From the President
FOREVER ROSE
I t is a little tempting to take a victory lap with this column.
After all, a year ago, we were not sure what the 2020-21 academic year would look like. Would we be able to teach our students in-person, remotely or a combination of both? While we focused primarily on in-person learning as much as possible, hybrid and online delivery methods were also utilized. In all aspects of campus life we spent significant time and effort implementing a series of safety protocols designed to keep our students, faculty and staff as healthy as possible. And we succeeded.
None of this means the cost of COVID-19 to our community was not high. Many of us suffered heartbreaking losses during this past year. My heart goes out to everyone for whom this year has brought immeasurable loss. We Prospered and Improved Yet, with this spring it feels as if a new day is emerging. Vaccination rates are rising and new cases are falling. We celebrated Commencement inperson and outdoors on our beautiful new athletic field (Pages 10-12), and we are looking forward to welcoming the Class of 2020 during Homecoming this fall to celebrate in person their own graduation milestone which they did virtually in 2020. As this issue of Echoes will show, we did not merely survive the past year, we prospered and improved. Work continued on our wonderful new academic building (Pages 6-9), which is set to welcome students this fall. Our new Noblitt Scholars program enabled us to welcome dozens of passionate, diverse and dedicated first-year students to campus; two of our faculty earned Fulbright Fellowships; we launched two new programs, Rose Squared and Rose Accelerate; and we crowned yet another student Goldwater Scholar. Meanwhile, more than 530 of our alumni and friends combined to donate a record $331,709 in a single day during our 2021 annual Day of Giving. We appreciate all the continued support of our alumni as we look for a strong finish to our $250 million Mission Driven fundraising campaign for Rose-Hulman.
BY ROBERT A. COONS, PRESIDENT coons@rose-hulman.edu
Thanks to our masking, social distancing, frequent testing, contact tracing, quarantining, and other policies outlined in our ever-evolving Rose Ready guidelines, (and, more importantly, our community’s compliance with those guidelines) the positivity rate for COVID-19 on our campus remained below one-half of one percent—consistently far below the national, state, and local averages.
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The institute also continued to receive votes of confidence from outside sources, including the Lilly Endowment, which awarded the AskRose Homework Help service a $1.46 million dollar grant to continue their good work and to increase our use of online technology in assisting middle
“ Many of us suffered heartbreaking losses during this past year. My heart goes out to everyone for whom this year has brought immeasurable loss.”
