Across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center’s twin towers, on the Stevens Institute of Technology campus where he studied engineering, he watched plumes of smoke billow from gaping openings where the planes had just hit.
It was an unusual winter in Washington, D.C. While the city was buried beneath the area’s largest snowstorm in recorded history, AU students relished a week without classes and witnessed the collapse of the Mary Graydon Center canopy as it succumbed to the weight of over two feet of snow, falling to the ground with a resounding crash.
It’s a gorgeous mid-April day in the District. So gorgeous, in part, because the Office of Admissions at American University has chosen today to be AU Preview Day. Incoming freshmen from all over the Eastern Seaboard flock with their parents to this beacon of higher education in our nation’s capital.
As a first generation college student from a working-class family in Northeastern Pennsylvania, attending a private university has given me a sense of Otherness.
One Saturday night, I stand on the border. The great divide between two highly similar and notionally divided ways of life: that of North side and that of South side.
“Your visit to American University is like a premiere!" reads a new section of AU's Web site, which lauds the birth of the “Green Room" in the Katzen Arts Building.
Crowds of “Tea Party Patriots” clad in conspicuously patriotic clothing, descended upon Washington brandishing picket signs and lawn chairs. One sign read “We came unarmed: THIS time.”
An athletic guy is a “jock.” An athletic girl, on the other hand, can be any number of things -- softball players are “dykes,” rugby players are “butch” and cheerleaders, dancers and gymnasts are “hot.”
