FDOC
At long last, it’s FDOC (First Day of Classes). Your students will now begin to settle in to the ebb and flow of a regular schedule and create a spring semester routine. President Hatch sent a welcome message to our campus community, as is his custom at the start of each semester. I particularly appreciated this sentiment:
As we begin a new semester, know that you are here at Wake Forest because our future needs leaders with a depth of understanding and the aspiration to improve our communities. Our staff and faculty have invested their careers in that mission, and our students are preparing today for the journey that is yet to come. As all of us continue to live out our own stories, let us go forth as beacons of hope, knowing that, as Frederick Buechner wrote, “your purpose is where your greatest joy meets the world’s greatest need.”
Your students are our future leaders, and to the degree we can help them discern what their gifts, talents, and joys are, and how those intersect with the needs of our world, the closer we’ll come to living our motto of Pro Humanitate (for humanity).
Wake got great news recently: as we prepare to launch our African American Studies Program this fall, an anonymous donor has made a $1 million gift to “support the overall development of African American Studies including the creation of new and innovative courses, faculty research and collaboration, and a variety of programming designed to critically address pressing issues of public concern.” Corey D. B. Walker is Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities and the inaugural director of the African American Studies Program. You can read the full story here.
This important gift will establish the Dr. Dolly A. McPherson Fund for African American Studies. Dr. McPherson was a faculty member when I was a student; she was the first full-time African American female faculty member when she was hired in the ’70s and she did a lot of work about and with Dr. Maya Angelou, who also taught here. While I never took any of Dr. McPherson’s classes, I remember her fondly. I happened to run into her in Tribble Hall one day and told her how much I enjoyed Dr. Maya Angelou’s inaugural poem, On the Pulse of Morning. Dr. McPherson told me “Go buy a copy in the Bookstore and bring it back to me. I’ll get Dr. Angelou to sign it” – which she did. (I got two: one for me, and one for Mr. Daily Deac, shown here).
As I mentioned yesterday, we will be adding new videos to our Quarantine and Isolation website to help students digest quickly and easily some of the key points. There is a new video about hotel logistics for your viewing pleasure, and more to come soon. We also got notice that Governor Cooper extended until February 28th the 10 pm–5 am curfew to reduce gathering and social activity. However, on-campus libraries, study spaces and to-go dining will be available after 10 pm.
I subscribe to our Thrive office’s e-newsletter, which I highly recommend to your Deacs. This month is about financial wellbeing month, and this is an area that might be especially important for students to begin thinking about. There is a ‘join the list’ link at the end of the e-newsletter for interested students.
Our ’24s got the first issue of Letters So Dear today, and it is filled with good ideas on how to connect, upcoming events, and great advice. I also want to say a word about the new semester relative to our ’24s. Students have different class schedules now – so they people they ate lunch or dinner with last semester may not be available now. Sorority recruitment just took place, and some young women within friend groups may now have new sorority activities that make them less available to their fall semester friends; it’s also important to acknowledge that some women withdrew from recruitment or did not have the outcomes they hoped for, and are feeling a variety of things associated with that. Students may be in classes with lots of new faces or people they don’t know well. All of this can be unsettling for awhile – and your ’24s may sound uncertain, hesitant, unhappy, etc. as they feel out what the spring looks like. This is a normal part of student development – finding your footing in changing times.
You can acknowledge those feelings without dwelling on them, and help encourage your Deac to look at this as a new semester, filled with new opportunities, new dreams to chase, new people to meet, new discoveries to make. They will find their path if we give them room and space to do so.