A history class taught by Dr. Meredith Lair, associate professor in the Department of History and Art History, was featured on ABC News’ This Week with George Stephanopoulos on September 6, 2026. ABC Capitol Hill correspondent Jay O’Brien reported the segment, “How a college class is teaching students to remember 9/11, 25 years later.”
At the center of HIST 387/389: 9/11 in History & Memory is a skill Dr. Lair wants students to practice well beyond the history classroom: discernment. Students learn to ask how information is produced, what makes a source trustworthy, and what evidence supports a claim. “What historians do is teach skills about information handling–collecting, processing, and sharing data,” Lair said. She wants students “to learn how to ask good questions and to get used to doing real research, not doomscrolling on YouTube as research.”
The ABC News team’s visit offered an immediate example of what discernment looks like. According to the American Press Institute, recent research suggests that older adults place more trust in legacy media, while “teens and young adults distribute trust more evenly across traditional news and independent creators,” even though independent creators–social media influencers–may not adhere to traditional editorial standards. To illustrate this point for her students, Dr. Lair asked O’Brien, an Emmy Award-winning journalist for a legacy media outlet, a question at the start of class: What professional consequences would he experience if he reported false information? He explained to Lair’s students that he would be fired, either for unethical behavior or for incompetence. O’Brien also shared that ABC employs about a 100 people to verify every word its reporters say on air.
That exchange gave students a way to think about a question historians routinely ask of their sources: what structures of evidence and accountability stand behind a claim? Discernment is not simply deciding whether something seems credible. It means understanding how information is produced, evaluating the evidence behind it, and recognizing what happens when those standards break down.
Dr. Lair first taught her 9/11 class in 2021 for the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, after noticing that 9/11 was fading from public memory while misinformation about it circulated online. She hopes to teach the class every five years. “I wanted to create a space that would be a kind of bulwark against forgetting,” she said.
For the final project, “A Legacy of 9/11,” students will research a lasting effect of the attacks. One resource they can explore is the September 11 Digital Archive, created by Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, which collected first-hand accounts of the attacks from 2001-2021. Dr. Lair’s project will ask students not simply to find information, but to evaluate sources, place them in context, and build an argument from evidence about how the 9/11 attacks shaped the world we inhabit today.
Dr. Lair’s classroom also brings different forms of evidence into conversation. Her students range in age from 18 to 83. A handful are old enough to remember the attacks, but most are too young. Barbara Kyriakakis, a retired Mason staff member, was on campus that day and lost a neighbor on one of the planes. MiCayla Cranford has no memory of 9/11, as she was not yet born. These students featured prominently in ABC News’s story, because they reflect national trends. In a country of 340 million people, it is estimated that 100 million Americans are too young to remember the 9/11 attacks. But for Americans who do remember, those memories are vivid. The Pew Research Center recently found that, for adults aged 35 and older–people who were at least 10 years old in 2001–93 percent of them remember exactly where they were when they heard about the attacks. In Dr. Lair’s class, students learn to consider personal narratives alongside other kinds of evidence and to ask what each source can reveal, where its limits lie, and how sources may complicate or corroborate one another.
The ABC News team’s visit to GMU comes as humanities programs face pressure nationally. History made up about 1.2% of bachelor’s degrees in 2019, the lowest share on record, according to the American Historical Association. At the same time, people encounter an enormous amount of historical information in news media, social media, and popular culture. Through the ABC News piece, Dr. Lair’s history students demonstrated how relevant and necessary historical education can be for understanding the world we inhabit.