Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell will come to Syracuse University on Tuesday to discuss how the world has changed — and if it has — since the Pan Am Flight 103 bombing that took the lives of 35 SU students.

Mitchell, who helped found the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center, has also served as Senate majority leader and as a special envoy for the Obama and Clinton administrations in the past. He addressed the Sept. 11 attacks at SU’s first University Lecture less than a month after they happened.

The bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988, killed all 259 people on board, including 35 SU students returning for Winter Break after studying abroad, and 11 people on the ground when the plane went down over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Esther Gray, coordinator of University Lectures, said in an email she hopes students, faculty and community members will attend the speech despite the 7:30 p.m. men’s basketball game.

“He is someone everyone knows and respects and wants to hear because he is grounded in truth,” she said.

Gray added that Doug Biklen, dean of the School of Education, will introduce Mitchell before turning the podium to an informal discussion between the former senator and James Steinberg, dean of Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and the former deputy secretary of state to Hillary Clinton.

Judy O’Rourke, the director of undergraduate studies who helps organize Remembrance Week, described in an email how the Pan Am bombing changed Syracuse.

“We are more involved in the ‘world,’” she said. “Clearly SU has a long history of study abroad and community engagement, but after Pan Am and again after 9/11, that commitment to be more than just an ‘ivory tower’ was reinforced, clearly articulated, and taken to heart by our students, staff, faculty and alumni.”

Joan Deppa, an associate professor of magazine, newspaper and online journalism who has written a book about Pan Am Flight 103 and the media, said the bombing refocused university attention on students.

“It’s not that we didn’t look at students before, but when you get to know students and invest in trying to help them build their lives, to lose 35 of them, a truly awful thing, it was a shift I think in the positive in focusing on those students,” she said.

Deppa added that Pan Am Flight 103 had worldwide implications, including creating a relationship between Lockerbie and Syracuse.

“I experienced this relationship first hand when I went there to write my book,” she said. “What mattered to them was I was from Syracuse, and it made me essentially family. When students from Syracuse go to Lockerbie, they are welcomed as family.”

Published on November 12, 2013 at 12:38 am