“I thought that I didn’t understand him,” David Rudenstine, former Dean of Cardozo and Professor of Law, recounts, referring to a doorman who first told him the news of the 9/11 attacks.  Many shared Rudenstine’s shock, as anxious onlookers crowded the streets gazing towards downtown.

“Things were very emotional at the law school at the time,” Rudenstine recalls.  Faculty members gathered on the fifth floor listening to a radio, trying to figure out what was going on.  “It was very chaotic at first because no one really understood what to do,” Stewart Sterk, Professor of Law and Acting Dean on 9/11, says.

By 11 a.m., administration had made the decision to cancel classes for the rest of the day.  “That seemed like the relatively obvious decision to make,” Sterk says. “As the enormity of the event became apparent, having classes seemed silly.”

The difficult decision for administration, however, was for how long to remain closed.  New York City required businesses south of 14th Street to remain closed for several days, but administration was determined to re-open as soon as possible and did so several days later.  “The longer you stayed closed,” according to Sterk, “the more you essentially were giving victory to the terrorists.”

The week following 9/11, a public meeting of students and faculty was held.  “There [were] strong expressions of people being totally discouraged and thinking of dropping out,” Rudenstine recalls.  “I don’t think that feeling came close to carrying the day, but it was clear that many students were feeling they didn’t know what they were doing in law school in the wake of the 9/11 attack.”  Two Cardozo graduates had been killed in the attacks—Andrew Zucker, who was in one of the buildings, and Barbara Olson, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon.

Appoximately two months after the attacks, Rudenstine was formally appointed Dean of Cardozo School of Law, and he admits that he was extremely “worried about the morale of the student body.”  The feeling of a lack of motivation and purpose drove several students to drop out of classes, but resignations were limited, and those feelings “passed,” according to Rudenstine.  “People began to get ahold of all of the reasons they were [at Cardozo] in the first place, and those reasons began to reassert themselves in their individual minds.  Plans for the future . . . continued to make sense.”

“We ended the year . . . on surprisingly strong footing,” Rudenstine says, “and people began to feel very hopeful through the law school.”  The applicant pool increased by 40% at Cardozo, which was “well ahead of the national average by large percentage points,” according to Rudenstine.  “Cardozo was taking a very large step forward, even though we were still haunted by 9/11.”

While strongly affected by the events of 9/11, Cardozo students and faculty responded with remarkable resilience and outstanding resolve.  “Faculty expected [the] student body to rise to the occasion and somehow live with the aftermath of 9/11,” says Rudenstine.  “That happened.”