David CookView other columns by David Cook
Fifteen years ago today, Dr. Betsy Alderman, professor emerita at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was teaching a news media writing class. It was a normal Tuesday morning.
Around 8:45, everything changed.
“A colleague ran down the hallway and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center,” Alderman said.
Her 15 or so students were sitting around desks shaped like a horseshoe in room 203 inside Frist Hall. Off to the side, a big, blocky TV was strapped to a roller cart; Alderman immediately pushed it to the front, turned it on. As Katie Couric and Matt Lauer tried to describe what felt like the collapse of the world – until then, the news cycle was full of Chandra Levy and summer shark attacks – the class of UTC students stared in shock.
“Mouths agape, dead silence,” said Heather Pelley, a sophomore in Alderman’s class. “Watching the world you know basically crumble.”