How a College Battled a September 11 Rumor That Threatened Its Image

Early on the morning of September 11, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University suffered a personal loss:

An alumnus — David M. Charlebois, first officer on American Airlines Flight 77 — was killed when his hijacked plane crashed into the Pentagon. That night, the university learned that it could potentially lose its proud reputation as well, as the investigation of the terrorist attacks drew the institution into the web of world events.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had spent the day combing the university’s admission records at its Daytona Beach, Fla., campus, looking for clues to the morning’s events — a logical step in the investigation, given the school’s prominence in the field of aviation education, says Robert Ross, media-relations specialist at the university, which also has a campus in Prescott, Ariz. Founded in 1926, the institution is an accredited university specializing in aviation and aerospace studies. Twenty-five percent of commercial airline pilots in the United States are Embry-Riddle alumni, says Mr. Ross.

Around 9 p.m. on September 11, Thomas J. Connolly, the university’s acting chancellor, received a phone call from the FBI, tipping him off that bureau investigators had identified Waleed Alshehri as one of the suspected hijackers aboard American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. The university’s records showed that it had graduated a student named Waleed A. Al-Shehri with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical science.

Although this possible link to a terrorist was appalling to the university’s administrators, it also presented an immediate problem: Someone had already leaked the information to the news media. Thus began a strange episode that dragged Embry-Riddle into the national spotlight, as it was called on to defend its reputation over the din of screaming headlines. The fallout from September 11 continues to affect the university, but the story of how it coped with controversy may hold lessons for other nonprofit institutions that encounter a crisis fueled by the news media.

‘It Was a Nightmare’

The morning of September 12, Embry-Riddle students and staff members awoke to chaos. Dozens of news trucks lined the entrance to the campus communications office — so many, Mr. Ross says, that they caused a traffic accident. The campus had received a bomb threat and was getting a steady stream of crank messages. And the office phones wouldn’t stop ringing with calls from reporters, alumni, and concerned parents. Mr. Ross remembers how, as he returned calls, working his way through nearly a dozen messages an hour, his voice-mail message queue would fill up again. “It was a nightmare,” he says. “It was like those dreams where you’re running and you’re not getting anywhere.”

Knowing that its two-person communications staff couldn’t handle the deluge by itself, the university hired public-relations consultants from the Tampa, Fla., office of Hill & Knowlton to help out. A trio of representatives from the company arrived three hours after being hired, and worked out of the university’s communications office alongside its staff members for several days.

Embry-Riddle’s communications office had always prided itself on good relationships with reporters and quick responses to news-media requests. But this time, he says, “we couldn’t respond to the story. The story was us, and we didn’t know the facts.”

Not only was the university unable to confirm or deny the rumor that it had educated a terrorist, but it also found itself being routinely referred to in news reports as a “flight school,” a characterization many Embry-Riddle officials found galling since the university offers more than 30 degree programs. “There is a large difference between a four-year university and having your studies culminate in a four-year degree versus a flight school where any individual who’s interested in learning can walk in and be taught how to fly,” says Lisa L. Ledewitz, vice president for communications and marketing. “One of the difficulties was trying to educate the media about the difference between a university that has a professional pilot program and a flight school where you can learn to solo in a couple of weeks.”

Even as some media outlets tagged Embry-Riddle with a “flight school” image, others were requesting interviews with the university’s faculty members, seeking expert aviation sources for stories on the hijackings, says Perry T. Fulkerson, Embry-Riddle’s vice president of institutional advancement.

As it juggled reporters’ requests, the university also reached out to its many constituencies that were concerned about the crisis: its alumni, donors, allies in the aviation industry, public officials, trustees, and students and their parents. Embry-Riddle used e-mail, fax, and telephone to contact these various groups, and enlisted the services of a company that does “voice-mail blasts” via automatic dialers, to send messages, says Mr. Fulkerson. It sent university officers to conduct small-group meetings with individual departments to answer questions, and held candlelight vigils to remember Mr. Charlebois and the other victims of the attacks.

Messages were tailored to specific groups’ concerns. International students, for example, were asked to keep a low profile in Daytona Beach to protect themselves, says Mr. Ross. Faculty members, he notes, were helpful in consoling them, talking about tolerance in their classroom lectures at the university’s request, and sometimes offering personal help to individuals who feared harassment.

“One faculty member even gave her personal cell phone to a student, told him he could stay with her,” he says. “His mother later told me she was really happy, was really reassured that a faculty member would do that.”

One key priority was keeping aviation-industry officials informed about the status of the FBI’s findings. “The aviation industry is very conservative,” says Mr. Ross. “It was very upsetting to many that something like this could even be possible.”

Breaking the Link

On September 21, Ms. Ledewitz took calls from reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal indicating that Embry-Riddle’s alumnus Waleed A. Al-Shehri was alive, well, and living in Morocco — and not the September 11 terrorist. Shortly afterward, she also received a call from the FBI confirming the information.

“It ended up being a case of mistaken or stolen identity,” she says. (Mr. Al-Shehri, who works as a commercial airline pilot in the Middle East, has not been in touch with the school since September 11, she says.)

Although the university quickly released a statement, approved by the FBI, announcing that it had not educated a hijacker, it learned that the news media were not as universally diligent about correcting their stories as they had been about printing the rumor originally. Embry-Riddle’s continuing challenge, she says, has been to break the link in the public’s mind between itself and September 11.

Applications for admission have increased over the past year, says Mr. Fulkerson, and donations are up this year, thanks to a renewed push to attract large gifts. Although the number of donors has declined, the amount given and pledged is up, and he says he expects that donations will exceed $20 million — double the institution’s total for the previous year.

Alumni account for much of the decline in the number of donors, he says: “When September 11 occurred, our alumni, most of whom are in the aviation business, were feeling unsettled about their jobs.”

The post–September 11 woes in the airline industry, he says, may also have a detrimental effect on some corporate donations. Since the attacks, Mr. Fulkerson says, Embry-Riddle has made a point of building its relationship with those companies with an eye toward the future.

“We decided we should pay more attention to how best we can serve those companies as they went through their crises,” Mr. Fulkerson says. “So we contacted a number of the companies that were close to the university and offered the expertise of our faculty, of our staff, to help them through this very difficult time — knowing that by serving them, which is our mission anyway, we’d be better prepared to receive their philanthropy once they get back on their feet again.”

He looks at the current downturn as a chance to form stronger relationships with donors.

“A lot of good things can come from this,” he says, “because you tend to see more of your constituents than you would otherwise.”

Last month, the university received some evidence that its reputation has emerged from last fall’s shadows of rumor and terror. It received a $14.5-million contract from the Air Force Academy for the next five years to teach basic flight training to academy cadets in Colorado Springs, Colo. Beginning October 1, says Mr. Ross, it will train at least 300 cadets per year.

The university looks upon the Air Force Academy contract as a vote of confidence, says Mr. Ross. He says he has also been heartened by all the other forms of support the school has received in the past year. “It really taught us,” he says, “that people are bigger than their prejudices.”