- September 11, 2026
- By Maryland Today Staff
People often say they remember exactly where they were on Sept. 11, 2001, when they first learned of the terrorist attacks. But that’s not the case for most Terps on campus today, as they hadn’t yet been born.
Twenty-five years ago, 19 hijackers commandeered four airliners and over 77 minutes, slammed them into both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C., and into a field in rural Pennsylvania when passengers fought back. The attacks killed 2,977 people and injured thousands more.
The panic, the smoke and the raw grief of that day remain vivid for many, including the 8,000 members of the University of Maryland community who turned out the next day on McKeldin Mall for a memorial or rolled up their sleeves to contribute to a campus blood drive.
Maryland Today reached out to several UMD faculty experts to explore how that day reshaped their fields—aviation security, terrorism research, fire protection engineering and the military—and helped create the world we know today, whether we remember 9/11 or encounter it only as history. Their recollections, edited for length and clarity, span continents, decades of war and shifts in public security. The opinions expressed are their own.
Air transportation expert Martin Dresner, professor emeritus in the Robert H. Smith School of Business, began studying the effects of post-9/11 security measures in the months after the attacks.
The most important change was the federalization of security at airports and the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Before Sept. 11, safeguarding air transport was ostensibly the purview of the airlines, which contracted it out to various security companies. The situation wasn’t as uniform or strict as it was now. Since Sept. 11, a security fee has been added to all passengers who fly in the United States to pay for these security measures.
Immediately after 9/11, lines were very long because of the extra security. Since then, they have come up with known traveler programs, like TSA Pre-Check, where they do checks on you ahead of time so you’re known to the government and you can get through security faster.
While in some cases the security measures have been found to be ineffective at detecting threats, they are still important as an assurance to passengers. If we didn’t have them, there could be a lot more hesitancy about flying.
Government bureaucracy, once it’s in place, is very difficult to remove. There’s been some discussion of letting airports take care of their own security again. There may be some ways that the security could be decentralized, if some airports think they can do a good job or better job than the TSA, though still under federal oversight.
In 2005, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Gary LaFree of UMD’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice launched the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism—better known as START—to bring academic rigor to the study of terrorism. One of its signature projects is the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), a one-of-a-kind database of global attacks that remains a key tool for researchers and policymakers.
In the last undergraduate class I taught in terrorism research, there wasn’t a single student alive at the time of 9/11. And yet it has continued to reverberate and have an amazing impact not just on U.S. history, but on world history. The loss of life that day was large and tragic, but not existential for our country. However, it changed the world so fundamentally that you can almost compare its impact to that of World War II.
Analyzing it as a criminologist, one of the greatest effects I see on society is that we quickly moved away from the idea of community-oriented policing—you know, Officer Friendly helping to rescue your cat from a tree—to the idea that police were our first line of defense against terrorism. It wasn’t nonsense; the FBI had maybe 1,500 people focused on terrorism on 9/11, and at the same time there were close to a million police officers in the United States. Following 9/11 the police became more of a paramilitary force with less emphasis on service to the public, and that had far-ranging effects you can still see today.
In the field of terrorism studies, the Department of Homeland Security’s Centers of Excellence on Terrorism have been closed, and the GTD database is no longer updated. The newest data in it is more than 4 years old. So if you ask, “Is terrorism going up or down?,” no one can give a scientific answer. In that sense, we’re in the place we were on the morning of 9/11.
James A. Milke, professor emeritus of fire protection engineering, was a lead investigator on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s World Trade Center Building Performance Study, which was convened following 9/11 to investigate the devastation to the complex and issue recommendations for updating building codes.
We were on site on Oct. 7. It was far bigger in magnitude than any magazine picture could show. We surveyed not just the Twin Towers but an entire set of buildings in lower Manhattan that either had had partial collapses or had been affected by debris.
Part of the charge was trying to explain what happened that day. The fires weren’t jet fuel fires per se; they were really office building fires. The jet fuel from those aircraft was an ignition aid for all the office furnishings in the Twin Towers. The buildings were significantly damaged by aircraft impacts, and the fire then was able to further weaken those structures.
Our recommendations applied to buildings over 420 feet, or about 35-40 stories. We recommended increasing fire resistance. We also recommended increasing the adherence strength of the concrete-like material sprayed onto steel to insulate it. Another recommendation was to create impact-resistant enclosures around exit stairs and elevator shafts. Before 9/11, you could enclose staircases and elevator shafts with lightweight materials that provide good fire resistance but are not terribly impact-resistant; when the aircraft came in, they took out the stairs, so you had these large holes that trapped people.
We put to rest some ideas that we had to completely redesign high-rise buildings because of jet fuel fires. There were some conspiracy theories about bombs that were set off in the buildings, and we found no evidence of that at all. We provided that initial data for people to know what needed more attention and what not to waste time on. It was an incredible honor to be selected.
Douglas “D.A.” Sims II, distinguished public service fellow in the School of Public Policy, was a young officer on the morning of 9/11, serving as an aide to the general who commanded the Military District of Washington at Fort McNair. Sims spent the majority of his Army career fighting the wars the attacks set in motion. He deployed many times to Iraq and Afghanistan, eventually commanding the 1st Infantry Division before retiring at three-star rank in 2025 as director of the Joint Staff, one of the U.S. military’s most senior roles.
My boss was in a meeting that morning, and I walked a note in to him saying a plane just hit the World Trade Center. He looked at it and said “huh.” A few minutes later I took him a note saying another plane had hit. He adjourned the meeting. Then word came that smoke was rising from the Pentagon, which is right across the river from Fort McNair. We reached the crash site within the hour: fire, plane parts, people everywhere.
My boss was named the commander for rescue and recovery. We were there for the next six weeks for the investigation and removing the remains and debris.
Just like everyone else’s, my life changed dramatically because of that day. What’s resonated with me the most is the way the country has gathered around and supported the military. It had been a long time since anything of that magnitude; the Gulf War was a different, much shorter fight. People were consciously thinking about Vietnam—how poorly we'd valued our veterans—and decided not to repeat it.
The military didn't fully grasp the importance of mental fitness until years into these wars. I went through it myself—post-deployment assessments, counseling, learning that resilience isn't fixed, it can be built. As a commander, I built wellness programs alongside our training and treated emotional fitness the way we treated physical fitness. Most veterans are doing well, but at any given time, about 10% of any population is struggling, and veterans are no exception.