She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees. (225)
—Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
In spring 2020, our dial turned a lot more than one or two degrees. We may or may not have been watching the COVID-19 virus as it spread from Wuhan, Teheran, and Milan, but it arrived here in Michigan with an unceremonious blow. We went from a seemingly normal early March at our school, work, and social lives to shelter-at-home orders with only those closest to us. The people, places, rhythms, and things we’d grown accustomed to in our daily lives vanished almost instantly.
Here in Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer issued the full “Stay Home, Stay Safe” orders for March 24, but Central Michigan University had already told students not to return from spring break for face-to-face classes by March 11. It was clear to everyone—students, faculty, and staff—that this would be a semester like no other we’d experienced.
However, by March 13, a pop-up course on the emerging pandemic, Dr. Marcy Taylor’s brainchild, was in the works. She and I rapidly assembled a crack team of lecturers from every college at Central Michigan University for a four-week, one-credit course within the Critical Engagements initiative. It ran from April 6 until May 3, 2020. Faculty with expertise in biomedicine, economics, education, history, public health, literature, medical anthropology, and public policy offered four weeks of lectures, discussions, readings, and other materials to put COVID-19 and other pandemics in context with world history and culture. And we all did this as we lived (and worked and studied) through an unimaginably challenging period.
Indeed, COVID-19 is the kind of problem that many in the twenty-first century have never confronted. On March 31st, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres emphasized that the world is undergoing “the greatest test that we have faced together” since the end of World War II. “A successful response and recovery,” he continued, “will require international cooperation and partnerships at every level -- governments taking action in lock step with communities; private sector engagement to find pathways out of this crisis. Partnerships based on solidarity will be the cornerstone for progress.”
This is just the type of cooperative approach that made this course unique, and unusually important. Equipped with multiple insights into the wicked problem of a global pandemic, students from across the university (including medical students about ready to head out to their residencies) learned how to think and respond more critically and effectively while living through an extraordinary moment. Students wrote reflective response journals as they moved through the weeks’ lectures and readings, all culminating in these final blog entries featured here.
And what they wrote was fascinating and insightful. Some students pondered the role of technology and cultural values; others wondered about their own political stances as the coronavirus challenged core beliefs and practices. Many contemplated the role of misinformation during a pandemic. Students and future teachers wrote about education at all levels in the wake of COVID-19 and in helping to solve pandemics in the future. And doctors heading out to practice clearly were deliberating about their weighty role as public health and preparedness advocates.
We offer them all here for you to read, a sort of microhistory of the novel coronavirus’s impact on Central Michigan University students during the spring 2020 semester. They are snapshots of an ephemeral moment on our campus, providing valuable insights to an indelible period in the history of the world.
*The student entries have been edited for grammar and style, but not content. The College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) and Critical Engagements (CE) value the power of publishing student writing. However, CLASS and CE make no guarantees about the accuracy or reliability of the information. The views expressed in the blog entries are solely those of the student authors.
