Mirror - Vol. 39, No. 02 - September 11, 2013

              THE MIRROR Student-run newspaper WeekofSeptemberll,2013 Vol. 39, Iss. 2
www.fairfieldmirror.com SvL
fairfieldmirror
The Fairfield Mirror
REMEMBERING
A CHRONICLE OF FAIRFIELD'S RECOVERY
By Luigi DiMeglio
Managing Editor
On the morning of Sept. 11,
2001, Director of Public Safety Todd
Pelazza was seated at his desk. Larri
Mazon, director of multicultural re-lations
at the time, went to Pelazzas
office to tell him about an incident
in New York. Mazon had a large TV
in his office and they proceeded to
watch history unfold.
By about 10:30 a.m., Fairfield
University had closed its gates and
manned the front entrance to campus
with an officer. Off-duty officers were
called in.
"I vividly remember that day,"
said Pelazza, "One of the things that
still strikes me is the weather. It was
a crystal clear day with literally not a
cloud in the sky.
"Whenever there's weather like
that today, it still sends a chill down
my back." .
In 2001, it was school policy for
student residences to have landlines.
There was no StagAlert system. Calls
came pouring in to the Department
of Public Safety office from students
unsure what to do.
Pelazza had been at Fairfield for
almost 10 years at that point, but the
situation was unprecedented. Disaster
planning had been done, but nothing
quite applied to 9/11. The closed gates
and checkpoints remained for more
than a week after that cloudless Tues-day.
"Because of our location, we
knew there would be students affect-ed,"
said Pelazza.
ResLife, Campus Ministry,
Counseling Services, DPS and oth-ers
in the campus community began
their search for whom Fairfield might
have lost.
The World Trade Center had
many people working there every
day that it had its own zip code. At
the Office of Alumni Relations, Janet
Canepa '82 began combing through
files for alumni that were listed under
the WTC zip code. When they were
found, their home telephone num-bers
were called.
Canepa remembers what some
of those calls were like. "You know,
you could hear that there would be
a lot of people over the house and
the house would calm down [when
the phone call started]. ... They were
there to console."
It took until the month of Octo-ber
2001 for the school to determine
that 14 alumni perished in the attack.
One of Canepa's classmates,
Patrick McGuire '82, was at work on
the 84th floor of 2 World Trade Cen-ter.
McGuire was about to evacuate
the building, but an announcement
over the building intercom said the
situation was under control, so he re-sumed
his work at Euro Brokers, Inc.
His long-time friend and Fair-field
classmate, Michael Murray '82,
had made it down to the 40th floor of
that building, but was on his way back
up when a plane slammed into floors
78 through 84.
READ STORY ON PAGE 4
Faculty wants Mentor
By Exnhi Myslymi
Associate News Editor
Twenty-five Fairfield faculty
members, including some who have
retired, signed a letter asking to fully
restore Mentor for faculty and stu-dents.
One week before classes start-ed,
faculty was informed by Chief
Information Officer Paige Francis
that Mentor's course management
system would shut down due to se-curity
concerns.
Considering Mentor's impor-tance
to Fairfield, "the timing and
lack of faculty input to the decision
to shut down Mentor should give
everyone cause for great concern,"
said Accounting Professor Dr. Dawn
Massey.
Francis said, "Unfortunately,
the issues only came to light the
week before fall semester started so
the decision was really disruptive
for the faculty to prepare for the stu-dents
coming in."
Author and creator of the Men-tor
Course Management and As-sessment
and co-founder of Axiom
Education Dr. Curt Naser said he
received an email on Aug. 22 from
Francis with specific security con-cerns.
These included faculty being
READ MENTOR ON PAGE 3
It is hard to see that there is any
plausible claim of a "Security
emergency of the sort that would
justify forcing over two hundred faculty,
500 courses and 4000 students to change
their course management system in the first
week of class . . . W^'
: - ' ■ f
Because the CIO has failed to
demonstrate any legitimate security
concerns with the Mentor system, we call
upon the CIO to immediately reinstate
faculty and student access to Mentor."
Faculty members want Information Technology Service to bring back Mentor Loan Le/The Mirror
News: Opinion: The Vine: Sports:
FUSA to announce Student critiques action in The Levee gets Nauti Fall sports preview
fall concert Syria
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