The Work We’ve Done, The Work That Remains

I’ve had the opportunity to travel the country and cover big-time college sports, spent days in the halls of Congress, and been given the great and serious responsibility of writing about matters of life and death: crime and punishment, sickness and disease, natural disasters, national tragedies.

I remember with searingly vivid detail how my days were spent in the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, back when I was a young reporter working at The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, and I remember thinking during those horrific times that never would I be asked to write about something so shocking and sobering ever again.

Of course, I was wrong. Because I now find myself writing these words during a global pandemic that has sickened millions and stolen the lives of tens of thousands more, and at a moment in our nation’s history when our collective failure to achieve true racial justice has come to the forefront of our national discourse. As a nation, as a university community and as individuals, we have suffered incalculable loss over these past few months, and as this pandemic continues to ravage our world—and as important, often difficult discussions around race in this country and on our campus continue—we are all dealing with feelings of anxiety, sadness, anger, doubt and fear.

It is within this context that we share with you this special issue of the Lehigh Bulletin. It is an issue in which we share the stories of Lehigh people during these unsettled times. They are stories of resilience and reflection, of action and urgency, of acknowledgment and activism. They are stories of how we responded as a university to an unprecedented situation as the virus bore down on us in early March, and how individuals throughout our community—students, faculty, staff, leadership—persevered, improvised and led in the often turbulent weeks that followed.

We hope these stories inspire you to do your part, however big or small, to help your community and ours build the better future we all so desperately seek.

Nothing about these past few months has been easy. I think we all understand that nothing will be easy about the months to come. What I do know is that the Lehigh community is up for the challenges ahead.

There is work to do. And this community is ready to do it.

Sincerely,
Tim Hyland, Editor