The annual ritual started a bit early this fall – roller bags being pulled across campus from the residence halls to meet transportation to train stations, bus pickups, and airports — students on their way to Thanksgiving gatherings.
On university campuses, this has been a fall unlike any previous fall. After seeing the Georgetown community supporting one another through the peaks of COVID prevalence in 2020, six months ago we were all optimistic that fall 2021 would resemble that of 2019, with no restrictions on residential, research, or classroom protocols. We assumed that staff’s and faculty’s children would return to their schools for in-person instruction. We were looking forward to daycare and eldercare facilities to be fully operational. We anticipated the normal.
The Delta variant put the breaks on some of these anticipations, but not all. This fall Georgetown had the largest number of residential undergraduates in dormitories in recent memory. Research laboratories were running at near-full-steam levels. The vast majority of classes met in-person. Student organizations resumed their activities. Intercollegiate athletics began anew.
With impressive cooperation of the full community Georgetown achieved near complete vaccination rates. Within-building masking requirements allowed us to avoid within-classroom transmission thus far. The positivity rates have been below 1% of tests taken for the vast majority of weeks in the semester.
But it hasn’t been easy. The community is striving to adapt to a new mix of teleworking and in-office working. We’re experiencing large variations among us in our tolerance for indoor interaction, so closed office doors predominate our buildings. Many meetings are a mix of in-person and zoom formats. We seemed to have lost a bit of our interpersonal skills. Area schools are generally in-person, but teacher shortages make the news. The rates of anxiety and depression within the community are higher than in pre-COVID times. It is common to hear that staff, faculty, and students are tired. And Georgetown, like all work organizations, has seen larger than normal attrition among its staff, so some are fulfilling a larger set of duties.
But here we are at Thanksgiving of 2021.
We have been together again for four months, as we should be, and safely so. Each day, as we do our work in new circumstances, we are defining how to fulfill the university’s mission, while coping with a global pandemic that will be with us for some time. We have renewed ties and are making new ones. With patience and good will toward one another, we are figuring this out.
And so, it is a moment to be thankful.
Happy thanksgiving to all. We are Georgetown. We are familia. Enjoy family and think of those in need in our Georgetown and local communities. Men and women for others.