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“I will always remember it was Tuesday,” said Jen Miller ’02 when recalling the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001.

Miller was a senior at UTampa and editor-in-chief of The Minaret student newspaper at the time. Every Tuesday, the staff would finalize that week’s paper, so it’d be ready to run on Friday. She spent that morning watching the news with her roommates before heading to The Minaret’s office to survey the scene on campus.

She vividly remembers that she told her newspaper advisor, “Well, now we can’t put the paper out tonight.” The advisor said, “No, you have to put a newspaper out. This is what journalism is.”

A column published in that edition of The Minaret described empty classrooms on Tuesday afternoon. The only sounds on campus, wrote assistant editor Sarah Morgan, were those coming from “televisions from behind close dorm rooms” as students “became obsessed with CNN and up-to-the-minute updates.”

Another weekly routine Miller remembered was that ROTC students wore fatigues on Tuesdays, and on Sept. 11, many other students didn’t realize this was a regular occurrence and thought active Army troops had been deployed to campus.

“It was just chaos,” said Miller. “(Later that day) we saw a light in the sky flying toward the Bank of America building (in downtown Tampa), and we all ducked, but it was just a helicopter going to Tampa General.”

Monnie Wertz, who was assistant to the dean of students at the time, also remembers the uncertainty the community experienced that day and in the following weeks. Wertz was home with her 1-year-old daughter when she got the news that morning, then promptly had to coordinate with the staff and students to ensure everyone felt safe and supported.

As she worked up to becoming the VP of Operations at UTampa, Wertz has seen the ways that the terrorist attacks permanently changed crisis responses across the nation.

“I think as a country, it was very foreign; how do you manage that level of collective trauma?” said Wertz. “Moving forward, knowing that, unfortunately, something of this scale was a possibility, you see that now as we’re putting our emergency protocols into practice.”

As student activities director, Stephanie Russell Krebs was also involved with immediate student assistance. After a colleague brought her to the commuter lounge near her office to see the live footage, “We watched for a little while, and then we knew we needed to figure out how to support our students.”

Russell Krebs — now VP of Student Affairs — said University staff worked to create spaces for students to come together and mourn about what happened that day. 

“We were helping students coordinate rides. Some people wanted to go back to New York,” she said. 

“We weren’t thinking about risk management; we were thinking people needed to get home to see their people. I just remember creating and holding space for people.” 

Miller remembers an improvised command center being set up in Fletcher Lounge in Plant Hall so students could reach their families in an era before it was common to have a cell phone and there wasn’t widespread internet.

Ronald Vaughn, UTampa’s president from 1995-2024, said that senior leaders communicated quickly to the campus and canceled classes for the day.

“Everybody was immersed in what was happening,” said Vaughn. “It was really about helping each other make it through such a challenging event in our country.”

“When tragedies happen, it brings everybody together,” said Russell Krebs. “We were all just one community navigating through this. It was a very connected place after that.”