by Deborah J. Taub, Kamryn S. E. Scott, and Johnathan T. O’Dea
The statistics related to the COVID-19 pandemic are devastating. The staggering number of cases and tragic number of fatalities – not to mention the cost of the recovery and the continuing economic impact – are, in many ways, almost inconceivable. Yet for all these quantifiable losses, there is also an incalculable amount of intangible loss being suffered by all of us. We have experienced it ourselves as human beings, and, as higher education and student affairs professionals, we have seen it in our colleagues and students.
In my career I have written about grief and bereavement among college and university students. Of course, life and death has always been a part of the student experience, just as in every other part of society. But as I spoke with my students from the beginning of the pandemic and throughout the 2020-21 academic year, what came through those Zoom classes were sentiments of loss that, quite honestly, I had never heard before. Rather than anticipation of what the future held, students felt trepidation over what might befall them, their family, or their friends. Those routine (maybe even mundane) parts of work and school were upended. Their experiences – traditionally marked by a number of defining events, milestones, and corresponding celebrations – were eliminated or drastically altered. In short, this is not what they signed up for.
Kamryn Scott is one of my graduate students at Binghamton University. When I reached out to her to learn more about this sense of loss, she was able to share the specifics of her experiences, but also expressed some of the more overarching themes.
Throughout all four years of my undergrad, I lived on Binghamton University’s campus as a resident of College-in-the-Woods (CIW). Living in CIW not only connected me with the friends I made in freshman year – people that I am still very close to – but also fostered environments that inspired me to become a resident assistant and guided my decision to pursue a career in higher education.
Though I came into the RA position extremely introverted, the rituals and traditions fostered the conditions that helped me connect with my staff, residents, and entire CIW community. In years past, RA training consisted of bonding together in staff development activities, in-hall meetings, and building preparation. Student move-in was just as busy as in the past, if not more so. The rush of following green carts around as they flew in and out of the building, reassuring parents waiting out in the hot sun with their children, and interacting with all of our residents was an incomparable feeling worth all the exhaustion we felt at the end of each day. The culmination of all our hard work was the RA banquet, where we dressed up in formal attire, took staff pictures, celebrated the end of training, and kicked off the start of an amazing year. These rituals and traditions didn’t just build our sense of community; they made us a community.
The efforts made during move-in and welcome week events, community gatherings, and hall interactions would sustain our connection throughout the year. Their absence during the COVID-19 pandemic meant a fundamental shift for residential dynamics. When the world went into total shutdown in March of 2020, I was in my first semester of graduate school at Binghamton. I mourned the loss of my graduation with a tinge of hope that I would still be able to experience one in a year, upon the culmination of my accelerated master’s program. Meanwhile, all around the world people mourned the loss of family and friends. It felt selfish to be sad about the loss of graduation. It still does. How could I, or anyone, cry about something like a postponed ceremony, when so many had lost something irreplaceable?
For the class of 2020, these types of losses affected many students as they transitioned from an important transformative chapter in their lives without the commemorative ceremony. At the time, I had not felt this loss as greatly as many of my friends and colleagues had, particularly because I knew that I would be graduating again in a year. But as I scrolled through my Instagram feed, looking through all the pictures of people smiling with their friends in cap and gown, I couldn’t help but envy them a bit. Many of my friends expressed similar sentiments. We were all supposed to graduate together, celebrate together at our combined graduation party, and celebrate with each other’s family and friends. Instead, we shut down in March and depressingly pushed ourselves through online classes until everything ended in May. We were all so busy trying to muster the energy to pass our courses during such a difficult time, that none of us had really been able to think about what came next. Classes simply . . . ended . . . and life went on.
For many first-year college students, this jarring reality was the same. They had lost not only their graduation, but also culminating traditions such as prom. I remember many of my friends had even begun saving outfits on Pinterest the year prior to our prom in anxious anticipation of the day we had all been waiting for. But for all the high school seniors this year, there were no ballrooms, no suits, and no gowns. They lost that transition to college – and, with it, a pivotal aspect of their community as well.
Just as their high school finish lines were blurred, so was the starting line to college. Orientations are constructed as an induction to the collegiate experience, giving students a taste of what living away from home will feel like. Though orientations still happened in fall 2020 and spring 2021, they weren’t the same. Students lost the sense of community that the event traditionally holds, and they lost the chance to build it for themselves in a setting that gave them the push they needed to do so. Though professionals tried their best to replicate that feeling in a virtual setting, a breakout room simply paled in comparison.
The notion of a campus community takes on a very different meaning in the absence of a physical community. From RA events and floor meetings to festivals and dorm wars, all of the rituals and traditions that had once aided housing professionals in their efforts to foster this sense of community went online. My transition from being an RA in one community to becoming one of Dickinson Community’s assistant residential coordinators (a live-in grad position) had made the changes caused by the pandemic even more apparent.
Johnathan T. O’Dea is another graduate student and a resident director for the campus’s housing department. His experience showed a number of similarities to Kamryn’s.
In spring 2020, as the pandemic pushed itself across the world, I was preparing to graduate from Towson University with my Bachelor’s degree and hoped to go into full-time work in student affairs. However, with jobs being scarce, graduate school became the only viable option to continue down this path. At the same time that I was grappling with this truth, Towson shut down, affecting my life immensely. I was a regular user of Towson’s rock-climbing wall and gym, but with these closed my opportunities for social interactions and physical exercise became virtually non-existent. I also had a job on campus that I loved doing, but I was no longer able to fulfill the usual day-to-day tasks. At the end of the semester, graduation came and went like any other day of the year. There was no pomp or circumstance, and there was little emotion. Despite the fact that a major chapter in my life had just come to an end, it felt like time just went on and nothing had really changed.
I spent the summer working and preparing for the move to Binghamton University for graduate school. Upon arriving I had to quarantine for two weeks, and while I had all the time in the world to acquaint myself with my new apartment, I had no time to orient myself to the new campus or surrounding area. My new academic career was kicked off with a virtual orientation, taking away the ability to meet other students and professors face-to-face. This, along with most classes being held virtually, meant that my cohort had very little ability to create meaningful connections. Every student, both graduate and undergraduate, that I have spoken to faced similar challenges, especially new students. Even students living in residence halls felt isolated from others outside of their immediate room or suite mates.
Virtual orientations also meant no in-person tours of the campus – and thus the inability to get acquainted with the new setting. Students found that they did not know campus that well and spent all of their time either in the residence halls or off campus at their homes. In one conversation with a group of my peers in the SAA (Student Affairs Administration) program, we discussed doing a tour of the campus and asking someone to help us learn our way around, so that we could finally become familiar with our surroundings.
This feeling of “it can’t be as good as it was before” is something that I have heard echoed hundreds of times throughout the last year, both from students and professionals. A lot of my colleagues have said that they miss the social opportunities of their pre-COVID work. They have also gone on to say how much more difficult it is to build relationships with their RA staff and residents with all of the restrictions and having to spend more time policing due to the pandemic. These difficulties caused some individuals to leave their positions altogether. Some RAs and some professional staff members felt that the position had morphed beyond their limits, and they decided to leave. Many of them talked about how they didn’t want to be COVID police anymore and that they no longer enjoyed the work. As a result, many valued colleagues were lost.
Kathleen Manning, professor of higher education and student affairs at the University of Vermont, has written about the innumerable ceremonies and traditions that add so much to campus life. She writes that these rituals “mark significant events in the life of a college and community.” Psychiatrists Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts are more specific, stating that rituals serve five non-mutually exclusive functions: bringing people together to build community and a sense of belonging, marking transitions, recovering from loss, expressing values, and celebrating.
Consider how integral those acts are to the human experience and then how higher education often is built around events and observations that serve one or more of these functions. The students’ collegiate career is book-ended, with a first-year convocation and a final commencement ceremony. Welcome weeks bring people together and build a sense of community, as do other events such as first-year convocation. There’s homecoming and a host of other traditional events, both official and unofficial. Students leap into campus fountains at Ithaca College and Butler University, illuminate paper lanterns the night before commencement at Oberlin College and Smith College, and creatively decorate their mortar boards. There are solemn rituals such as signing the campus honor code or those like Purdue University’s Golden Taps and Texas A&M’s Silver Taps ceremonies that commemorate the loss of students who died while enrolled. Finally, annual awards ceremonies, festivals, and the myriad student-created activities around breaks and holidays all represent rituals that are celebratory.
Johnathan and Kamryn both noted the loss of Binghamton’s traditional so-called dorm wars.
Out of all of Binghamton’s residential communities’ traditional dorm wars, Dickinson’s Mutant Mania was always the most widely talked about across campus, as its competition was like no other. It was an intensive event, planned by the Dickinson area government, that kept both RAs and residents extremely busy for nine days, as they competed in a myriad of events, including Iron Chef, Clue Run, Skits, and a slew of field games. In spring 2020 Mutant Mania was reduced to a single day right before the campus closed; and this year, there was a lot of uncertainty around Mania because of it. Many students weren't really excited because they knew it wasn't going to be like the Mania they remembered from two years prior. During planning, students frequently remarked that this Mania was not going to be “a real Mania.” Afterward, many said they had a lot of fun and they were really appreciative of the organizers, but the hybrid nature of the event, where some of us were virtual, and the very limited capacity of other events had a huge impact on the feeling that Mania still wasn't the same. Masked strangers positioned six feet apart stood where smiling faces once huddled together to cheer on their building teams during an event. Screams of excitement and rousing support had become clapping hands and party hat emojis that briefly flashed across the screen in Zoom’s gallery view. It’s startling to think that our sophomore residents next year will only know Mutant Mania this way.
Why does the loss of these moments, which may only take up a few hours in a student’s career, leave such a void? I think that it is due to the fact that, as Manning notes, milestone events are so deeply rooted in institutional culture. The impact of the event expands beyond the moments they actually occur and envelop the time that students and family members anticipate them beforehand as well as cherish them afterward. Families may dream for years of their child’s high school graduation, college visits, move-in, family weekends, and college commencement. Residential students may keenly anticipate their chance to participate in dorm wars and the attendant bragging rights. Juniors watch seniors participate in the traditional fountain splash and think “that will be me next year.” Later, they look back fondly at photographs and videos. When these keenly anticipated events do not occur, or do not occur in the forms that have been dreamt of, the sense of loss is real.
Read On
Check out these additional readings to learn more about coping with grief and the role of rituals and milestones within higher education and society.
• Kenneth Doka, “Disenfranchised Grief and Trauma” in Handbook of Traumatic Loss: A Guide to Theory and Practice (2017); “Disenfranchised Grief and Non-Death Losses” in Non-Death Loss and Grief: Context and Clinical Implications (2020).• Darcy Harris, “Concluding Thoughts” in Counting Our Losses: Reflecting on Change, Loss, and Transition in Everyday Life (2011).• Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts, Rituals for Our Times: Celebrating, Healing, and Changing Our Lives and Our Relationships (1992).• Kathleen Manning, Rituals, Ceremonies, and Cultural Meaning in Higher Education (2020).
Is this sense of loss fair or proportional? Kenneth Doka, professor emeritus at the graduate school of The College of New Rochelle and a senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America, presents the concept of what he calls “disenfranchised grief,” which may be helpful in considering the non-death losses of ceremonies, traditions, and rituals. He defines disenfranchised grief as “the grief that results when a person experiences a significant loss where the resultant grief is not openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned. In short, though the individual is experiencing a grief reaction, there is no social recognition that the person has a right to grieve or a claim for social sympathy or support.”
While the loss of life due to COVID-19 was recognized (think of how it was incorporated into President Joe Biden’s inauguration events), the losses discussed here represent those that are not socially validated or publicly mourned. In fact, individuals experienced rebukes for “complaining” about the loss of things that appear insignificant in light of the larger losses of life. A decade ago, psychiatrist Darcy Harris wrote about dealing with ambiguous losses and how “there is often a social message of so what? that accompanies the experience or a sense of just get over it and get on with your life that many individuals feel when these losses are encountered.” Therefore, those grieving these losses may experience a conflict of emotions: On the one hand, they may feel the frustration, anger, and sadness associated with the loss, while on the other hand they feel embarrassed or ashamed about those feelings. So they keep those feelings of grief and loss to themselves and continue to grieve in isolation. This is what many of us and our students have been and continue to be feeling. When students return to campus, these feelings will return with them as well. People will continue to carry their disenfranchised grief as student affairs staff and students alike continue to grapple with the losses and changes, despite society’s attempts to make a quick transition back to “normal.” But what is this new normal, and how can we move towards it, while acknowledging all that we lost?
One possibility is to lean on the same thing that was lost. New events and ceremonies can help with recovery. Doka suggests that rituals can be a way of addressing disenfranchised grief: “Ritual reaffirms continuity. It allows different strands of the community to come together – affirming a sense of solidarity.” How might we re-imagine some of our traditional events and ceremonies to acknowledge losses and to begin to build and rebuild community? What new events can we create to begin to bring the campus community back together?
It also will be important to acknowledge the experience we have all had. Although it is tempting as we return to a more normal campus to focus on celebrating being back, it is important to acknowledge and validate the losses. As each tradition and ceremony returns, recognize publicly, and honestly, that many individuals within the campus community missed out on these events. Perhaps this takes the form of Orientation 2.0 and Welcome Week 2.0. As colleges and universities reopen face-to-face, they will welcome students who technically are sophomores but who may be as unfamiliar with campus as their first-year counterparts are and who may equally need opportunities to meet others and to make friends. Be mindful of including returning students in such events, intentionally inviting them to participate both in the promotion of the events and through personal invitations. Consider creating events for them specifically and designing them with their needs in mind. If your campus does not do so already, consider posting campus volunteers during the first days of classes who can give directions to students who have not had an opportunity to learn their way around.
Students and staff also will likely require modified training. Many RAs (both new and returning) will never have planned and led in-person events and activities. It is likely that they will need specific training on how to develop and implement engaging in-person programs. Similarly, many RAs will not have experienced a more normal move-in (either as RAs or as new students) and will need help in preparing.
Finally, there will need to be a continued focus on mental health concerns. Everyone has been through a difficult year and a half. Everyone has experienced a variety of losses. Know the mental health resources available on your campus for students and for staff. Publicize and promote these resources. What we have done for the last year-and-a-half was hard, and the losses were real. Navigating the post-pandemic campus is likely to be hard as well. There is no benefit in burning out. As we return to more normal campuses, let’s give one another grace. We’ve all heard “give yourself grace” enough for it to become a cliché. However, it's a saying and a lesson that we should take to heart. As you give your colleagues grace, remember to extend that grace to yourself as well. With all of our losses, we’ve gained insight into the importance of social connections and have learned to adapt under the most difficult of circumstances. We can carry these lessons forward with us and use them to face the challenges that lie ahead as we rebuild our communities.
Deborah J. Taub is a professor and chair of the Department of Student Affairs Administration at Binghamton University. Kamryn S. E. Scott is a graduate student in student affairs administration at Binghamton and an assistant residential coordinator for Binghamton’s Office of Residential Life. Johnathan T. O’Dea is a resident director for Binghamton’s Office of Residential Life and a graduate student in student affairs administration at Binghamton.
