Kathleen Shields Anderson said the September 11 Memorial era still shapes how Penn handles security 25 years after Sept. 11, 2001. The university had already begun a crisis management plan before the attacks, but she said the emergency work became more urgent after that day.
Penn established an Emergency Preparedness Plan in the summer after the attacks. The plan gave each school and center tailored preparations, and those location plans are shared with fire and police departments so they can quickly get access to the information they need about that building in case of an emergency, Eugene Janda said.
Penn emergency planning after 2001
That system reaches beyond paperwork. Penn began working with the Philadelphia Police Department's Ordnance Disposal Unit and bomb unit for large events after the attacks, and it also collaborated with the City of Philadelphia, Amtrak, and SEPTA police to conduct sweeps of the area for large events.
Janda, who is Chief of Fire and Emergency Services, said the department now assesses threats based on situational awareness. Derrick Wood, chief of the Penn Police Department, is part of the campus security structure that grew out of those post-9/11 changes.
Frank Plantan on CCTV
Frank Plantan, an international relations lecturer emeritus at Penn, said the camera debate changed after 9/11. He said, "There had been massive resistance by students and faculty to closed-circuit TV cameras" and that "Penn Security had been trying to put them on campus for years — then after 9/11, the resistance to that broke down."
Kathleen Shields Anderson said she understood why people would link the CCTV expansion to the attacks, but she said, "I understand how people would see a correlation," and described the program as "primarily investigation." Her account places the surveillance shift inside a longer effort that started before Sept. 11, 2001, even as the attacks changed how easily Penn could move it forward.
Michael Horowitz on campus risk
Michael Horowitz said the post-9/11 response reflected a new willingness to accept disruption to reduce risk. He said, "After 9/11, the risk was thought to be high enough that people were willing to experience lots of disruptions to decrease the potential risk of another attack," and added that police departments across the country had SWAT teams and armored vehicles within a few years after the attacks.
He also said federal support for local response "didn’t exist before 9/11," and described the limits of trying to "barricade campus off from the community" when a university is supposed to remain among "accessible places where lots of different people come and teach and work and take classes." As of 2025, the Penn Vet Working Dog Center has graduated nearly 200 detection dogs, another sign of how Penn’s response to the attacks spread into daily security practice.
Twenty-five years later, the practical effect is clear: Penn’s emergency plans, event sweeps, and surveillance decisions are still built around the security environment that followed Sept. 11, 2001. The remaining question is which parts of the campus response were direct results of the attacks and which were already underway before them.
