A Business School Counts Its Losses at the World Trade Center

By ANNE MARIE BORREGO

Hardened splotches of wax still cling to the bricks on the walkways of Lehman Brothers Quadrangle. Not long ago, they were fluid drops, like tears, falling from the

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candles held by hundreds of students at the Wharton School during a memorial for victims of the terrorist attacks.

The quad's very name, which honors the venerable investment bank, reflects the close ties between Wharton and New York's financial district. Lehman Brothers occupied floors 38 to 40 of the World Trade Center's north tower, which was struck by American Airlines Flight 11 at 8:48 a.m. and collapsed in a pile of dust, paper, bodies, and soot not two hours later. The company was lucky: Of 618 employees, only one is missing.

But as the operation in Manhattan shifts from search and rescue to the recovery of bodies, Wharton is just waiting. With 78,000 alumni worldwide, more than 7,000 of whom live in New York City, the University of Pennsylvania's business school estimates that 586 of its former students worked in the financial district. About 300 of those alumni worked in the twin towers or in nearby buildings. While the body count has only begun, administrators know they have lost alumni. Professors, many of whom work as consultants, believe they have lost colleagues and clients. Some 77 second-year M.B.A. students, who worked this past summer in or near the trade center, know they have lost former bosses, co-workers, and friends.

"A lot of us worked on those floors, or had a boyfriend or a girlfriend or a wife or a husband in the World Trade Center," says Ali Reza, a second-year M.B.A. candidate. "Even someone like me -- my brother lives in the shadow of the World Trade Center, and I go up there once or twice a month."

While the human toll promises to be devastating, Wharton is also trying to deal with the economic fallout of the attacks. The suddenly dimmer job prospects of its graduates and the propriety of pursuing gifts have Wharton administrators feeling their way gingerly. "The economy is still high on people's list of concerns," says Patrick Harker, the school's dean. "Before, people panicked about themselves. And now they are concerned about the collective culture as a whole."

Indeed, there is an overwhelming sense of apprehension here. Over and over, when asked about the loss of friends, alumni, or even jobs, the reply has been, "We just have no idea how bad it's going to be."

John C. Bishop VII, a second-year M.B.A. student, first heard of the attacks while he was moving between classes. After arriving late to his second class, Mr. Bishop says, he began to panic as he realized how many friends had been in the area. "I started making a mental list," he says. "And I could see that others in the class were doing the same thing." His fellow students, Mr. Bishop says, were "completely disconnected from whatever was going on in class." Many, like Mr. Bishop, left the room to make phone calls.

Wharton canceled classes by noon that Tuesday, and many students who were on campus made mad dashes to use the Internet at computer terminals in the hallways, sending frantic messages with subject lines that invariably asked some version of "Are you OK?" Others gravitated to the television screens in Steinberg and Dietrich Halls and in Vance Hall. The shock and horror wrought by the images they saw lingered on through the days that followed.

The next day, says Mr. Reza, when classes resumed, "one professor just led a moment of silence at the beginning of class. ... He just allowed the sounds to settle in. He didn't make reference to it after that. He just jumped into class."

Other professors began class by opening it up to discussion of the events, but a few simply avoided the topic. "Some professors couldn't do it," speculates Mr. Bishop. "They didn't want to open up, because they'd break down."

Michael Useem, a management professor who had been stuck in California during the attacks, returned to the classroom last week. Even then, the pain was obvious. "I was in a class withabout 200 M.B.A. students yesterday, and it was a pretty solemn crowd," he says. "In many cases, there were no degrees of separation -- or they at least knew someone who had lost someone."

He decided to spend more of his class time teaching crisis leadership, "so we can pledge ourselves to help people come out of school with the readiness to be prepared for such events."

So while classes do continue, it is not exactly business as usual here. The tone is decidedly somber, and students seem to search more actively for camaraderie.

Most M.B.A. students live off campus and head home after classes. But when M.B.A. Pub, a regular Thursday-night event featuring beer, wine, and pizza for those students who have paid $100 in annual dues, met on September 13, scores of students, many of them nonmembers, showed up. "There is a sense that we should do whatever we can to get people to stick together," Mr. Bishop says. "Some of these social gatherings are used to help in healing -- not for partying."

While some campuses have been riven along religious and ethnic lines, Wharton, with 42 percent of its M.B.A. students hailing from outside the United States, remains close-knit. Mr. Reza, a Muslim from Pittsburgh, where he was born, says he is comfortable on Penn's campus, even though he notes only half jokingly that "when I don't shave, I look like a terrorist." When he walks off campus, he notices certain glances that signal the start of what he fears could be a backlash against Arabs and Muslims. "I've been putting up with that all my life," he says.

While concerned about the fate of friends and colleagues, students here are also quietly apprehensive about what the attacks mean for their job prospects. September and October are normally the height of the recruiting season. But this year, even before the terrorist attacks, there had been a noticeable drop in the number of investment-banking and consulting jobs available. Realistic students expect that falloff to become more severe in the wake of the attacks.

Second-year M.B.A. students had once counted on five to six cocktail receptions and schmooze fests, held on or near the campus, with potential employers each week. Those were canceled for the week after the attacks, and nobody knows when the events will get back on track.

Still, if students' prospects are dimmer now, they nonetheless seem to be taking a more mature view of their careers and life in general. "Recruiting is normally such a big deal," Mr. Bishop says. "But a lot of students now feel it's inappropriate to even think about."

"The big news on campus was that the consulting firms and banks aren't hiring like they had in years past," Mr. Reza says. Now, "people are less whiny about it."

Steven Oliveira has had to deal with the dark unknown every day since he first learned of the attacks on his way out the door of his house that Tuesday morning. As the associate dean for external affairs, Mr. Oliveira is in charge of alumni relations and the coordination of much of Wharton's fund raising. He says the attacks hit home for several reasons, including fond memories of an alumni event he recently held at the Windows on the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center. "I had been calling on alumni there this summer," he says.

Since September 11, he has been meeting daily with Wharton's top officials to plot each move, any of which, he says, could change again in 24 hours.

He's had to cancel or postpone certain celebratory events long in the making, like the grand opening of a Wharton club in Hong Kong.

Working with Wharton's New York alumni club, Mr. Oliveira is helping assemble resources for those displaced by the attacks, and is also monitoring plans for a memorial to fallen alumni.

He is also overseeing the creation of an official Web site to provide credible information on the whereabouts of Wharton alumni. Though an unofficial site had been available, much of what was on it was unverified. "We're being very strict not to publish any information that we've gotten from unconfirmed reports," he says.

But it is Mr. Oliveira's fund-raising duties that have him walking on eggshells. Mailings that were scheduled to go out have been held, as he and his staff grapple with what to include in newly drafted letters and with when to send them. "I won't say the fund raising has stopped, but we have to review it every single day."

Mr. Oliveira says the college is very lucky, in one sense, to have kicked off its $425-million capital campaign last October. But corporate giving, which accounted for $15-million in donations during fiscal-year 2001, was already down before the attacks. "It's a double blow," he says, of the incidents, because of their direct effect on alumni and their effect on many of the sponsors of Wharton's conferences and other events. Some were actually trade-center tenants, and others, like insurance companies and airlines, will probably face huge losses. "They will be cutting back," he says. "We're going in uncharted waters here."

Still, the outlook is not completely bleak. Some alumni have already called to say they're making -- and in some cases increasing -- their gifts. "In the past, tragedies have brought out great and lasting acts of philanthropy," says Mr. Oliveira. "They tend to bring out the best in people."

Until last week, when it was shut down, the most popular -- and disturbing -- Web site for alumni was that unofficial site for information on classmates. Designated by year and type of degree, hundreds of alumni had written to report their own safety or that of others.

Some simply listed "OK," while others petitioned for prayers and told of wives, sisters, or brothers, both lost and found.

There were also tales of near misses.

"He was late for work."

"They were having coffee right there when it happened."

There were, however, gaping white holes on the site, where the status of several alumni living in New York remained blank, leaving imaginations and odds-players to ask if those alumni were among the 5,400 people still missing underneath the rubble.

Perhaps most chilling were the pleas for information like this one: "Has anyone heard from Vic?"

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