FSL Updates
Dear FSL Community,
Welcome to yet another welcome email welcoming you to this new academic year. This is a fall quarter that opens on the heels of a spring and summer full of anxiety, pain, resistance, and uncertainty. It is a fall quarter that is still tenuous with courses and professional work not looking anything like any of us had planned for. And yet, here we are.
Yes, here we are. We are here by the need to be flexible, adaptive, and resilient. For those of us who were here back in the spring, we saw our worlds upended. For you all as students, courses were shifted online. For some students, work experiences were moved remotely. While for other students, their work experiences stayed on campus but were crafted very differently. Those of us who are administrators also experienced upheavals in our work lives and in how we look out for and look after elders and young people in our care. Perhaps all of us became more mindful of our health, our vulnerabilities, and our responsibility to keep each other well. We learned much this spring – about ourselves, our work, and possibilities for doing work and life differently.
We seemed to move from spring quarter into a long, hot summer that kept the virus at center stage, but also added the specter of Black death at the hands of state sanctioned violence and the uprisings that responded, NO MORE. BLACK LIVES MATTER became a tagline for hundreds of corporations from Door Dash to the NFL and NASCAR and from colleges and universities to street murals in cities across the country. Hundreds and thousands have marched – and perhaps many of us have also. Activists have called on these institutions to follow up pronouncements with action – and perhaps many of us have also - calling on public officials to divest from policing and find new means of promoting and sustaining community safety.
It was a summer that saw judicial victories and spells of relief related to Indigenous sovereignty, DACA, and employment discrimination protections for queer and trans people nationwide. There was much to celebrate and the need for harm reduction and to continue the fight became even more apparent.
While the pandemic response has been overwhelming the news cycle and our inboxes as we begin this academic year, we cannot forget our responsibilities as educators, as citizens, and as humans to keep fights for equity and justice centerstage. We must remember Fraternity & Sorority Life is a community brought together by a commitment to do justice through our service and time as members in these organizations. These are the times we prepare for; these are the occasions we rise.
There is much we are being asked to do in this moment that we have no blueprint for and no past track record to judge our efforts by. Let us not be daunted by the uncertainties of this time. Rather, let us give in to innovation, to ideation, to compassionate understanding, and to collaborative problem-solving. Now is the time to extend grace to each other and to ourselves.
So - even as classes have begun this week and much of the time those of you on campus are meeting remotely and learning perhaps synchronously, asynchronously, or both; even as others continue to learn asynchronously and experience work upheavals; even as we all move through what promises to be another difficult election season – let us rise to the occasion and foster our own and each other’s humanity, possibility, and commitment.
We have the tools to not just get through this, but to get through it well. The FSL team is here to support you as students in the community – professionally, personally, and academically.
We look forward to connecting with you all throughout this quarter in meetings, calls, one on ones, etc.
-Fraternity & Sorority Life Staff
PLEASE MAKE SURE TO COMPLETE THE FORMS AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS EMAIL BY THIS FRIDAY!
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