We’re approaching the one-year anniversary of the COVID evacuation of the Forty Acres—Friday, March 13, 2020. “Only” a year has gone by, 12 months, but this date last year already seems a world and an age ago—a date and a year against which we’ll mark our calendars for years to come.
I hope you and yours came through this past week safe and healthy, with minimal damage to your homes. I hope you’ve enjoyed a warm bath and filled your pantry, commonplace conveniences that at least for the moment, seem precious luxuries.
In Austin, here on campus, we’ve been picking up the pieces. Swabbing out the floods and checking for power and internet. The campus community was scattered and displaced by the storm, but pulled together more tightly than ever, looking after one another. I took two faculty families into my home, which lost water, but not power and heat. We opened campus buildings as a refuge for students, faculty and staff who had no other options. I jogged over to campus during the worst of the storm to make sure our buildings were accessible and operating, which gave me the chance to watch young Texans frolicking heedlessly in more snow than many had ever seen before, and got to push some of their cars out of more snow than they knew how to drive in.
By the time you get this, we’ll be back in session having lost a week and a half of classes. We’re adjusting course schedules and learning objectives to get students through their coursework by the end of the semester. We’re restarting our COVID testing and vaccinations in Gregory Gym and inoculating more and more Austinites every day.
Our students don’t know it yet, but this past year has given them an invaluable gift. It’s tested their resilience, their mettle, their grit. They’ve learned to be creative and productive under the most confined and challenging conditions. They’ve learned to lean on others and to lend a hand. They’ve learned in fighting a pandemic or surviving a killer winter storm that going it alone can be a fatal prescription. They’ve learned how deeply committed their faculty and this university is to their education and their futures. They’ve been given a great gift of learning that they’re tougher and more capable and determined than they might have ever guessed. It is, to be sure, the school of hard knocks and life lessons, but it’s an unforgettable education nonetheless.
We’ve picked ourselves up, and today we restart our teaching and learning. Once again.
I am willfully treating last week’s horrendous winter storm as the altogether fittingly unforgettable climax, and finale, to an altogether unforgettably challenging year. I am taking arms against a sea of troubles by declaring this week’s full-on, glorious Texas sunshine as the awaited light at the end of this long tunnel. Mirabile dictu!
