Indiana University of Pennsylvania will mark the 24th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on September 11, starting at 11:10 a.m. in front of the 9/11 memorial in the IUP Oak Grove. The program is open to the community.
In addition to an opportunity to reflect on and mark the anniversary of the attacks, the event includes a remembrance of the three IUP alumni lost in the World Trade Center attacks: Donald Jones, a 1980 graduate; William Moskal, a 1979 graduate; and William (Bill) Sugra, a 1993 graduate.
Jones and Sugra worked for Cantor Fitzgerald in the north tower of the World Trade Center. Jones was a bond broker from Bucks County.
Moskal, a safety sciences graduate and Johnstown native, was a risk consultant for Marsh and McLennan in Cleveland, specializing in heavy construction. He was in New York on September 11 for a meeting at the World Trade Center.
Sugra lived in Manhattan and worked for e-Speed, Cantor Fitzgerald’s electronic trading unit. Sugra’s family, of Allentown, continues to provide the funding for an annual memorial scholarship in his honor for IUP students.
The university’s September 11 memorial in the Oak Grove is located between Sutton Hall and Stapleton Library. It includes a 13-foot remnant of the World Trade Center, on long-term loan to the university from the Kovalchick family of Indiana.
Speakers for the 2025 event will include IUP President Michael Driscoll and retired US Army Brigadier General Robin Paul Swan, a 1978 graduate of IUP.
Lt. Col. Erich Steffens, chair of IUP’s Department of Military Science, will serve as master of ceremonies.
Music will be performed by the IUP Wind Ensemble under the direction of Timothy Paul, director of bands.
Brig. Gen. Swan is a member of the Senior Executive Service. Highlights of his 32 years of military service include commander, First Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment in Bosnia; commanding general, Coalition Military Training Team in Iraq; deputy commanding general, Fourth Infantry Division and Multinational Division, Baghdad; and director, Army Strategy, Headquarters, Department of the Army. After he retired from uniformed service, he joined the Senior Executive Service at the Tier 3 (lieutenant general equivalent) level and became deputy director and then director of the US Army Office of Business Transformation. He retired as director of the Army Office of Enterprise Management.
Brigadier General Robin Paul Swan, with the IUP Distinguished Alumni Award
At IUP, he earned a bachelor’s degree in geology and was a distinguished military graduate of IUP’s Army ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) program. He continues to support IUP’s ROTC faculty and cadets and was the keynote speaker at the program’s one-hundredth anniversary dinner in 2016. He received the IUP Distinguished Alumni Award in 2023.
Past speakers for the event have included national award-winning journalist Tim Lambert, a 1992 communications media graduate, whose family owned part of the land where Flight 93 crashed on September 11, 2001, and who produced a National Public Radio series about the crash; student Abigail Knapp, then a cadet in IUP’s ROTC program whose family owned land that was the site of the Flight 93 crash; Michael Tyree, the IUP faculty lead for the Flight 93 National Memorial Reforestation Monitoring Project; Danny Sacco, a lifelong resident of Center Township, who was deployed to Ground Zero in New York City in September 2001 and who has been recognized locally, regionally, and nationally for his a five-decade career in public safety; James Leda, a 1995 IUP graduate who is president of the Foundation for IUP Board of Directors and managing director of KRyS Global USA, Inc., and who, at the time of the 2001 attacks, was one block away from the World Trade Center; and the late Glenn Cannon, a 1971 graduate of IUP and former member of the IUP Council of Trustees, who was the founding director of Pittsburgh’s Emergency Medical Services Department, director of disaster operations for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.
This annual event has been scheduled in conjunction with IUP’s Common Hour, a period on weekdays set aside for events and programs.
During September, the IUP Libraries offers a special display in the first-floor lobby area about the attacks.
In the event of inclement weather, the program will be moved to Gorell Recital Hall, Sutton Hall.