Message From the Dean
Dean Kenneth A. Gould
HSS Colleagues,
It is a season for gratitude. I am grateful to work with and for an amazing group of faculty, students, and staff who have struggled, mostly successfully, to keep our school running, engaged, and effective through this difficult and trying semester. I know that you are all tired. Whether you've been flitting from Zoom to Zoom, teaching to a screen of blank boxes, or trying to succeed in an online class taken on your phone at work, it has been a rough road. There does appear to be some genuine light at the end of this tunnel. While last semester was terrifying and tragic, this semester, at least to me, has felt like a long slow uphill slog trying to stay focused, keep spirits up, and keep things moving forward at a reasonable pace. But we are nearing the finish line for this semester, moving past a difficult election season and looking ahead to the promise of vaccines that can finally bring this plague year to an end. This comes not a moment too soon.
Amid all of the stress of living at work, working online, and struggling to balance a socially distanced life and work, there have been silver linings. We had an extraordinarily successful Hess week with Winona LaDuke in residence, brought together by Professor Rosamond King. The Hess events and many of our other HSS online events have been particularly well attended. The capacity to Zoom and participate without commuting, while sometimes attending to household chores, has made it more possible for more people to take advantage of these intellectually stimulating opportunities. I am grateful for the chance to visit more talks, panel discussions, speaker series, readings, and film viewings in HSS.
We've gotten to see and meet each other's family members, pets, and spaces, which I've found to be a pleasant and humanizing experience. We are less our "work selves" and much more just ourselves through all this, and that I think is a good thing. I know many of you have enjoyed spending quality time with my thriving fern that increasingly engulfs my Zoom space. I am grateful for our community and everyone's openness to keeping it real with each other. Let's not lose that.
We have also learned a lot of new pedagogical and technological tricks, thanks in large part to the efforts of professors Maddy Fox and Donna Lee Granville, director and associate director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. We've become accustomed to using new collaborative tools that have made working together easier, more productive, and less time consuming than before. I am grateful for the flourishing of collaborations in our school, both for their intellectual contributions and for their building of our HSS community.
As you reflect on the waning year and semester, don't discount the toll that providing emotional support for your family, friends, colleagues, students, professors, and yourselves has taken through all this. When our semester is done, rest. Take some time to regroup, replenish, daydream, reflect, cry, laugh, and do nothing at all. The work we do takes time and space to think. You don't need to rush into the next project. Replenish before you embark on the next journey. Taking that time for yourself will make our school and our college better.
I thank all of you for pulling together to get us through this. Be sure to take a moment to thank someone who helped you. Have a good break and a good holiday.
Ken
Back to Critical Thinking — December 2020
