Dear colleagues,

Now that the Winter 2020 term is officially behind us, I wanted to send a huge thank-you to everyone with whom we have served shoulder to shoulder over the past month.

To all the members of our campus team, I extend my deepest appreciation for the integral role you have played. I particularly want to recognize our frontline instructors, department and faculty support staff, technical crews, educational developers, instructional designers, and academic administrators — you have done an outstanding job. So much of what made the end of the academic term a success lies in your countless hours of both up-front and behind-the-scenes efforts. To everyone, bravo and thank you for your good work.

We have all been transformed by the experience of the coronavirus pandemic — some of us directly through its impact on the health of friends and loved ones, others indirectly through the changes in our daily work routines or the simultaneous closeness and distancing within our households. We have all heard the metaphor of pivot being used to describe how in the past month we were able to turn from a face-to-face method of operation to virtual, remote, alternative, and indeed unknown modes of being. Me, I think that what the University of Windsor community accomplished in the final weeks of the Winter term was not just a pivot, it was positively a pirouette, performed with grace and executed in unison. I am so proud of how you rose to this unprecedented occasion, caring for one another, for our students, our disciplines, our calling in the world.

T.S. Eliot speaks of “the still point of the turning world.” In the midst of all our pivoting and pirouetting, I hope that you are able to find your own still point, whatever or wherever or whoever that may be.

And I hope that you and yours stay healthy and happy. We are joint labourers in this, and jointly we will work through it.

• Douglas Kneale
  Provost and Vice-President, Academic