Introducing Taylor Stewart, Our Vassar Correspondent
The Vassar College junior gives us a wistful peek into life on campus this fall.
[From the editor: Recent events have opened our eyes to the fact that we need to be inclusive of a wider swath of the population, including the generation that has even more at stake than the rest of us. Meet Taylor Stewart, a Vassar junior from Tokyo majoring in English and art history. She likes writing about art and music as a means of understanding community, and we look forward to the insights she shares with us in the stories she will be contributing to Rural Intelligence.]
“Gordon Commons” is Vassar College’s dining center. It used to be called officially the “All Campus Dining Center,” which was dubbed “the Deece” by really anyone and everyone. “The Deece” remains the sole acceptable name with its own verb, “Deecing,” e.g., “Do you want to Deece at 12?” The affection that produced this nickname and hundreds of in-house food reviews on Instagram is now being challenged. This year, students get their food in boxes and eat outside, crowding benches, lying on the grass, sometimes bringing their own folding chairs and forming socially distanced, brochure-worthy circles.
Eating outside is pleasant, but I’m still taken aback at how normal things are, or seem to be, under the circumstances. Clubs table outside the Deece. Select classes take place under tents outside, with spaced-out desks and loudspeakers and a laptop poised on the professor’s podium so that students studying remotely may watch over Zoom. The quad view is like any other warm day pre-pandemic. Students play guitar, read, lounge, put up hammocks, put down blankets and put on these insistent picturesque smiles that seem performed. Reckoning with the anxieties of being on campus during a pandemic? I think to myself. Or maybe they are extra cheery after a summer of solitude.
Before I arrived on campus, I awaited the semester with some trepidation. Not only because I was making quite the gamble (financially and healthwise) by coming to Poughkeepsie from my hometown in Tokyo, but also because I knew all my classes were online (about 40 percent of Vassar professors opted to teach remotely this semester). I didn’t know if it was worth it. I fretted over the coming screen fatigue, and the prospect of Vassar transforming into a surveillance state, of being indoors all day, of losing the ability to wander my beloved library. And parties were out of the question.
Things were tumultuous at first. After a summer spent shunning crowds, seeing new faces trickle in was scary. As the administration navigated the new normal, they fumbled sometimes: there were many issues with on-campus testing and quarantining infected or potentially infected students. Things have settled, however. Nasal swabs and mask wearing have fused themselves onto student schedules, as routine as getting coffee or turning in a paper. People have found creative ways to restore the old order: sitting on grass with remarkable, maybe forced gaiety, for example, or the digitization of the school newspaper. To my relief, I am able to study and work my job in the library as usual. Sometimes, I find little-explored crevices of campus to attend my Zoom lectures from.
It was an experiment — even similar institutions like Smith and Pomona are remote this semester. With the media’s eye fixed on Vassar since the summer, there is pressure to not only minimize infections, but also justify our being here.
“Aren’t you getting claustrophobic?” my parents asked me over the phone. I answered that being at Vassar before the pandemic was already pretty claustrophobic. Even though only students and staff are allowed on campus, the Vassar bubble is hardly more rigid than it used to be. Often, businesses from the neighboring Arlington will sell coffee or falafel on the lawns and lend everything a sense of reality and being in the world. Students line up in droves and bounce giddily on the balls of their feet.
With the chill, people are getting nervous. They know that as Poughkeepsie autumn begins to rear its head, these arrangements, contingent on outdoor social distancing, become less of a possibility. Even with a radically altered COVID-wary agenda, it is easy to get lost in student life and the flow of work-play-sleep. But that is now. Vassar is currently at zero active cases, which has created a sort of lull — the threat of an outbreak is tucked at the back of our minds, no longer plaguing every thought. This makes the whole enterprise of going to school feel more like school rather than some epic quest to get through the semester with your health intact.
However, with the collective relief comes an unease, maybe even a suspicion, that lurks under everything, from lectures to doing laundry with other people in the room. Currently, the weather, safety regulations, student compliance and some luck allow for a quasi-normal campus life. In this case, I can only hope that this experiment does not go awry.
