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.
The progressive community took a loss this past January with the death of historian Howard Zinn — college professor, World War II bombardier, and author of the renowned “A People’s History of the United States.” Zinn was a relentless critic of war, inequality and injustice wherever he saw it.
Two and a half years ago, I set out on campus with a handful of fliers — none sporting the Student Activities approval stamp — and tacked them around Ward, MGC, and the library.
