Paul Kengor: A professor’s coronavirus perspective

“Well, you know I’m graduating this semester. This may be the last time I see you.”

So said one of my students somberly at the end of class last week. Typically, that’s a goodbye I hear in mid-May, not mid-March. It came in response to a campuswide email announcing that doors would be closing and students and professors alike would need to begin transitioning to online learning. The CDC had just issued an alert urging a halt to gatherings of more than 50 people (numbers soon reduced even more), citing the risk of coronavirus. Grove City College had seen no cases on campus, nor in our county. We were hanging in there, but now the writing was on the wall, or at least the CDC website.

One might think that students would have been celebrating. Many nationwide did just that — storming the beaches of Florida, partying up. North of us, the first reported case of coronavirus in Erie County came via a Mercyhurst University student who went to Europe for spring break, visiting several Level 3 countries.

I can you tell, however, that our students weren’t celebrating. There was a morose feeling on campus, particularly as I write from my office in a virtually empty building.

Among the gloomy students is my second son, who’s graduating. This wasn’t how he planned to finish his four years. This was supposed to be his best semester, the one he set up carefully, with favorite classes. All his friends left campus last week. Amid an empty campus, he feels empty. He fears he will not see them again until graduation day, maybe not even then.

The situation reminds me of an article from our campus newspaper that I regularly read to students in my Modern Civilization course — a retrospective on life at Grove City College during World War II.

“It was a sad, sad time on campus,” remembered one alumna. “Almost the entire male student population was gone.” Another added: “I was a freshman. Many of the girls were crying because they had brothers who would be called to war. In just a few short weeks, a lot of the boys were gone. We had very little social life, no football team or anything like that.”

Sad as those memories are, the situation on campus in 2020 is actually more desolate. Boys and girls alike are gone. Sports are finished. And of course, this is true for campuses nationwide. No March Madness this year. Excellent speakers headed to campus are no longer coming. In fact, the organization I run at Grove City College, the Institute for Faith & Freedom, has been hardest hit precisely there. This is our busiest time for lectures, including our annual April conference. They’re all canceled.

It’s a difficult time, but America has seen much worse. I was reminded of that by Ashley, the last student to leave the room at the end of my Major European Governments course last Monday: “These are tough times, Dr. Kengor,” she acknowledged, “but imagine what our grandparents and great grandparents went through a hundred years ago.” She noted the period from World War I to the influenza epidemic to the Great Depression to World War II.

Yes, imagine. Now there’s a student with some perspective.

Let’s hope our times don’t get nearly as difficult.