursework that she realized the true impact of Sept. 11 on her studies.

To prepare for her oral examination, Leventhal leafed through old papers and skimmed course notes. Her reflection on the impact of Sept. 11, she says, was the one theme that stood out. “I realized that Sept. 11 and the response to it has framed my entire academic career.”

Leventhal is one of many across a variety of fields who have pursued thesis topics relating to Sept. 11.

Clemens says he came across the idea for his economics thesis in a national security seminar inspired by Sept. 11 and taught by Baker Professor of Economics Martin S. Feldstein. Clemens learned that 40 percent of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product comes from opium production, a figure that prompted his own research into the issue.

Using data collected by the United Nations since the early 1990s, Clemens estimated the efficacy of drug control policies like crop eradication and crop replacement. This May, he won a Hoopes prize for his thesis on price fluctuations in opium from Afghanistan.

The impact of the attacks has gone beyond senior theses. Academic tastes have shifted across the College.