THE EMPTY CAMPUS: 2. College from Your Living Room

In THE EMPTY CAMPUS, students in the spring 2022 Honors Seminar in History gathered thirty-six oral histories about the Fitchburg State community’s experience of the Covid 19 pandemic. They turned their research into this podcast to begin the process of reflecting on these events.

Episode 2: College from Your Living Room explores how members of the Fitchburg State community attempted to continue their studies, teaching, and work from home during the spring 2020 lockdown.

Find out more about the Empty Campus project at the Fitchburg State University Archives.

This episode was first recorded in Spring 2022.  The five-part series was remastered for Perseverantia, in Spring 2023 by Matt Baier, a student in the Communications Media department and member of the Perseverantia staff.

Episode transcript available here.

Click here to learn more about Perseverantia. Join us for programming updates on Instagram. Or reach out with ideas or suggestions at podcasts@fitchburgstate.edu.

Transcript

Matt Baier:
The Empty Campus series was originally produced in Spring 2022 as part of the Honors Seminar in History with Professor Katherine Jewell. Students conducted 36 oral histories with various members of the campus community about COVID-19 at Fitchburg State. 

These interviews are now housed in the university archives and available for researchers. To interpret what they found, the students constructed five thematic episodes, remastered in Spring 2023 for Perseverantia, by Matt Baier. 

Find out more about the empty campus and our other series at www.fitchburgstate.edu/podcasts.

[ 0min 34sec ]  

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Steve Olson (host):
Welcome back to Perseverantia. I'm your host, Steve Olson. This is episode two: “College from Your Living Room.” 

Last episode, we looked at the initial reaction to being sent home in March 2020. Both students and faculty alike were thrown into the world of online education and forced to make do. What did that look like? What effect did it have on the campus community?

Ryan Norman studied Game Design at Fitchburg State.  By credit, he's a senior at the university. But transferring from being an English major at UMass Boston lost him some of his progress towards his degree. The shift to at home learning shocked him in particular. UMass Boston is an urban schoo,l and has the city of Boston as its classroom, especially if you study the liberal arts.

Within a year, Norman's classroom shrank from the size of a metropolis down to the size of his bedroom.

Ryan Norman:
It was a lot of just like, okay, how can I not go stir crazy, locked away at home, doing Japanese at 8 a.m. for a class, and then writing essays and essays while being stuck in home all the time? It was, it was unfortunate, but – and all the teachers had, like, really clocked out, too, because they were in the same position as us.  They really had no idea what was going on. 

So then it did get better with time. I just kind of read a lot. I just started to really read. I started to write a lot. And I used art to cope, definitely.

[ 1min 53sec ]  

Steve Olson (host):
Gabby Callahan, the sophomore nursing major you heard from last episode, expressed her immediate frustrations in her interview for this project.

Gabby Callahan:
I feel like it completely affected the way that I saw nursing – if that makes sense. Like I was really angry. Not that anybody could have done anything about it, but I was angry at the fact that my clinical experience was being taken away. I had a great clinical instructor, a great clinical group, so I was really mad for a really long time that it got ripped away from me.

I'm not going to say it was like a blessing in disguise because I still think that I need a lot more, like hands on things, like hands on practice. But I do think it built communication and it gave me a chance to kind of take a step back and be like, “maybe there's other things that are more important than just clinical” – and immersing yourself in the experience.

Steve Olson (host):
As a result of these frustrations, burnout settled in almost as fast as the pandemic itself. Students no longer enjoyed the degrees of separation between work, school, and play. They all mixed together into a melting pot of stress and worry that can really take a toll on mental health. Miranda Gustin held several student leadership roles on campus, but most notably, she served as residential assistant and president of the Fitchburg Activities Board.

But you'll hear more about them in a later episode. Here she is, talking about the difficulty students had with dividing their priorities.

[ 3min 14sec ]  

Miranda Gustin:
The workload was a lot harder to do because you think you go to class and you're staring at a screen. You do your homework, you're staring at a screen. Then people who went home, including myself, if they weren't on a screen, they were at work. You know, they weren't, they weren't sitting at home doing nothing.

Steve Olson (host):
Joe Cautella, who you heard from last episode, had a similar experience and understood the struggle from both a student and faculty perspective.

Joe Cautella:
A lot of professors may not have been familiar with how to do online learning – different ways and techniques or to be the most efficient.  So I had some professors that uploaded lectures and just asked the students to watch them. Others went completely documents only and said, “Here's what you have to do.”

Steve Olson (host):
Faculty, like Cautella said, had a lot of difficulty adjusting. Dr. William Cortezia, a professor of education, did his best to capture the feelings of his colleagues.

[ 4min 08sec ]  

Dr. William Cortezia:
It changed drastically. Teaching online is a completely different format, and it's something that none of us have gone to school to do. Because, honestly, depending on your age and when you got your degree, that didn't even exist. I think the set up, you miss that eye contact. Even though you can see the student, without a mask, it's very detached.

There isn't that synergy of walking around the class, feeling the class. It's multiple boxes that you're looking at. And it also not only affects the teaching part of it, but the learning. Some students don't do well online. They need to be there or ask more questions or ask the professor to repeat. And they might not do that online.

[ 5min 01sec ] 

Steve Olson (host):
Sudden change in academic procedure directly correlates to sudden drops in academic performance.  With programs like nursing that have a GPA minimum of 2.5 in order to stay in the program, younger students struggled to keep afloat. That's part of what made Gabby Callahan so nervous. Deborah Benes knew this all too well.

Dr. Deborah Benes:
We lost more sophomores than we normally would have lost. And there's so many variables that go into play: mental health, family, home life, a different mechanism for learning. It's really important from a nursing perspective to be interactive, and that screen doesn't always allow that to occur.

Steve Olson (host):
So how do you keep students engaged? How do you make sure they don't give up? How do you ensure their success? These questions ultimately fell on the university administration to answer. Here's Vice President of Student Affairs Dr. Laura Bayless.

[ 5min 51sec ] 

Dr. Laura Bayless:
In 2020-21, 88% of our classes were virtual or hybrid, and then 12% were in-person. And so then what do faculty and students need to support that and, you know, technology training policy-wise, all of those kinds of things?  So one of the threads that run through, runs through COVID is things change all the time on a dime.

So there was no one moment that was like, done, we're doing this, you know? But it's just a series of decisions that happen over time. And they change.

Steve Olson (host):
The university's ability to think on its toes may have saved students and faculty from completely losing at least a year of education. University President Richard Lapidus was all too aware of the tightrope he walked. Here he is from an interview I conducted with him earlier this spring.

[ 6min 42sec ] 

President Richard Lapidus:
I think we did really well. Certainly had glitches, but nothing catastrophic. We checked up on students and checked up on staff to make sure that they were still hanging in there. It wasn't easy, but we did it. We survived. And, you know, overall, I think that the students reported that they thought their classes were okay. They would have preferred to have been in the original format.

Mostly what we got were complaints about, you know, being home, the loss of socialization, isolation. And, you know, as we learned two years later, that's led to depression and all kinds of mental health issues – and so it was just the beginning of that – we hadn’t yet seen.

Steve Olson (host):
It was, personally speaking, it was really tough to have my commute to school be six steps instead of a six minute drive – rolling out of bed, going right to my computer and getting to work 

President Richard Lapidus:
With each iteration of COVID, we didn't know what was coming. We were making up the rules as we went along. We had no idea whether the decisions we were making were good or bad until we saw the result of them. 

We were very nervous about bringing students and staff back to campus, having them get sick.  We had seen, if you recall, some of the bigger schools around the country with outbreaks of eight, 9000 people at one time. We weren’t prepared for that. I mean, we're not a hospital. We don't have the ability to triage people.  So we were, we were very nervous about that.

Steve Olson (host):
Kerry McManus, Student Government President, gives an interesting cross between students and administration due to the nature of her position. McManus continued to work diligently with administration to make sure that the student voice continued to be heard.

[ 8min 32sec ] 

Kerry McManus:
Providing, I know a lot of students at the time needed an at home WiFi system, sothey provided those. And I know that students who might not have had easy access with a computer or somewhere to take their classes.  Because that was something that a lot of students struggled with, was like taking their classes online, which is like a parking lot that they could get free Wi-Fi at, like they'd go sit in the car all day.

So I do know that there was some role that the Cares Act played in like helping to fund that so students could take classes in environments that were more conducive to education.

Steve Olson (host):
Students struggled. Faculty struggled. Administration struggled. The Cleveland Clinic defines dissociative amnesia as when a person blocks out certain events, often associated with stress or trauma, leaving the person unable to remember important personal information. Maybe that's why a lot of our sources are saying the same thing. Maybe the experience was so traumatic and so awful that they simply resort to universal experiences instead of coming to terms with the end of day existence.

It seems so surreal looking back on it as a student myself, staring at a computer screen for hours on end alone – as almost every news outlet showed people dying by the thousands. All we could do is sit by and watch and do our best to make our way through the semester. Again, from Kerry McManus.

[ 9min 41sec ] 

Kerry McManus:
Honestly, that was such a blur. I think everybody was struggling with everything that was going on then.  I don't think anybody did well. Students, staff, faculty, administration, I think we all kind of did our best. And I don't think our best was the standard that everybody is as used to. But that's not to say that we did poorly.

I just think that there was a lot of other things, personal and otherwise, going on that kind of prevented Fitchburg State from being like the forefront of everybody's attention.

[ 10min 12sec ] 

[ theme music fades in ]

Steve Olson (host):
Perseverantia is a production of Fitchburg State University. I'm your host, Steve Olson. This podcast was produced as part of Dr. Katherine Jewell’s Honors History Seminar in History in the Spring of 2022. Special thanks to Asher Jackson and the staff at the Amelia V. Gallucci-Cirio Library, Kisha Tracy, and the Fitchburg State University Economics, History and Political Science Department, as well as the Fitchburg State University Honors Program.

You can find all episodes of Perseverantia, as well as our bibliographies and our entire archive on our website sites.google.com/fitchburgstate.edu/FSUCOVID19.

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[ 10min 51sec ]

Prof. Kevin McCarthy:
This is Professor Kevin McCarthy from the Communications Media program. 

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And you're listening to Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State Podcast Network.

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