THE EMPTY CAMPUS: 1. Spring Break

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 1: Spring Break explores the moment when members of the Fitchburg State community found out about the university’s indefinite closure in March 2020.

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 by Matt Baier, for Perseverantia. 

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

[ 0min 34sec ] 

(series theme fades in, playing under a montage of voices)

Montage of Voices:  Fitchburg State Student:
I think I was in class – that was right before spring break – so it was March of 2020. I believe, like, the week before, even though we had been joking about it for weeks in class.  And then they basically told us we weren't coming back that semester. 

 Montage of Voices:  Fitchburg State Student:
It was odd. I remember the feeling, saying goodbye to certain people and thinking, like, “It's going to be a long time before I see this person.” 

Montage of Voices:  Fitchburg State Student:
It was kind of like overnight, all of a sudden, everyone needed to have a Ph.D. in virology or public health or something like that in order to understand what was going on in the world. 

Montage of Voices:  Fitchburg State Student:
I'll probably always remember when it first happened, which I believe was March of that year. And so when we first heard about what was going on. You can, of course, no one really knew what was happening yet.

[ 1min 23sec ]  

Maddy Waterson (host):
Welcome to Perseverantia. This is a brief series on the effects of the COVID 19 pandemic on college life using Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts as a case study. 

I'm your host, Maddy Waterson, and this is episode one, “Spring Break.” 

[ 1min 38sec ] 

[ theme swells and fades out ] 

[ 1min 42sec ] 

Maddy Waterson (host):
Fitchburg State was five days into its spring break when University President, Richard Lapidus, sent an email to the student body: 

“To the campus community: In the face of this rapidly developing global health emergency, our highest priority remains the health and welfare of our students, faculty and staff. While Fitchburg State has received no confirmed or suspected cases of COVID 19 infection, we need to act now to slow the spread of the virus. 

“To further that goal, we are preparing and planning for the possibility of temporarily delivering course material remotely for all face-to-face courses. 

“Therefore, we are going to cancel classes until Monday, March 23. Students should not return to campus the week of March 16th to March 20th.” 

That email was followed a few days later by this – also from the President's office:

“No decisions have been made about the remainder of the semester. We are hopeful that we will be able to bring students back and residence and resume our vibrant campus life. The circumstances of the spread of the coronavirus will determine whether this is possible. I am so sorry that your college experience is being altered in this way. Thank you for your patience and cooperation as we join the world in responding to this pandemic.” 

Many students were rushed with a wave of emotions. Gabby Callahan, a sophomore nursing major at the time, describes her initial confusion. 

[ 3min 02sec ] 

Gabby Callahan:
It was kind of scary, and it was just like, “Am I going to be able to finish? Am I going to be able to finish my classes? Do school online? What's going on? When is this going to end?”  It was just scary. 

Maddy Waterson (host):
Similarly, Ben Sacramone and the Fitchburg State Track & Field Team were returning from a meet in Boston when the news broke about the initial cases. 

Ben Sacramone:
I don't think I'll ever forget.  We were coming back from a track meet – I think it was in Boston – and somebody on the bus had said, “Oh my God, there's a COVID case in Boston.” 

Like the first COVID case hit Boston and everybody on the bus turned around.

Unknown Speaker with Ben:
That was UMass Boston right? Wasn't it? I think it was.

Ben Sacramone:
And we were all like, “Oh, my God, this is crazy.”   And then after that, we just kept hearing about more and more and more. And I think we went to a meet at Wesleyan where there was a rumor that one student had had it. 

I remember everybody was terrified. Nobody went to the bathroom. And the only reason to go to the bathroom was to wash your hands.  Everybody stayed away from each other. 

And I don't think I'll ever forget, like, that feeling of, “Oh my God, this might actually be a real thing.”  Like, we weren't too serious about it, but at the same time, it was, “Holy crap.” 

[ 4min 06sec ]

Maddy Waterson (host):
Administrators struggled with the immediate aftermath just as much as students did. Almost every member of the executive cabinet worked tirelessly to ensure the transition went as smoothly as possible. Nobody was more concerned about the pandemic than Vice President of Student Affairs, Dr. Laura Bayless. 

Dr. Laura Bayless:
Yeah, so I was watching the news and seeing this thing starting to develop in China. And, you know, I've been part of emergency management my entire career and so we've prepped many times for bird flu and all different kinds of things. 

And I was like, “This seems pretty serious.”  And I pulled together the first group. Well, actually, I spoke with our then director of health services and her supervisor, the Assistant Dean of Students, and Director of Counseling Services in probably mid-January – just to say, “Hey, Martha, what are you seeing?” All that kind of thing. And on January 28, I pulled together the first group of people across campus to start talking about the possibility of COVID. 

[ 5min 10sec ]

Maddy Waterson (host):
Even student leaders were aware of the dangers of the new virus. From student Trustee Steven Olson: 

Steven Olson:
And so I drive to school every day. I listen to NPR, and I was listening to the show at the time, their 9 o’clock shows, the BBC Radio News Hour. And they were covering the coronavirus pandemic. The angle they took on it was it seemed like it was going to be an economic issue because it was affecting China, it was affecting manufacturing. 

It was going to hurt, but it wasn't going to be a pandemic, is the idea that they had. And that was November 2019 through December 2019. 

Maddy Waterson (host):
Student Government Treasurer Joe Cautella the third was on a trip to Washington, D.C. at the time. 

Joe Cautella:
I knew there is something going on with coronavirus. I didn't really know what it was. No one really knew what it was at that time. But I knew something was getting a bit weird when I would go to see monuments of different areas in DC – go to different museums – and there weren't that many people. And I thought it was a great time. 

I'm like, “Wow, I'm able to see the Jefferson Memorial with nobody there have a picture, just me and the monuments.” 

[ 6min 18sec ]

Maddy Waterson (host):
Despite their fears, the pandemic still caught the administration a little off guard. The university extended spring break another week to try and catch up. Here's University President Richard Lapidus. 

President Richard Lapidus:
So that was a big planning week for us. One, we obviously had to think about transitioning students to a remote format for which none of the classes were designed. And so we needed time to give faculty the opportunity to do that. Faculty had the, obviously, the most amount of work to do in figuring out how they were going to convert their lectures and other materials to that format. 

At the same time, we had to – on the back end, the things that people tend not to think about – we had to figure out how to sort of activate our business continuity plan, how was this place to operate remotely as well. 

So all of a sudden people had to figure out teleworking. So we're disassembling the infrastructure here and sending people home with all kinds of equipment that wasn't necessarily designed to use that way so that the university could operate. 

So just a phenomenal amount of work. We were working 18, 20 hour days for at least two weeks just to get some bare minimum up and then for months on end. 

And you know, I'm sure that students have said, but I know faculty and staff would sit and say the same: we worked harder during that semester probably than any time in our lives. It was just challenging and stressful.

Maddy Waterson (host):
Faculty faced a strange cross between the student’s experience and the administrator’s experience. Much like administrators, they needed to adjust to not having a connection with the students, but also had been forced to go home and deal with the same struggles as students with the same adjustment to at home education as their students. 

Here's Dan Welsh, a member of the biology faculty. 

[ 8min 12sec ]

Prof. Dan Welsh:
I was – as much as I’m always sad to not be in the classroom, I mean, it was a little disorienting. 

I kind of was thankful I wasn't teaching because I don't know how my colleagues managed to just adjust on the fly like that. I mean, with that sudden shift to we don't know what's going on in the world. “Can we meet in person?  Should we meet in person?”  I mean, that was totally disorienting. 

Maddy Waterson (host):
Fitchburg State was perplexed by the changes. The sheer amount of uncertainty on all fronts had a profound effect on all aspects of the campus community for years to come. From Matt Burke, Senior Director of Athletics and Recreation. 

Matt Burke:
I had a conversation with my boss, who's Laura Bayless, the Vice President for Student Affairs. And I was like, “So I'm still working on the end of year Athletic Banquet” and she was like, “No, you're not.” And I was like, “What do you mean?” 

She's like, “There's not going to be an end of the year athletic banquet.”  And I was like, “Wait, what?” 

I'm like, but I figured we were going to shut down for like a week or two and then be back. And she was like, No, we're shutting down for the semester!” [ laughs]

[ 9min 06sec ]

[ series theme fades in and plays under the host ]

Maddy Waterson (host):
Perseverantia is a production of Fitchburg State University. I'm your narrator, Maddy Waterson. This podcast was produced as part of Dr. Katherine Jewell’s Honors 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 and 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.

[ series theme fades swells and then fades out ]

[ 9min 59sec ]

[ Perseverantia Podcast Network theme fades in ]

Matt Baier:
This is Matthew Baier, a junior from Milford, Massachusetts, majoring in Film and Video – and you’re listening to Perseverantia, the Fitchburg State Podcast Network.

[ Perseverantia Podcast Network theme fades out ]