On the evening of Dec. 21, 1988, a bomb detonated in the luggage compartment of Pan Am Flight 103, bound from London to New York. The jumbo jet crashed into the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 35 Syracuse University students returning from a semester of study abroad.
Judith O’Rourke, director of the Office of Undergraduate Studies at SU, remembers the aftermath of the disaster well. “It became immediately clear that something had to be done to remember the students who lost their lives,” she said.
SU instituted the Remembrance Scholarship, an award given to 35 distinguished seniors, in 1989 to honor the 35 students killed in the terrorist bombing. Since the mid-’90s, Remembrance Scholars have been in charge of planning a series of activities for the University’s Remembrance Week, an event that commemorates the students who died in the Pan Am tragedy and educates the campus community about terrorism.
“We need to think about what we can do individually and collectively about terrorism,” said O’Rourke, an advisor to the 35 Remembrance Scholars.
Remembrance scholar Sarah DiGiulio says that the purpose of Remembrance Week is to show that the 35 students who died in 1988 were just like every university student — young, ambitious, and looking forward to the life that lay ahead of them. DiGiulio applied for the scholarship in the fall of her junior year, before spending her spring semester studying abroad in London.
“All of a sudden these were not just 35 random students from 20 years ago,” she said. “It was 35 students that could have been me and my friends. It made me realize that we need to remember the students and that terrorist attacks can’t happen again.”
On Thursday, remembrance scholars built a Memorial Cairn — a manmade pile of stones that serves as a traditional Scottish marker of remembrance — on the SU quad. There were 35 rectangular stones, each representing a victim of the Pan Am flight.
Remembrance Week officially began on Sunday, Nov. 8, with the 3.5 for 35 Memorial Run on SU’s North Campus. Each one-tenth of a mile will be dedicated to one of the 35 SU student victims. Various other commemorative activities will take place throughout the week, including an evening celebration of the victims’ lives through stories, performances, and shared memories, the distribution of carnations in the quad and other university buildings, and a panel discussion entitled “Why We Remember: Pan Am Flight 103 Symposium.” The week will conclude on Nov. 14 with the annual Rose-Laying Ceremony at the Wall of Remembrance in front of the Hall of Languages. The ceremony will be immediately followed by a campus-wide moment of silence.
“I have grown to know the families over the years, so this is hard time of the year,” said O’Rourke. “But I’m glad when I see people who stop to think about what the event means personally and what we can do individually to make the world better.”
To see a full schedule of events visit the Remembrance Scholars Web site [10]
SU Students and the Lockerbie schoalrs react to the release of the Pan Am 103 bomber [11]
The official homepage of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103 [12]
