OPINION: Bring Back the Books and Boats

Those who have read my work for a while know that I was no fan of the COVID-era restrictions. 

It was recently pointed out to me that COVID at Cornell has little to no relevance for today’s freshmen; that complaining about how things were during COVID has passed from the zeitgeist (if it was ever there to begin with).

And yet, COVID took so much from four classes of Cornellians. From the Class of 2020, which lost their senior spring semester, to my own Class of 2024, which lost our first year of true independence, many of us are not ready to forget the indignities of the COVID era.

It’s harder to forget when we’re constantly reminded of what we lost. One of the first casualties of the coronavirus response at Cornell was the Willard Straight Hall Browsing Library. The Class of 1925 through the Class of 2023 knew this room as a quiet place for studying and reflection. From ‘24 onwards, a sterile testing location.

That so much of the student body was unconcerned with the student union being occupied by the administration for use as a testing facility always struck me as bizarre. Here, administrators in white lab coats occupied a space donated for student use and repurposed it for the draconian measure of weekly (and sometimes bi-weekly and tri-weekly) ‘surveillance testing’ of every student.

Even now, almost a year after the restrictions were lifted for double-vaccinated and boosted students and testing has been relegated to antigen kits and Cornell Health, we’re still not ‘back to normal.’

Among other things, the boats are missing from the Browsing Library.

The missing model ships are such a minor detail, such a slight omission that even those students who were here before all hell broke loose might not notice their absence. And yet, even in a restored browsing library, where are the boats?

I first visited Cornell in October of 2019, then witnessing the ship models in the room. When I came back in August of 2021, I was quite surprised to find them missing. Colleagues of my class year, when asked, have no recollection of the boats at all. They have been memory-holed for an entire generation of Cornellians.

The ships are a metaphor for what Cornell has taken and not given back, for the university’s shoulder-shrugging stance after seizing two years of every undergraduate’s life.

Masks are mostly gone, ‘de-densified’ classrooms are a not-so-distant memory, and yet the shelves of the Browsing Library still sit empty. The adjoining room still has a crisis-era sign outside, too.

I reached out to the Willard Straight scheduling administrators to inquire about the boats’ fate, yet they have remained silent. For all we know, the ships sank to the bottom of Cayuga Lake in March 2020.

Perhaps it sounds strange to today’s freshmen to criticize the university months after the end of COVID-era restrictions. People would like to forget the lunatic enforcement of mask rules at Lynah Rink last Spring. Students would prefer not to remember the years spent on Zoom. 

Evidently, several classes of Cornellians are content to live and let live after the university seized several of the “shortest, gladdest years” of their lives. What’s lost in this c’est la vie attitude is that nobody ever truly apologized for the unnecessarily long restrictions that hampered campus life for two years. Even a year after the restrictions ended, the vestiges of administerial overreach haunt the campus.

They didn’t even bother to put the boats back.