What do the words “global pandemic” mean? I define it this way: Zoom calls, neighborhood walks and anxiety. For some, the words sound like painted cars and drive-by graduation ceremonies. Others think of police brutality and protests. Still others miss loved ones.
COVID-19 gave those words a literal meaning. Where before they were science fiction, the words “global pandemic” now refer to something as real as someone’s name, as the words “Occidental College.” Sci-fi dystopia is no longer pure fantasy. Today, a life without a global pandemic can only be conjured in the imagination. Those words are as real as a person’s heritage.
By most standards, things are back to normal, and only historians still need to bury their heads in the myriad effects of COVID-19. Now that the class of 2024 has graduated, every current student at Occidental is expected to start and finish the school year in person with few interruptions. There is almost unanimous acknowledgement that a global pandemic occurred, but only a select few imagine that they continue to live in an era of worldwide lockdown today.
There are the obvious changes on campus. There’s a new president and a new dean. Five years from the first COVID-19 outbreak, Occidental is a different place, populated with different actors. Some changes are unrelated to COVID-19; however, its impact on our community is undeniable.
But what really happened? Though we may feel that something is different, how much evidence do we currently have that something historic took place? According to Special Collections archivist Alanna Quan ‘16, there’s not much archival proof.
“One of the things that is a big impact of COVID here in the archives — that I’m working to repair as quickly as possible — is that there is a pretty solid gap in college history,” Quan said.
According to Quan, when COVID-19 forced everyone online, recording college history became more difficult.
“People knew to just bring things to the archives,” Quan said. “[COVID-19] broke the habits and patterns of remembering to actively collect these materials in the archives.”
The pandemic, from an archival perspective, lacks a physical presence in our collective memory. Despite its worldwide impact, Quan said piecing together the full picture has been difficult. Recording history, Quan said, is more than bullet points and lists; it’s a cultural activity.
“When you have this network of contextual information, where you can see images of what students were doing, you can hear in people’s own words what their feelings and thoughts were at the time,” Quan said. “You get a more holistic picture of what the culture for what that time at Oxy was like.”
Quan said that even the physicality of historical records and being able to touch physical documents provides important historical context to how archives were produced.
“They have a materiality of what they were being printed on and you can think about, ‘OK, why were these people making these choices? Why were they choosing to represent the human figures looking a certain way, or why were they choosing to add this influence here?’” Quan said.
For future generations, Quan said there is a real danger of forgetting the pandemic, or at least its severity. A lack of archiving activity and physical records can create an amnesia surrounding major events.
“Somebody might look back and be like, ‘Oh, nothing really happened. There’s nothing here,’” Quan said. “There’s nothing here because everything happened, and we just couldn’t collect it because we were a part of the everything.”
COVID-19 was not the sole cause for the increasing digitization of records, according to Quan. A trending phrase in the archiving community describes the recent move toward keeping electronic records over physical ones.
“This concept of the digital dark age has been thrown around,” Quan said. “It’s so much more ephemeral and hard to keep [records].”
Quan said that COVID-19 exploded what was an underlying trend toward digital technology. There are still pros to consider from digital recordkeeping, she said, including increased accessibility and democratization. But regardless of whether one prefers to keep physical or digital archives, the adjustment to digital archiving during COVID-19 was disorienting at first, to say the least.
If COVID-19 briefly impaired our faculty for collective memory, were any other aspects of the Occidental community affected? According to Associate Dean for Student Academic Affairs Carolyn Brighouse, our academic psyches were impacted too, especially for those whose high school years were interrupted by the pandemic.
“You’re expected to perform in exactly the same way, at the same level, as students who had a regular in-class experience in high school,” Brighouse said. “It makes college a very different experience than the college [experience] that I had.”
Brighouse said from her perspective as a mother, the COVID-19 high school experience seemed a massive debilitation to students.
“My son was in his junior year of high school when we went remote,” Brighouse said. “He didn’t have the same richness of content. He lost all of his socialization, but he also lost his love of learning.”
For those who weren’t given as much time and space to develop in high school, the college experience becomes a mountain to climb.
“You don’t have all the normal preparation for college, academically, socially,” Brighouse said. “If you’ve lost your love of learning, if you don’t have a desire to learn, if you don’t see it as intrinsically enjoyable, college is miserable, right?”
Consequently, Brighouse said that she’s seen more students struggle as of late with building up fortitude in their academic pursuits.
“That’s also something that students need to build back up after the pandemic, the willingness to engage in intellectual activity,” Brighouse said. “Where it’s not just, ‘I’ll do my homework the night before,’ but it’s, ‘Oh, I’m going to spend a week and a half working on this problem set or working on this paper,’ learning how rewarding and enjoyable that can be, because I think, oftentimes, the experience in high school hasn’t helped students see how enjoyable and valuable that can be.”
Echoing Brighouse, Professor of Biology Kerry Thompson said that COVID-19 altered the normal course of development for high schoolers from youth into adulthood.
“What would have been their normal developmental experience in this American education system, certainly that changed,” Thompson said. “That’s all brain development stuff, and so it certainly did limit their opportunities for exchanges of ideas and experiences.”
The destabilizing effect of the lockdown caused a rise in student anxiety and mental health incidences, Thompson said, but there is an important distinction to be made about anxiety.
“We need some anxiety to perform at our best, and so I tell my students, ‘Don’t be completely afraid of anxiety,’” Thompson said.
But the pandemic upended everything, inducing the kind of anxiety that can easily lead to detrimental consequences.
“It’s a global pandemic,” Thompson said. “All the things that changed [were] anxiety-provoking, certainly.”
Like Brighouse’s son, Thompson said his children have also undergone metamorphoses while locked down at home.
“My own two kids both dropped their instruments,” Thompson said. “They were both musicians. It was just a different way to experience that, and it’s totally passive. There weren’t really good tools, particularly early on, to try to make it a group virtual experience.”
In contrast to some of the aforementioned relaxed learning habits, Resident Associate Professor at the Core Program Devin Fromm said that he observed mostly positive effects of the pandemic on students: a few were disengaged, but in his experience, most used the extra free time to pour themselves into their studies.
However, Fromm, who teaches a First Year Seminar (FYS) every year, said that he’s also noticed vast differences in student social behavior between classes that had to finish high school online and classes that entered college with a full high school career.
“The Fall of ’21 in particular, where the students coming to college had finished high school online — that was really a bumpy time where you could see the gap in socialization and responsibilities,” Fromm said. “[It] was hugely apparent, and the students, as a group, not down to the individual, but as a group, didn’t know how to behave.”
Fromm said that since COVID-19 — though not necessarily as a result of it — many students who transfer out of Occidental cite a difficulty finding a sense of belonging. The FYS program attempted to relieve these issues, according to Fromm, by incorporating social aspects into the learning experience.
“The first year program has added a social or communitarian component,” Fromm said. “[We’re] taking steps to build community and repair some of the asocialization or social drift.”
A campus community is not only built in the classroom but in club meetings and campus events. Along with changes in academic life, Assistant Director of SLICE Ginny Salazar said via email that, though she did not work at Occidental before the pandemic, from her research of student life events pre-COVID-19, she has noticed a clear difference between what events look like before versus after COVID-19.
“Events prior to the pandemic often featured more intricate décor and themed visual elements, suggesting a strong emphasis on detailed planning,” Salazar said via email. “Post-COVID, there’s been a noticeable move toward immersive experiences over elaborate setups.”
However, while academic life seems to be wrestling detrimental impacts, clubs at Occidental are bouncing back with renewed strength after the pandemic. According to Salazar, many clubs adapted nimbly to COVID-19’s disruptions, especially among affinity groups, by finding creative ways to meet and hold events. Returning to campus, Salazar said, has been a strong homecoming for club life.
“We’re seeing incredible student-led initiatives, a renewed sense of purpose and events that bring people together in powerful ways,” Salazar said via email. “There’s a noticeable energy on campus.”
Club leaders achieve this through establishing a common vision within the club, according to Salazar. At Occidental, Salazar said this comes naturally.
“When clubs create events that foster connection and a shared sense of vision, members feel seen and empowered,” Salazar said via email. “I can’t speak in detail about pre-COVID club life, but from what I’ve seen, Oxy students are natural leaders with a strong desire to contribute to their communities — something that has only become more evident in the past few years.”
One new initiative taken by students was the first annual Oxy Car Club Car Show April 4. There are some club events that Salazar refers to as “staple events,” long-running traditions on campus, and the Car Show intends to be one of them as a new part of the Occidental campus experience post-COVID-19.
The inaugural event presents an oddly serendipitous moment to a generation of high schoolers who witnessed car graduations and walked by utterly empty highways. At the event, there was no big chatter of a pandemic. There were flashing LED lights and retro automobile designs. Things did seem back to normal.
But those weighty historical, academic, social effects — what do they mean for us?
It seems that despite the history forgotten, passions lost, instruments dropped, even potential friends forsaken, everything’s been settled. The year is now 2025, and the COVID-19 experience seems like a bad dream.
For us who are growing up on this side of a global pandemic, there’s a palpable anxiety to life. Before we see this anxiety in full clarity, we believe it to be normal. Quan said that, in part, the pandemic’s destabilizing effects have fostered this mentality.
“There is a loss of the stability that comes with predictability,” Quan said. “Pre-COVID, we hadn’t in a very long time had, at least in a couple generations, an event that really pulled the rug out from an entire generation of people in terms of what we were told.”
But the inverse of this anxiety, according to Thompson, could furnish gratitude.
“[We have an] awareness of the instability of our societal norms,” Thompson said. “Maybe it formed an appreciation for what we actually have now.”
What do we actually have now? During the pandemic, we realized what it would feel like to wait in line for toilet paper or only see our professors on a computer screen. Today, only five years later, we might take for granted the physical presence of our friends and classmates. At Occidental, we might overlook the tightness of our community, especially in how it has helped us respond to the pandemic.
“I would suspect students who went to larger institutions had more problems, more students fell through the cracks, fell behind their curves,” Fromm said. “The closer you are to the people who are coaching you, the more help you get when things go sideways, or you slip up on something, or you need some attention or guidance.”
Maybe the smallness of Occidental is something underappreciated after COVID-19.
“I wonder at Oxy if it’s maybe even a little bit less so because of that really tight-knit relationship that our classroom structure was built on,” Quan said.
There’s also much that we’ve lost, including time. We experienced a different reality of youth than our parents and their parents’ generations and have learned different skills and habits. Yet this is no reason to be hopeless about our futures, according to Thompson, who spoke on his own experience growing up.
“I came into academia late. I was working, working in high school, working to pay my bills in high school,” Thompson said.
Thompson said his own career trajectory demonstrates that resilience is crucial for growth, regardless of one’s starting point.
“I was 10 years behind everybody,” Thompson said. “But my God, when I got there, it was like this is a whole new thing for me, and then I engaged and accelerated.”
Still, possibly the most valuable inheritance from our pandemic past is the shared ability to work through issues, personal and social, and endeavor to search for a truly meaningful life.
“It’s a global bonding experience, in some sense, that will remain for your generation and hopefully a clearer discernment of what you want out of life because you know how much can be upended in a moment,” Brighouse said.
Whatever trauma we experienced during COVID-19 does not have to determine our collective futures, if we can learn to address it.
“If those students have the advantage of learning what they need for their mental health, learning how to live with anxiety and depression in ways that allow them to still engage in the world and have a productive, engaged, on the whole, life that they enjoy, they feel they can choose and enjoy,” Brighouse said. “If the pandemic has put students into such a difficult situation where they have to learn that, that’s huge.”
One way the Occidental community has attempted to remember the historic events of COVID-19 has been through artistic performance. The Occidental College Theater Department premiered an original devised play, titled, “Alone Together,” April 3. The play retells the COVID-19 experience through six fictionalized characters living in one house during lockdown. In creating the play, the cast combed through over 100 interviews conducted during COVID-19 listening sessions.
Theater & Performance Studies Chair and director of the play Sarah Kozinn said via email that she still feels the aftereffects of the pandemic’s isolation.
“I think we’re still all a bit hungover from COVID, and I’ve noticed it has become harder and harder to convince people to go out into the world,” Kozinn said via email. “It’s much easier to plug in and tune out — or cultivate lives in the digital space.”
In her eyes, remembering through physical action, such as through theater, creates deep emotional bonds between us.
“There’s an energy that can only be felt when you are in proximity to other people, collectively bearing witness,” Kozinn said via email. “The performers feed off of the energy and the audience, in turn, reciprocates; it’s a beautiful symbiosis. You can’t mimic it in virtual space. It’s a kind of collective synchrony — when we all feel together. To me, this is magical.”
According to Kozinn, our global pandemic left an indelible mark in our unique past, one that we should reflect on rather than blot out of our lives.
“Can we really move on?” Kozinn said. “Should we? I think we should take the experiences with us.”
Contact Noah Kim at nkim4@oxy.edu
