Sustaining our Community Virtually

April 4, 2020

Dear Students, Faculty and Staff:

As we reach the end of the second week of the COVID-19 era at Montclair State University, I am pleased to see faculty and students continuing to use effectively the available technologies to realize their commitment to teaching and to learning. I have heard from many of you about what you have learned from moving the instructional process online, including some unexpected pleasures. Supporting every student to successfully complete the semester is our goal, and I have great confidence we will be able to achieve it.

That said, there is no question that we are all missing our community: the face-to-face interactions in classrooms, studios, and laboratories; the sharing of space with teammates, officemates, roommates; the walks with colleagues and friends across our beautiful campus, which is now flowering into spring; the conversations over coffee and lunch; for students – the clubs, organizations, events, the group study sessions, and the parties; for staff and faculty – the committees, all those many committees. We miss the handshakes and the friendly hugs and the sharing of things from hand to hand.

And the missing of all that reminds us how valuable this University community is to us. The work we do here and the experiences and relationships we create here, in this physical place, are a profoundly important part of our teaching and learning and working and living. So, yes, we miss it, and what a joy it will be to reclaim it. We will keep working hard through these difficult days, and then, one day, we will all come streaming back, and the silent campus that I see from my window today will again be filled with life. There will be bongos and trombones playing in the quad, there will be groups of students walking and laughing, there will be faculty debating all sides of an issue, there will be staff everywhere making it all run smoothly. We don’t know when exactly that day will be, but it will come, and we’ll all be here, together, to celebrate it.

I am really stunned by how creatively you all are sustaining our community virtually. Heather Buchanan, director of choral studies, not only has found a way to keep 70 singers on pitch in a Zoom room, she has also created the new “Masterful Musings” series, online conversations with leading figures in choral music that are open to alumni as well as students. When Tara George’s journalism students told her they missed the camaraderie of the classroom, she organized an online movie watching party. The class viewed the documentary film The Central Park Five simultaneously and used a chat room to discuss it. Tara said she found the film in a free Sprague Library database called Kanopy. And Tiger Roholt in Philosophy will be taking his popular Thursday “Philosophy for Lunch” brown bag series online, starting next Thursday.

Here are just few more of the many creative and wonderful ways people are connecting and caring for each other:

• Look at how some Dance students figured out how to dance together even though they are physically apart. View their uplifting video.
• Read about Awilda Quezada Puntiel ’18, a Fashion Studies alumna who is fighting COVID-19 one stitch at a time by making and donating face masks, as is senior Brianna Cesaro of Kenilworth, who was featured on the news website TAPinto on Monday.
• Say hello to our newest Red Hawk, Juliana Pellikan, who tweeted a photo to show the world how excited she is about coming to Montclair State in the fall.
• Take encouragement from these messages alumni posted for our students during the #MontclairStateCares campaign last week.
• Enjoy the beautiful images of campus in our new Virtual Tour, recently created when we “virtualized” all of our Admissions activities.

And I look forward to being able to take pictures such as this with all of you soon.

Be well,
President Cole