As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it is worth remembering we ought to remember another devastating act of terrorism that intimately affected our campus.

On Dec. 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York City exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the death of all 243 passengers, sixteen crew members and eleven bystanders on the ground.

Thirty-five of the passengers killed were students returning home after spending a semester studying in Syracuse University Abroad’s London and Florence programs. Investigators ultimately traced the plane’s destruction to a suitcase bomb stowed in the cargo hold.

The attack forcibly inaugurated the modern era of large-scale terrorist attacks, calling into question the safety of commercial transportation, the invulnerability of American citizens living abroad and the United States’ relationship with the rest of the world. As one of the first major acts of airborne terrorism, Pan Am 103 completely altered the way many Americans viewed their place in the world, a realization the attacks of 9/11 brought back into our public discourse.

Yet some students question the relevance of Pan Am 103, an event that occurred before they were even born, to their own personal lives. It is an all-too-common mistake to overlook the strong underlying connections between the SU campus and Pan-Am 103.

The attack is still relevant to SU not only because it claimed the lives of 35 members of our community, but also because those lives so closely resemble our own. The majority of those 35 victims were young men and women who had the same experiences and ambitions as many of today’s undergraduate students; nearly 50 percent of current SU

students study abroad. .

Pan Am 103 changed our parents’ generation in the same way that 9/11 changed ours; the education and remembrance of one event is incomplete without the other. As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and 23rd anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing draw near, actively reach out to friends, classmates, professors and other acquaintances who have been directly affected by terrorism.

This Sunday, the Remembrance Scholars will join the rest of our campus in honoring the memory of those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks during a service in Hendricks Chapel at 2 p.m.

From Nov. 5-12, the Remembrance Scholars will host several events devoted to educating the campus community about the legacy of Pan Am 103. Please join us in remembering those we lost 23 years ago during the Rose-Laying Ceremony at 2:03 p.m. and the Remembrance Convocation at 3:30 p.m. on Nov. 11.

The 2011-2012 Remembrance Scholars

Published on September 6, 2011 at 12:00 pm