Dear Cornellians:
In these strange and rapidly changing times, I have taken comfort, as I hope have you, in the resilience, determination and humor demonstrated by so many in our community. This morning, I laughed out loud when a Cornell student posted on their Instagram, “You have the chance to save the world by sitting at home with a book. This chance will not come again. Don’t mess it up.”
As schools and workplaces have closed, events have been cancelled, and our daily routines have been disrupted, reshaped, and disrupted again, I have seen again and again a spirit of community that has made me enormously proud to be a Cornellian. Here in Ithaca, where we have made the difficult but necessary decision to suspend in-person instruction and ask our students to depart for home, the response across campus has been nothing short of inspiring. Faced with the sudden upending of their lives at Cornell, students, faculty, and staff reacted with sadness and disappointment, but equally with understanding, compassion, and resolve. These past two weeks, as students have left their residence halls, nonessential campus research has been suspended, and our quads have fallen nearly silent, every day has brought new examples of Cornellians’ ingenuity and their kindness to each other. Graduate students mobilized to help undergraduates move and store their belongings; staff worked nearly around the clock to help students unable to get home, or with no home to go to; our remarkable Center for Teaching Innovation brought all hands on deck so that all instructors, in every field, would be ready to teach again when classes resumed online.
While none of us would have chosen to interrupt the semester this way, all of us understand that it is not a choice. It is our responsibility, as a community, to safeguard our own health and wellbeing, and the health and wellbeing of those around us. For most Cornellians, this means simply staying home. But for many others, especially our colleagues at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, it means standing on the front lines of the crisis, working under unthinkable conditions against the tsunami of illness caused by COVID-19. Their courage, in one of the pandemic’s epicenters, has been extraordinary. I am in awe not only of their commitment, but of the readiness with which Cornellians behind those front lines have stepped forward to help. As I write this, a Bartels Hall basketball court is being used as a makeshift mask factory, where dozens of volunteers are working—at a safe distance from each other—to cut and sew masks for use in the Ithaca community. Across campus, faculty and staff have thrown open their labs, clinics, and storage closets, piling masks, gowns, N95 respirators, and viral sample swabs into boxes for donation. Thousands of items have already been delivered to our local healthcare facilities; thousands more were loaded onto a Campus-to-Campus bus earlier this week, bound for Weill Cornell Medicine.
Every one of us is doing what we can to stem a pandemic that threatens us all. And all of us have been doing our best to think creatively about how we can support each other, and move forward with our lives, despite these unprecedented circumstances. As I announced earlier, it is clear that we will not be able to hold a traditional Commencement weekend on campus as scheduled, but we are committed to finding an alternative way to celebrate the many remarkable achievements of the Class of 2020. And, as we did during World War II, we have now made the difficult decision to cancel Cornell’s in-person Reunion in June.
In this era of keeping our physical distance, it is more important than ever to find ways to keep our bonds with each other strong, wherever we may be. Fortunately, these days we have a host of ways to do just that, and our Reunion team is already hard at work planning a virtual Reunion celebration for all alumni the weekend of June 5, 2020. For those of you who, for reasons of time or distance, have not yet participated in a Cornell Reunion, I hope you will mark the dates on your calendar and be sure to join your classmates and fellow alumni in a celebration of all things Cornell. We are also hoping, and tentatively planning, to host an on-campus gathering for the classes of the ’0s and ’5s on Homecoming Weekend, September 25-26. While we recognize that public health considerations must be the primary drivers of our decisionmaking, we are optimistic that we will be able to safely and responsibly host a delayed, but even more celebratory, event at that time.
As alumni, all of you know better than anyone that Cornell is more than just a place. It is an ethos, it is a community, and it is who we are, wherever we are. I wish all of you good health and good spirits as we face these challenging times together, and I look forward to seeing all of you—virtually—in June.
Best wishes,
Martha E. Pollack