"Without us this campus shuts down"
Three voices kept coming back to me this year. First, Tanya Hughes, who oversees the residential hall cleaning staff at the University of Florida. All across the country, campus custodians and cleaning staff have become essential during the pandemic. Colleges intent on opening in-person and housing students on campus have leaned heavily on their building and facilities teams to do it.
"I'm not trying to be arrogant here," says Hughes, "without us this campus shuts down."
The cleaning itself hasn't been hard — the difficult part has been navigating her and her team's fears around having to work in person. While she admits there are limited benefits to keeping surfaces clean, she says being more visible – having people see her staff working as hard as they do – has been a silver lining in all of this.
"We are somebody," Hughes says. "You may not have seen us before the pandemic, but I guarantee you'll see us now."
The second voice I’ve been thinking about is Yusef Pierce’s. He’s a college graduate, who gave his graduation speech while inside the California Rehabilitation Center, a medium-security prison.
Pierce was the first person to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the Inside-Out program at Pitzer College, a liberal arts school outside Los Angeles. His speech was inspired by a letter his mother had sent him just a few months into his nearly 20-year prison sentence.
"What's done is done," she wrote. "You, now more than ever, must diligently seek and obtain higher education."
In his speech, Pierce said, "I realize now that I've saved this letter because it was meant for me way back then to share it with you all today."
Finally, I’ve been thinking about Faylene Begay, a student parent living on the Navajo Nation Reservation in Arizona. Internet access has always been a problem for Begay, and during the pandemic completing her assignments without a reliable connection became a real challenge. "It was just beyond my power to submit my work," Begay recalls. "That alone just kind of depleted my purpose ... made me feel like I was defeated by the internet."
Begay’s experience mirrors that of many other students, especially those living in rural areas of tribal lands. Across the county, access to a strong internet connection isn't a given. But help is on the way. President Biden's infrastructure package includes $65 billion for improving broadband – an effort that could help countless other students like Faylene Begay. |
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