Every day on her PATH train commute from her home in Jersey City, Elizabeth Hillman follows the same route so many New Jersey residents took into lower Manhattan 23 years ago today — some for the last time.
“I think about a lot of things differently,” said Hillman, the president of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum at the former site of Ground Zero. “I can’t help but be in awe of the courage with which people responded that day and the compassion that shaped a lot of the aftermath too.”
But, the memories of that day are now decades old — and don’t exist at all for a new generation born after the terrorist attacks.
“We now have 100 million Americans who are too young to remember 9/11 — they were born since then or were quite young at the time,” Hillman said, sitting earlier this week near the memorial waterfalls built in the footprints of the North and South Towers.
As of 2023, 27% of Americans were born after 2001. It’s a sobering statistic for those trying to keep alive the memories of those who died and the lessons of Sept. 11.
“Our mission is to commemorate, educate and inspire people about what happened,” Hillman said. “And for us to do that, we have to reach new generations.”
The National September 11 Memorial and Museum sits on the 16-acre site that was once home to the World Trade Center towers. Its 100,000 square feet of exhibition space and 90,000 artifacts serve as both a memorial to the tragedy and a teaching tool for future generations.
The story of Sept. 11, 2001, is complex and far-reaching — and one Hillman is avid about telling.
The former Rutgers University professor has led the museum and memorial for two years, after serving as president of Mills College in California. The 56-year-old is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, a respected historian and former law professor. The New Jerseyan and her wife, Trish, are the parents of five grown children.
When she was appointed, the museum’s board chairman and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg praised her “rare set of skills from her experience as college president managing large institutions through challenging times, as a veteran who is still relied upon by our armed services, as a historian whose deep sense of service is grounded in a lifelong commitment to learning, and as a trailblazer who has fought for justice and equality her entire career.”
Hillman had worked in legal reform around military issues. At Rutgers Law School in Camden, she taught courses on women and the law, and supervised students teaching law in underserved schools in the city.
Her resume included no museum work, and she had been surprised to be recruited for the job at the 9/11 museum.
But she saw it as an outlet for her deep interest in American history and military history and her desire to help “educate people about the most important things that made the world what it is and how they might be able to improve it or change in the future.”
She saw the chance to reach so many people from the site of the largest-ever terrorist attack on American soil.
“We see thousands of people in the museum every day,” she said. “We’ll see more than 2 million this year.”
The job was a homecoming of sorts, as she had gone to graduate school in New York. She was just starting her job at Rutgers-Camden when the planes hit the towers. Her sister was living in New York City at the time, but Hillman did not lose any close friends or relatives in the attacks.
“Honestly, it’s been a tremendous privilege to connect to the communities most affected by this,” she said.
She has been moved by the city’s resilience after its single worst day, and how people have shown how they can work through unimaginable trauma.
“We rebuilt the World Trade Center site, and all these people are here, learning and visiting,” she said, looking around at the crowds. “The fact that this was built, and that this remains such sort of hallowed ground, is an amazing thing.”
That day held lessons for countless sectors of society, she said, in firefighting, building, crisis management, processing grief, and recovery, among others.
To ensure current and future generations benefit from those lessons, the museum offers educational programs within its walls as well as outside.
The museum offers free lesson plans designed to be easy for teachers to use, including video clips of people’s recollections from the day.
For teachers, there are also virtual field trips and an Anniversary Digital Learning Experience on Wednesday, with a 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. live chat where educators will answer students’ questions about the day.
A week-long intensive professional development workshop over the summer was attended by 23 teachers from 12 states and the United Kingdom.
The museum website also features panel discussions including “Forensic Science in the Wake of Mass Atrocity,” “Marking Fifty Years of Hip Hop & the WTC,” and “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.”
One of the most popular lessons offered by the museum addresses how to talk to children about terrorism, Hillman said.
“We also realize the whole complexity of the events is too much for young learners to understand, but it’s really never too early to answer kids’ questions about what happened,” she said.
The day-to-day running of the museum requires a deft touch. As in other museums that focus on traumatic material, it’s important to take care of staff and volunteers. Some will need breaks, some will need to be moved from area to area, depending on how they are affected by spending time with various exhibits.
For instance, the rooms where one hears voicemail recordings or newscasts from the day or sees the mangled Ladder Co. 3 firetruck might be challenging posts, and docents might need to move over to the glorious mural of multiple patches of blue, remembrances of the sky that perfect September Tuesday.
Looking ahead, Hillman is aiming to lead the museum beyond its goal of reaching a total of 20 million students in the next two years, in time for the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
She also wants to reach 100,000 emerging leaders with professional training programs and to expand access to the museum. It is free to New Yorkers on the first Monday of every month, and she hopes to extend that program to New Jersey residents in the future.
Hillman has also met with officials in Jersey City who wanted to use its materials to inspire public service in underserved communities. And she visited the Sept. 11 memorial at Eagle Rock Reservation, meeting with Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr. and his chief of staff about 9/11 lessons.
“All education is local,” she said. “So we need to meet with people in different communities and connect with them. It’s why we think that the outreach to educators is the best way for us to reach more communities.”
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Tina Kelley may be reached at [email protected].
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