History Professor and Department Chair Dr. Mark Schantz recently sent this essay to his students, sharing a few thoughts on the end of BSC’s on-campus term and the power of being together in the classroom.

“On Grieving What We Have Not Yet Lost”

We could all see it coming and still it was a surprise.

In an instant, seemingly, COVID-19 obliterated our spring semester at BSC.  And with its coming evaporated most of the baseball and softball seasons, golf, tennis, track and field, the spring musical in the College Theatre, the Senior BFA Art Show, the sweetness of Honors Day (preceded as if my magic by Michael McInturff’s call for abstracts), senior music performances, the Concert Choir gig on campus, the Symphonic band concert, MFS film screenings on campus, the celebration of faculty scholarship by the Library, and the SGA’s Sterling Lecture in which we would have hosted the incomparable Angela Davis—our neighbor and human rights avatar. There would have been senior parties, predictable excesses among the Greeks, and the campus bell ringing out last classes for seniors.  Tide pods would doubtless have rendered the central fountain on campus unworkable. Feral cats would prowl the trash bins outside of Norton, their mottled tails flicking. There would have been complaining about final exams and last kisses. There would likely have been walks around campus and perhaps the interminable length and fantastical name pronunciations (and loveliness) of the Capping Ceremony. And then the hot stickiness of sugary pink punch and melting chocolate chip cookies on the academic Quad after commencement. The final chasing down of relatives and students for last photos with cherished professors and students. These being the last “memory pictures” that close our academic year. Of course are plenty of things I’m missing in my litany of days of future passed. But that’s also the point. All of this suddenly rendered moot by the appearance of a snazzy looking and deadly little microbe.

I’m especially vexed that I won’t get to wear my academic regalia this spring. My old Emory blue now bleached by the sun into some psychedelic-looking purple that almost always gets a comment or two. I enjoy the perversity of it. I love the last push of grading finals—really, I do. Once I get rolling on my grading, just about everything in sight—Alabama Power bills, junk mail, invitations to eat a “free steak” while I learn about Medicare, my ACLU junk mail—all of it gets marked up. Just about anything with print on it is at risk.

In recent years, I’ve taken to reminding my students that the time we have together in class is precious beyond measure. Sacred space and blessed time. Each class session, each seminar is one we will never get back. Why not bring your “A” game every day? The week before COVID-19 collapsed the College, I told the students in our Angela Davis course exactly that. I didn’t want to be right then, or ever. But that was the case. I wanted, especially, for all of our seniors to find a sense of heightened awareness of enjoying their last semester on campus. To look at themselves enjoying life on campus and to remember it. Make a mental picture without social media. Feel it in your bones. And by enjoyment, I explained, I didn’t mean standing kegs on fraternity row or smoking out with your friends. I meant the pleasure of being in class with smart people who care about learning, who care about each other, and who—in the end—love each other. This will likely never happen again in your lives I say—“oh bright college years with pleasures rife, shortest, gladdest years of life” as the Yale Whiffenpoofs sing it. This year I can’t tell you how sorry I was to be right.

Of course we will dutifully soldier on with online courses, we will fill the SACS-COC required minutes; we will complete rubrics, we will assess, we will make the best of a semester that is really already a dead letter no matter what we do. It’s possible that some creative, cool stuff will come out of this destructive vortex. Any redemption is ultimately up to our own creativity and inventiveness. But Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams or Zoom or Moodle or anything else can’t take up the smell of fresh cut grass or the stink of the Bradford pear trees. They can’t catch a student’s eye that is finally catching the fire in a seminar. And they sure can’t capture the initiative of senior history major Eva Byrum who asked to “take over” our last HI 152 class session (which we didn’t know at the time) and received the spontaneous applause from her classmates when she finished. Or Austin Lewter’s keen and insightful reading of Angela Davis’s work as a project of “unlearning” what most of us thought we knew. Or the beauty and courage of my History of Death students trusting each other with some of their moments of loss and connecting those to our texts.  These things are probably not reducible to Internet exchanges. If these spontaneous triumphs and moments of glorious learning were available, even supportable, online, then we would teach that way all of the time. This is the Luddite in me speaking, but give me a group of students around a table, with a good book to discuss, minds and hearts engaged, and we can make a funeral pyre of our smart phones and laptops.

By taking away the possibility of authentic human interaction with my students, COVID-19 stole my joy. My joy in my students and their achievements, my joy in being so tired my eyes can’t see straight, my joy in feeling the itch of spring on my skin while walking across campus to class, the joy of watching students finish their exams. High-fiving them. Seeing them in the Caf on Fridays and, especially in office hours where the real work and advising gets done. Enjoying a laugh, a handshake, spotting them walking on campus and shouting hello, some emblem of our shared humanity that transcends grades or Latin praise or the awards they have won. Some bit of connection to the project of college that has been snatched away from us without our consent and with our sorrow.

The grieving that takes place when someone whom we love dies is inherently retrospective. We look back. We take stock of a life. We construct memories out of what has already happened—some of these reflections possess the virtue of truth and some are fabricated. But who really cares? We remember good times and bad. Queries begin with phrases such as “Do you remember the time that?” We construct eulogies to recite the accomplishments, the foibles, and the landmarks in the life of the one who has died. But we know who and what we are mourning.  Our grief has a focus, a center, a person whom we have known who is no longer alive. We know how to do this.

It’s a different task to grieve the indeterminacy of a semester that we haven’t yet shared. We don’t know how the spring semester would have turned out. It’s a weird kind of prospective grieving in which we are now engaged. Would we have had sports champions? How cool would the art and music and film and theatre shows have been? How long would the Honors Day ceremony have lasted? Would I have arrived at the reception in time to get Swedish meatballs? Who might I have capped? Who would have had the most outrageously decorated mortarboard at Commencement? How hot would it have been? We can’t know these things and so can’t celebrate them, lie about how great they were, honor them, or regret the opportunities for learning and growth that have disappeared on us.

When I was on campus yesterday, I saw clumps of students lugging garbage bags of clothes and suitcases to cars, down the hill from the dorm quad to cars by the Chapel. Heads down and bent to the grim task of leaving. I’ve had students flat out tell me they can’t take being at home for the remainder of the semester and don’t know what to do. Some seniors burst into tears in the Humanities Building as I talked to them last Friday. Having an amputated spring semester is not what any of us would have wanted and surely being left without memories of your last spring semester on campus is the last thing our seniors could have predicted. It’s no way to take leave of a place you love. You can’t miss what you haven’t experienced.

For all of us, I yearn for some small moments of redemption and hold onto the irrational hope that we will all see each other again—whole and well and sound—on the other side of this capricious and cruel of season.

Pictured Above: Schantz (left) with SGA President Austin Lewter and Assistant Professor of Political Science Dr. Desireé Melonas at the 2020 Black History Month Gala.

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See and hear a few moments from Schantz’s Bob Dylan E-Term course with their class performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind.”