Queens College students persevere in spite of COVID's toll: A professor's perspective
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Sari Kisilevsky is an associate professor in Queens College’s Department of Philosophy.
By Sari Kisilevsky
It would be hard to overstate the level of devastation the pandemic wrought on Queens College students this spring.
As students at private universities packed up their dorms and flew home, Queens College students faced a different dilemma: whether to go out to work as essential workers and risk all that their families had sacrificed for their educations, or watch as older family members risked their lives to go off to work so that they can stay home and complete their studies.
Either way, the weight of this burden was more than many could bear.
Located in the epicenter of the pandemic, the college closed just as the wave of COVID-19 infections was cresting. The shutdown left students in turmoil, as their parents’ jobs disappeared, income evaporated and vital family and community connections collapsed.
Faculty and administrators scrambled to reestablish connections with students armed with nothing but clumsy software and outdated email addresses.
CUNY is unique in its role as an engine for moving students from the bottom sectors of society up through the ranks, lifting them and their families into economic security.
Queens College students often represent the culmination of sacrifices families have made for the sake of their futures, many having endured unspeakable hardships so that these students can have the opportunity to succeed.
Students’ lives are complex matrices of family obligations, paid work, school work and commuting, with students regularly arriving late to class after working overnight shifts and leaving early to care for sick family members, balancing their intellectual, emotional and social needs with the hopes their families have pinned on their successes.
When the pandemic hit, these delicate arrangements were upended.
Many students were forced to leave their homes as each household recalculated its ability to secure its future.
My students were totally displaced, going months without internet and phone connections, losing family support, and many were forced to move into dangerous and abusive situations or to escape them.
CUNY set up emergency resources, but moving them through the bureaucracy at a distance and getting them to students was near impossible.
In any event, there was little CUNY could do to counter the bargain the city had struck of sacrificing its poor and immigrant population so that its wealthier residents could live in safety and comfort.
And yet the students came back.
They phoned into class from hospital rooms, where they were accompanying sick family members for treatment; from backrooms at grocery stores where they were working as essential workers; from basement apartments holding their phones up to the window for reception; from homeless shelters and safe houses where they were escaping abuse; from sick in bed with COVID.
They grieved together, prayed together, chatted and exchanged Instagram handles.
They checked in on each other’s health, keeping close tabs on who went missing from class and how each of their families’ were doing.
As each of them lost close family members, they cried together and comforted each other, sharing stories of loss and remembrance as the virus tore through their households.
I am at a loss to describe the level of trauma I encountered this semester.
The burden these students bear to repay all the sacrifices their parents and grandparents have made and lift their families out of poverty simply crushed them as they watched their families succumb to this grim calculation.
In the decade that I have been at Queens College, the bookstore has closed and the food pantry opened to bustling business. And now, as the city faces the worst economic crisis in a century, CUNY is facing massive disinvestment.
As the semester wound down, students were more apprehensive than ebullient, anxious about facing a summer with no support rather than excited to be free from school.
“Professor, what’s going to happen to us?” they asked on the last day of class.
I was anxious too. Having spent the past two months managing crises, I was worried about losing connection to my students, and severing their connection with each other.
When I asked them, all of my students opted to continue to meet through the summer, turning our classes into clubs and coming up with their own reading lists.
We are still meeting and checking in on each other, and the students are still navigating their trauma, all of them saying this semester has transformed their lives.
Sari Kisilevsky is an associate professor in Queens College’s Department of Philosophy.
