Reconnecting…
In this Editorial, the first of its kind at the Review, members of our Board consider how, throughout COVID, individual class years have disparate memories, experiences, and understandings of Swarthmore.
It’s been around so long that you probably can’t remember what it’s like to forget about public health. Many of us carry sanitizers in our pockets, wear our masks outdoors, and ask for Zoom links to important meetings. The “new normal” isn’t new anymore.
There was a time—two years’ worth of time—when every article was a mini-referendum on the slipperiness of now. Daily reports inundated us with COVID numbers and statistics in the US and across the world. There was a flood of profiles featuring hospital workers across all counties, states, countries, following nurses and doctors swaddled in layers of PPE gear as they tended to the patients that would eventually get most of them sick. There was the American political ping-pong between masks, no masks, virtual, in-person, what counted as an essential business, vaccine, no vaccine; the international scramble as countries poured money into hoarding masks, oxygen, PPE gear, Moderna, Pfizer, resulting in uneven access to treat and prevent the pandemic.
What else was there? An election. The shuttering of many people’s jobs and lives as the sprawling service industry, which constitutes over 70% of the U.S. economy, was gutted and nearly sunk. There was the world outside: news trickled in about stringent lockdowns in places like China and Australia and New Zealand; surges in various countries that threatened to overwhelm hospitals and flooded morgues; economic devastation everywhere as what couldn’t just be flipped online ground to a halt and then started again, tentatively, shakily, as people everywhere had to make the awful decision between risking a virus or being able to financially stay afloat.
For the past two years, to know or to be informed or even to step outside was actually just to drown.
And now that torrential onslaught of public health hell has all but dried up and drifted to the edge of public consciousness. (To follow a newspaper’s line of thought, if we declare something enough times to be true, then of course it is.) The argument about whether or not COVID is over can, will, and should play out in stages larger than Swarthmore’s lone literary magazine; on that we are no authority. But Swarthmore College’s administration seems to have made the decision that we can move forward, back to a pre-pandemic life: optional self-COVID testing until the end of the semester; that student health insurance will no longer pay for outside COVID testing; that masks have been rendered optional almost everywhere except while in class. (At this time last year it was not yet permitted to remove your mask while outside, unless eating, at least six feet from other people.)
Which leaves us here. What do we remember from before March of 2020—and not just what do we want to remember, but how many of us even know anything? What do we call the year that was fully online? Where do all of the classes stand now?
It took a global pandemic for the world—and, to some extent, Swarthmore’s community—to come together and fall apart over and over and over. This is hard not to think about or talk about. So we offer you this: our own thoughts. This is how we weave an interweb of community. This is how we reconnect.
* * *
Some might say that we’re the lucky ones, that the freshman class, the class of 2025, is lucky to experience Swarthmore as it is today—with the school’s first completely in-person structure since the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve nestled ourselves into comfortable corners of campus buildings and atop benches under arboretum cherry blossoms. These spaces are safe for us, reminders of what we imagined college would be like. But we can tell something’s different about the community.
This isn’t the place many of us expected. The quirky admissions emails, the corny website promos, and the busy day-in-the-life videos never anticipated the class year divide that COVID created. There’s no student-written cheat sheet or almanac that details the old Swarthmore, so the only way we can learn about how these campus spaces have changed is through older Swatties and their oral histories—upperclassmen reminiscing about places, events, and traditions that died with the pandemic.
Following our high school graduations, some of us chose to take a year off from school. We were the class of 2020. We lived through COVID-infected senioritis and “graduated” virtually on screens, surrounded by lost clichés and the “new normal” of a pandemic. Many of us watched our friends, the people we had been closest to, join their university communities and move forward with their lives, while ours stood still after high school. Sure, we knew where we were going for school, but what were we supposed to do in the meantime? Temporary limbo is funny like that—you know where you’re going to be eventually, but you need to find things to occupy yourself in the present. Eventually, we found ways to fill the void of high school activities and extracurriculars to which we’d dedicated our entire beings for the last three years. Some of us traveled to dream destinations that opened our eyes to the world, while others stayed home for internships and job opportunities. Maybe we became closer to our families, fell in love with a new TV series, or taught ourselves how to bake bread. Regardless of our location, occupation, and interests, we all had one thing in common. We grew up. We got to know ourselves better and grew into these adults outside of academia.
It was hard feeling like we missed out, but we built lives away from the restrictions of a college campus. And, though, being here is great, it’s admittedly different. Some days, it feels like we’ve given up pieces of our gap year freedom only to revert into the anxious teenagers we were in high school. On other days, it feels easy: there’s a comfortability–a nonchalance–in our approach to academics. We understand just how big the world is outside of Swarthmore, the importance of taking the time to have brunch with friends, and that the quiz we failed in CS isn’t the end of the world. We’re fitting ourselves into the freshman community and finding ways to inspire our interest in academia once more.
Those of us who didn’t defer were members of the class of 2021. Senior year was an entirely digital experience for us. The whole world collapsed into a 13” computer screen, a caricature of reality that could never fully capture the physical space it was parodying. Sometimes we looked at the previous seniors with jealousy because at least they had been lucky enough to have half of a senior year without COVID-19. Our fall semesters were isolating and sad excuses for a senior year, crippled by the crumbling structure of pandemic-safe academia. Our spring semesters brought even more unknowns (if that was even possible), regarding flattened curves, vaccine boosters, proms, graduations, and college decisions. We clung to the promise of escape and, when our Swarthmore acceptance letters came in, that promise entered into a countdown. Images of Crum Woods, Scott Amphitheater, and Parrish Beach overtook daydreams, creating a perhaps overly romanticized vision of Swarthmore as an oasis of beauty and knowledge.
But, most of the time, we’re just freshmen searching for pieces of the Swarthmore we met online, the one we were catfished into applying to. Actually occupying Swarthmore’s campus, we find ourselves tasked with navigating the liminal space between new and old, fantasy and reality.
* * *
We are a small class, and we are a scattered class. Some of us, in the face of the pandemic, initially were Class of ‘23 but decided to spend last year doing anything other than eye-glazing classes online; they joined us this fall as super sophomores, the rare members of our class who escaped a freshman orientation on Moodle and a First Collection on Zoom. Many more of us who were admitted in the 2019-2020 school year deferred until last fall, joining the burgeoning class of 2025. And then some of us, who, after the endless headache we call our freshmen fall semester, took the spring off, and are still Class of 2024, or 24.5, or now are 25.
There have been a handful of times when we’ve had the opportunity to gather all together in one space, and none were in our freshman year. They all happened last fall: our second First Collection that barely filled half of the Ampitheatre’s rows, the planting of a class tree and our photo that had so few people we could only stand in the shape of two numbers—24. (We say I think I can recognize everyone in our class by face; but the statement always ends up inflected like a question.) The tree planting and the second First Collection felt quite fitting. We’ve lived through many little substitutes, always waiting for the real thing.
Most of us sophomores—just under 380—and us here on the Ed Board were seniors in high school when COVID hit. Have you seen movies like Freaky Friday or 13 Going on 30? The protagonist blinks and she’s in a body she doesn’t know but can recognize from the outside, or at an age she doesn’t remember becoming, but everyone around her doesn’t register any change. It’s just like that. We turn 20, 21, and 22 this year, but we don’t feel a day over 17. Ask us what we did last week and we’ll blank, but ask about our senior year and we’ll respond right away.
Somehow we’re almost halfway through college. We’ve just declared majors after one and a half semesters of classes in-person: What a joke. What a lie. What a scam. They tell us the Sophomore Plan doesn’t even matter but, of course, it does matter even if we don’t stick to what we write. But we’re used to hearing such lies. Like the idea that last year counts as two semesters to explore and figure out what we wanted to do based off of awkward lectures from a screen. No. Last year was a fever dream, a simulation, an oscillation between the virtual reality we were supposed to call school and the ever-shifting, shut-down reality that was supposed to form our life.
That dream started, of course, in March of our senior year, when, instead of going through the stressful period of opening college decisions with our friends and easing ourselves into the much-vaunted new chapter of our lives, we did it alone. Most of us decided on Swarthmore without having ever stepped foot on campus: we picked based on pictures after navigating through the labyrinthine swarthmore.edu and scouring the Internet for any and all videos or testimonials about student life.
For some of us, Swarthmore was a relief: it was the beginning of college, a new chapter where we could find ourselves and be the person we wanted to present; for others, it was an escape from a quarantine that trapped its victims in place like ants stuck fast in amber; and for others still, Swarthmore was the hallucination trapped on a screen, an academia unbothered by the pandemic that was controlling life outside, where completing a midterm by midnight was more important than anything else. It was like the capital city or rich districts in a civilization that all those dystopian novels liked to have: distorted by the world outside, yet still cut off from all of the troubles within, where worries took on a different quality.
Most publications called COVID a pause, or a stopping, as daily life was disrupted and then slowed. It’s more apt to call it a suspension, because that’s what all of last year felt like. There are seven sophomores on this year’s Ed Board: four spent one semester on campus and three spent the whole year, living in a state of social distancing and reduced capacity. Everyone was assigned their own room, regardless of whether it was designed to hold one person or two, and each dorm was filled to just under 40%. Hearing voices and movements in the dorm hall was a novelty, passing more than one person in any bathroom was a shock, and being stuck outside any building (for all of them were locked) without a OneCard was humbling to the extreme: even at peak times, no more than one person would walk by every 15 minutes. Chairs and beds (but not desks and dressers) were missing from rooms, and any furniture in spaces public or private that hadn’t been displaced were stickered in black and red and white:
REMEMBER TO BE SIX FEET APART. STAY SAFE FROM COVID-19.
LEARN MORE AT SWARTHMORE.EDU/COVID-19.
There were stickers that told us where not to sit and stickers on the floor that anchored the furniture to be at least six feet apart from everything else. What an uncomfortable feeling, to be reminded where to sit. Have you ever studied a language? One of the tips recommended by the Internet and language teachers alike is to go through your house and label everything. If you were studying Spanish, for example, your bathroom door might have baño stickied near the handle; inside, towels would be labeled toalla, the sink lavabo, and maybe you’d even put a sticky next to the jabón. Each time you go to shower or wash your hands, there’d be a little jolt: you’d read lavabo over and over again, marveling at the rolling syllables compared to the succinct smack of the word sink, and, eventually, some of those words might stick in your head. You’ll go to a bathroom in another person’s house, and those words will be there, at the back of your head, waiting to be picked up and placed on your tongue. But it wouldn’t matter, because people all over the world speak Spanish, and everyone has a different word for where the little things go. So all that studying in your house does shit.
(And so did the social-distancing signs. But we’re not supposed to say that. Because everyone always followed guidelines. Because our COVID numbers were great in our beautiful little bubble. Because our college was a success story, a model college during the pandemic, a place that did everything right.)
When they let us eat in Sharples—at least three weeks after the start of each semester, and only a GET reservation was accepted in order to properly cap the number of students in the building—each table had a max capacity of two diners, which made trios quite awkward. Each table was also marked with a wooden block painted red or white on each side that you flipped over after eating. A wandering Sharples employee would beeline to a red block right away and wipe down the table, reminding us that every second we spent too close to our friends was a liability, a health risk. We didn’t see the famous sharpied trays (as advertised, like many things about the student life we didn’t see, on the website) or the colorful plastic bowls and plates or a full room for the salad bar or even the silverware.
We were unsettled and also apart: starting last year, OneCard access was restricted to one dorm per student; coupled with online classes and the discouragement of face-to-face interaction, socialization became a little dorm-shaped bubble of its own. Then there were the students who were in all different parts of the U.S., at the home they grew up in or in an apartment with other students, connected to Swarthmore through only a screen. And, finally, there were the international students. Some came in the fall, some in the spring, and some didn’t step foot at Swarthmore College until August of 2021. Their freshman year was a separation of time and of space: attending class at 3 A.M., fighting back sleep as they tried to discuss the Panopticon or practice a new unit in French, calculating the mounting difference between Philly and where they were living, operating on EST and always disconnecting from local time.
Unmoored from the usual rhythm of upperclassmen befriending and mentoring underclassmen, forming a tightly woven cycle of strong bonds essential to preserving a student culture rife with silly and sweet traditions, the class of 2024 was thrust and dropped in blank space. We’ve seen signs for waffles in McCabe, have heard about pizza bar in Sharples, and the website listed things we’ve still not done: Crum Regatta, the McCabe Mile, Worthstock, a Primal Scream that’s not grab-and-go (oh, how we’ve come to hate that combination of words). Traditions have been scrapped, and due to the disparity in experiences between the upperclassmen and lowerclassmen, we won’t recover them.
This editorial is a start. It’s a snapshot, and a record. But who’s to say it won’t get lost like the many articles in Voices and the Phoenix? Even so, the upperclassmen sections of this essay contain words we don’t recognize: Hicks. BEP. Swing Tree. Or that “the Grill” has a full name, a longer name. The sophomore class is the small class, the patient class. The world asked us to pause when we were barely 18-years-old, and then didn’t tell us that when we restarted, we’d skip.
Of course this college changes. It has changed: our culture now is not the same as the class of 1971, 1871. And it will keep changing: if the class of 2055 is the exact same as 1955, that would feel scary. But the changes this school has undergone is unnatural. It feels like we were snapped, snatched, separated; broken off and isolated from the other classes like a young branch from a tree, cast on the ground, and then, this year, dusted off and told to figure out how to stand up and grow.
* * *
I came to Swarthmore at an interesting time. I mean, I think every person on this campus came in at an interesting time, but my interesting time was fall of 2019. Campus was still reeling from the dissolution of the frats and everything surrounding that, and once I got a handle on what Swarthmore generally is, all the life was sucked out of it by the pandemic.
Once everything moved to Zoom, you became part of the Swarthmore diaspora. And one thing that sociologists will tell you about diaspora groups is that they have a sort of fictionalized ideal of a homeland, one that is both temporally and physically displaced, a place before everything became so not-normal. Was Swarthmore ever normal, though? I don’t know. I’d thought that I’d had a pretty normal college experience. I craved being back, even with all the humdrum stuff that it entails, because you could see people’s faces and community wasn’t reduced to quadrants on a screen. And even though quarantine had its moments, I always felt that I was swimming along toward one goal—return.
Now that we’re back, my memories of Swarthmore from before and after are so jumbled that I can’t remember what is after and what is before. We can go into Singer now, which is nice, even though it’s ugly and overly fluorescent and sound travels weirdly. The bell started working again, which was pretty annoying until you started to tune it out (it still makes you feel you’re in college, though). Crumb Cafe is exactly the same. Sometimes you’ll just remember someone and think, huh, haven’t seen that person in a while. And it turns out that, indeed, you haven’t, because they transferred immediately after COVID, took a bunch of summer classes, got their degree, and are now a middle manager already.
One thing I’ve increasingly noticed is that people are hungry for tradition. People want to know about the “before time.” They wanted to know about Pub Nite (now that it’s back I don’t know if they were blown away); they wanted to know about Worthstock (stop asking me, I wasn’t there). The thing is: the task of carrying these memories forward was left to people who weren’t totally prepared to do it, between campus leaders thrust into roles prematurely and administration that is both opaque about what we’re allowed to do and out of touch with what we want to do.
It’s fine, though. I’ve seen some of the maintenance work required to sustain something as simple as this magazine, but people have put that work in. Campus traditions have returned, like animals reclaiming Chernobyl or something.
* * *
What we remember isn’t eating in Sharples or attending our classes without masks. Instead, our memories are now informed by a sobering truth: we’re the only class left to have experienced a full year at Swarthmore before the pandemic. In about a month, we’ll walk across a stage on Mertz Field, our memories accompanying us as we descend the steps and slowly drift away from campus. Right now, it’s difficult to imagine what we’ll leave behind, what our peers will remember, and what will be known about Swarthmore without a pandemic defining it. There’s a sense of loss in this, one that we’ve carried with us throughout the past few years, and will carry with us after we graduate.
In contending with these memories, we’ve increasingly reevaluated our understanding of what we once considered mundane, what once seemed so immediate and, now, is confined to nostalgia. While the pandemic has left many of us oblivious to the passing of time (we admit it—we still feel like sophomores sometimes), impressions of “normal” campus life still resurface: we attend our classes in-person; we laugh over a meal at Essie’s; we enter into the grimy sauna that is Paces. These memories, in a word, are pervasive. And, though these moments maintain a degree of separation from us, we strive to reassemble them, to grasp onto them as we navigate a campus that, two years later, continues to strike us as unfamiliar.
Except this unfamiliarity, for us, extends beyond the pandemic and its external impact upon College policies and the Swarthmore community. It’s an internal unfamiliarity, too, and it roots itself in everyday gestures, spaces, and traditions, all of which seem to collapse into an inaccessible and distant past. As simple and mundane as it is, overhearing underclassmen say, for example, “I’m headed over to Singer” betrays how disconnected we’ve become to the culture our younger peers are currently rebuilding. Before being named Singer, this academic building received the placeholder acronym BEP (Biology, Engineering, and Psychology). Despite, or perhaps because of, its absurdity, the acronym quickly became the building’s identity, one that we adamantly cling to as we strain against the limits of memory. Although it shouldn’t at this point, it still feels surprising—and, within this, lonely—when students don’t remember Singer’s previous name or, more obscurely, its predecessor Hicks.
For engineering students, Hicks was home. For humanities majors, however, Hicks was a sexy and scary adventure. In its basement, there was a dungeon that seemingly doubled as storage for evil science experiments, an impression that was undoubtedly produced by the yellow “KEEP OUT” sign and the chain link fence surrounding the engineering equipment. The elevator, too, proved disconcerting. Its walls cloaked by blue tarp and its ceiling gauged by a massive vent, the elevator would constantly groan as it scaled the building (at times, it felt slower and more precarious than the elevators in Parrish). To our shock and distress, however, Hicks was demolished in June 2019 in order to make room for the BEP.
Though somewhat contrived, it’s easy to imagine the demolition of Hicks and its replacement by then-BEP-now-Singer as reflective of our severance from pre-pandemic Swarthmore. Just as we remember Pubnite not as super spreader events but as a weekly relief; Worthstock not as an unprecedented luxury but as an established fact of the spring semester; the back of Sharples not as a site of construction but of the beloved Swing Tree; we remember Singer not as a study space but as Hicks and, after, an absurd acronym.
In some ways, it feels as though we’ve been waging warfare against forgetting. In tense whispers and in frustrated tirades, in bittersweet sighs and in rowdy laughs, we constantly assert the presence of our pre-pandemic memories. We give them body, weight, the agility to move not only between us, as seniors, but also between those who never experienced them. With our departure from Swarthmore inching closer, we’ve been forced to confront yet another sobering truth: we don’t want these minute recollections, these moments, to escape us or those we will leave behind.
* * *
The world to a Swarthmore student is small. Although our intellectual world is huge—you can schmooze with the world’s leading expert in late Byzantine history in the morning and learn about particle physics in the afternoon—our social-physical world is small. On this campus, there are maybe 30 different buildings. There are probably around 600 kids with glasses, 300 athletes, and three people who went to highschool with you that you’ve only briefly heard of. There are four places where you can find an apple and exactly one place where you can find a grapefruit (sometimes).
At the same time, though, the small Swarthmore world is a microcosm of the other side of our bubble. We are a part of the statistics on CNN: the 2.8 million cases in Pennsylvania, the 80 million in the U.S., the 491 million across the world. Every one of us is at most two degrees of separation from someone who has tested positive and six degrees from a victim of the pandemic. The political ping-pong in D.C. affects us. The debates on the TV screen about vaccine and mask effectiveness are heard at Sharples tables. And as Delaware County lifted its mask mandate last month, so did the College.
It might feel minute to talk about COVID’s effects on Swarthmore, especially since most of the pandemic’s fatalities aren’t college-aged. Even when we hear that our friend or friend’s friend tests positive at the College, we still turn in our assignments, go to classes, and write articles for a literary magazine. But when you’re in college—and Swarthmore does plenty to reinforce this—it becomes part of you, structuring your daily life and carving a piece for itself out of your identity. So when a pandemic changes how everything in the College works, it changes you.