President Connie Ledoux Book reflects on how Elon adapted to the pandemic and how the community was strengthened by this collective crisis.
Each day throughout the pandemic and Elon’s emergency operations, as I enter Powell Building, I pass a collection of Elon’s beautiful admissions viewbooks. The compelling photos in these publications visualize our campus for prospective students and their families. Across higher education, we affectionately refer to these brochures as “three and a tree” because so many of the photos show three students, smiling, walking on campus against a backdrop of trees and academic buildings.
Those of us who have the privilege of working in higher education know an image can only capture a fraction of the transformation learning creates. The beauty of learning and the transformative power of higher education have always been my guiding light. And, if you ask me, the individual transformation and learning that happens at Elon is the most beautiful of all.
This past fall, the year started as it always does: with the arrival of curious students who set out on a course of study that will eventually change who they are. Spring typically marks the time of year when seniors walk across the stage at graduation, emerging as people who are truly new, as people who have been transformed by their time at Elon. However, this spring our beautiful Elon campus was quiet, itself transformed by the coronavirus pandemic.
Without a doubt, this pandemic is not a course or class that any of us would have chosen to take or to be challenged by. Without question, we are finding ourselves in the middle of an unanticipated and painful moment of learning. No one wants to be in this moment of uncertainty and loss. Our initial human response to the pandemic and its painful lessons is to long for the time before this upheaval. We hear it in the question, “When can we go back to normal?”
Let us go forward to a new Elon so that we can rise like our beloved Phoenix with the powerful lessons we are learning during these difficult times.
What we know to be true is that learning — and the transformation it creates in our lives — is often not beautiful. Learning and transformation include dark periods full of doubt, anxiety and fear. While this pandemic is unprecedented, no journey of learning is free from painful discoveries or anxieties. An education inherently requires that we learn about ourselves — who we want to be, who we don’t want to be, what we regret, what disappoints us. In those lonelier moments of discovery, in that doubt and fear, we turn to each other for strength.
The friendships and collegiality we find at Elon are deep and lifelong, forged as we have turned to each other in a time of difficulty and found support, compassion and understanding. This year, it is more often our shared vulnerability and our shared challenges, rather than our strengths or our successes, that bind us together.
When I was in college and on my own transformational journey, a campus Jesuit priest shared the prayer Patient Trust as a reminder that it is impossible to rush through dark times. I’ve returned to this reminder as we are all transformed by the challenges presented by the pandemic:
“Give Our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”
The pandemic has forced us into suspended incompleteness, but we are learning and being transformed by this challenge. I have been inspired by how our students and our faculty and staff have been transformed, and our community strengthened, by this collective crisis.
While our physical campus is empty, our Elon community has grown to encompass the entire world. We are all engaged in a challenging period of transformation and our community is vibrant and strong.
Faced with this uncertainty but united as a community, let us embrace going forward into the unknown with the new knowledge and understanding that we have learned during this pandemic.
Let us go forward to new with our deeper understanding of what is essential in our lives. Let us go forward to new with the renewal we have experienced with our loved ones and families. Let us go forward to new with the richer understanding of the professional courage and critical work of nurses, teachers, grocery store clerks, cleaning crews and so many others.
Let us go forward to new with our awareness of those in need in our communities and around the world. Let us go forward to new with our understanding of the demand and power of research and innovation.
Let us go forward to a new Elon so that we can rise like our beloved Phoenix with the powerful lessons we are learning during these difficult times. While no photograph will be able to capture this transformation, it will live in each of us and we will be different — a new Elon, stronger with our new knowledge, richer with our new understanding, ready for our new future.
Connie Ledoux Book
President