By Judson Brewer, Harvard Business Review, March 18, 2020
As my class began on Thursday (March 10th), I looked around at my undergraduate and graduate students. Their faces were somber. I asked how they were doing, but I already knew. Harvard and Princeton had, days earlier, announced that they were closing in response and as a precaution to the COVID-19 pandemic. My wife, a professor at Holy Cross, told me the night before that her students were informed they would have a week to pack up and leave their dorms.
My students were waiting to get an email from Christina Paxon, the president of Brown University. It was rumored that Brown may be closing for the rest of the semester and the announcement was scheduled to go out early that morning. But here we were, at 9am, sitting in a technology-free seminar without access to our phones or computers.
Even though their devices were off, my students’ phones were burning holes in their pockets. My tech-free policy was blocking them from receiving vital information. Did the email go out yet? What was it going to say? Their slumped shoulders told me that they were in no mood for debate. They needed to know what was going to happen to them today. This email was going to affect their lives in significant ways — particularly my seniors’, some of who were holding back tears. Their “senior spring” was destined to go down in the record books as the most memorable, and not in a good way.
Comments (0)