102 minutes.
That’s how long it took for the Twin Towers to collapse.
Anyone who watched it happen live on television can never forget where they were or what they were doing. We watched in disbelief as smoke poured across Manhattan and two buildings that had defined one of the world’s most recognizable skylines simply disappeared.
I was driving to work when the first reports came over the radio. At that point, it did not seem catastrophic. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. Terrible, certainly, but the scale of what was unfolding was impossible to comprehend.
Then I got to the office and watched it on television.
Disbelief is still the closest word I have.
Twenty-five years later, America will again remember September 11. We will read the names, replay the footage, honor those who died, and remember the courage of those who ran toward danger.
We will also remember September 12, a day that has acquired a mythology of its own.
It was the day America came together. Flags appeared everywhere. Blood banks filled. Political differences seemed smaller. Neighbors checked on one another. Strangers helped strangers. For a moment, something larger seemed to hold us together.
Much of that was real. But we have also romanticized what it meant.
September 12 did not feel the same to everyone. Muslims found themselves viewed with suspicion. Sikhs were attacked because someone decided a turban told them everything they needed to know. Brown skin, foreign names, accents, and unfamiliar faiths suddenly carried meanings they had not carried the day before.
I remember becoming more conscious of that myself. I was an American grieving an attack on my country, but I was also foreign-born, brown, and visibly someone another person could place into whatever category fear required.
That does not diminish the extraordinary solidarity America displayed. It complicates it.
That is the first myth worth confronting: unity did not necessarily mean understanding.
I have spent most of my adult life believing deeply in a particular idea of America. I came here through education, built a life and family here, and eventually a business devoted to bringing people and ideas across borders.
For three decades, I have believed America’s strength was its ability to absorb difference. People could arrive from everywhere and become part of something larger without surrendering where they came from.
The melting pot.
Lately, I find myself less certain about that idea.
The public language feels coarser. Racism, xenophobia, and bigotry seem less embarrassed. Suspicion sits closer to the surface. We increasingly reduce groups of people to an immigration status, religion, political affiliation, nationality, or thirty-second video clip.
America feels less welcoming to me than it once did.
But if I am going to make that statement, I need to interrogate it.
How do I know?
Is it because I see more examples of hatred? Because they constantly cross my social media feeds? Because the ugliest corners of American life now arrive on a device in my hand before I have finished my morning coffee?
America may have become less welcoming. But I also have to consider that I may be seeing more of its worst because outrage is what our information systems have learned to serve us.
The racist who once had an audience of six at the end of a bar can now have an audience of six million. Visibility is not necessarily prevalence, and we need to make that distinction.
In the first chapter of my book American Stupediority, titled “The Rise of Feelings Over Facts,” I wrote about our dangerous tendency to accept something as true because it validates what we already feel.
I thought I was writing about America.
This September 11, sitting outside America, I am realizing how conveniently that allowed me to avoid writing about myself.
Feelings over facts is easy to recognize in someone else. One video of an immigrant committing a crime becomes evidence that immigrants are dangerous. One case of fraud becomes proof that newcomers are exploiting American generosity.
I do not believe either of those things.
But I also have to be careful not to make the opposite mistake.
Because my own life was transformed by immigration, and because my work has been built around the movement of people and ideas across borders, it would be easy for me to dismiss concerns about immigration as ignorance or xenophobia.
That would be another version of feelings over facts.
Countries need borders. Immigration needs standards. Communities have limits on housing, infrastructure, and public resources. Governments have a responsibility to decide who enters, under what circumstances, and with what expectations.
Acknowledging those realities does not require accepting the caricature of immigrants as criminals or freeloaders. But rejecting those caricatures does not give me permission to dismiss every concern about immigration either.
The harder work is refusing both shortcuts and asking what the evidence actually tells us. If I stop asking because the explanation already feels right, I have become the person my own book was criticizing.
That may be one of the more unsettling truths about where we are twenty-five years after 9/11. We are not suffering from a lack of information. Almost any conclusion can now be supported by a statistic, a video, an expert, a podcast, or a story that proves exactly what we already suspected. We have become remarkably good at finding evidence that confirms us.
That is particularly uncomfortable for me this week because I am writing from the @EAIE Annual Conference in Glasgow, surrounded by thousands of people whose work, like mine, rests on a powerful belief about education: that it opens minds.
Bring people across borders. Put students into classrooms with people unlike themselves. Encourage study abroad. Let people encounter the world, and surely they will understand one another better.
I have spent my career believing that. I still want to.
But the backdrop against which we are gathering makes that belief harder.
Just days ago, the far-right AfD won nearly 44 percent of the vote in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, running heavily on opposition to immigration and establishment politics. In the United States, the Trump administration has tightened rules for international students and made mobility more uncertain. Across countries, arguments about immigration, borders, national identity, and who belongs have moved from the political margins toward the center.
From inside an international education conference, it would be comfortable to diagnose the problem as ignorance and prescribe more education and more exposure.
That answer is becoming too easy.
We are hardly suffering from a shortage of exposure. Millions cross borders to study and work. Universities call themselves global. Our phones connect us to people and cultures on another continent in real time.
And yet suspicion appears to be growing rather than receding.
That forces a harder question: what if exposure is not enough?
Education can give us knowledge without humility. Intelligence can make us more sophisticated at defending what we already wanted to believe. The highly educated person is still perfectly capable of confirmation bias and may even be better at rationalizing it.
Those of us who champion global education have blind spots too. People like me, whose lives and careers have been enriched by mobility and immigration, can be too quick to assume their virtues are self-evident. They are not. Concerns about migration deserve examination rather than immediate dismissal, just as claims about its dangers deserve evidence rather than fear.
The work is figuring out what is true. That requires something harder than choosing a camp: the willingness to wrestle with complexity long enough to question our own assumptions.
Maybe the real promise of education was never that exposure would make us agree. Maybe its deeper purpose was to give us the capacity to encounter difference without immediately turning difference into threat.
The same may be true of America.
The promise was never that we would all become the same. It was that we could remain different without becoming enemies.
That promise feels fragile twenty-five years after September 11, but fragile is not the same as lost.
The solution is unlikely to come from another national moment of forced unity. I am not sure we need another September 12.
We need something harder and more ordinary: the discipline to slow down before we convert instinct into certainty.
Before sharing the post, ask another question. Before deciding what millions of people believe because one person behaved badly, ask another question. Before assuming everyone who voted differently from you is stupid, racist, fascist, communist, immoral, or un-American, ask another question. Before turning fear into evidence, ask another question. And when the facts threaten something you desperately want to believe, ask one more.
The towers fell in 102 minutes.
We rebuilt at Ground Zero. We repaired the Pentagon. We redesigned airports, reorganized intelligence agencies, and built memorials so future generations would remember what happened that morning.
But twenty-five years later, the harder reconstruction remains unfinished.
Trust, curiosity, humility, the ability to disagree without assuming treachery, the willingness to change our minds when evidence changes, and the discipline to distinguish what we feel from what we know.
I wrote American Stupediority because I was trying to understand the habits I believed were making a country I love less thoughtful, less curious, and less capable of governing itself.
Twenty-five years after September 11, I still believe feelings over facts is one of the most dangerous of those habits.
I am simply less certain that I am standing outside it.
Maybe none of us are.
That seems like a useful place to begin.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
