Together
Again By Melodie Little
The pandemic isn’t over, but Eastern is celebrating its return to ‘near normal.’
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ack in March 2020, just a week after the EWU men’s basketball team learned its appearance in the NCAA Tournament had been canceled, the university announced there would be a one-week extension of Eastern’s typical week-long spring break. The pause in students’ return wasn’t about providing extra time for cavorting in Cabo. Eastern’s leadership was instead trying to “flatten the transmission curve” of the novel coronavirus — a scary new contagion spreading rapidly across the globe. It was a sensible step to keep students safe, just an extra week to ensure safety measures were in place. At the time, few would have predicted that the temporary closure would extend to an 18-month pivot to remote-only learning; a pivot that emptied dormitories, shuttered laboratories and classrooms, and created an eerie emptiness in Eastern’s once bustling common spaces. Though countless students, faculty and staff rose to meet the challenge of pandemic-related
