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A recent letter to the editor lamented the lack of spectator sports in the Dome.

When it will be safe to watch people throw balls around in person is a complicated question. But centering the loss of spectator sports — as though this is the singular tragedy of university life during the pandemic — misses the bigger picture of what we have lost.

A university is not a sports league that, as a fanciful hobby, does a bit of scholarship on the side. Syracuse University exists to provide students a top-notch education, perform cutting-edge research and serve our community with the skills we cultivate.

Instead, our choristers are reduced to singing 18-feet apart with masks on. Our student scientists and mathematicians, once able to draw diagrams and debate analysis around a shared piece of paper or chalkboard, are consigned to gloomy, invisible conversations over Blackboard Collaborate and clumsy drawings with a mouse. Students in lab classes, once able to do experiments, labor over frame-by-frame analysis through YouTube videos. Lively in-person conversation and debate — the lifeblood of everything from theoretical physics to philosophy — is gone. 

And, of course, the impacts are unequal, falling disproportionately on those who have no safe, calm place to do remote courses, those with no money to buy a tablet and stylus, those with hearing impairments who can’t understand others with masks on, those in China without solid connections to the open Internet, and many others. We are trying. Faculty and academic staff have worked long hours and spent thousands of dollars of our own money on equipment to help keep research and teaching going. But it is a pale shadow of what we were able to do in the Before Times.

These are the losses to COVID-19 — a pandemic sustained in part by the selfish behavior of partiers, including student athletes, whose lust for a “normal college experience” (whatever that means) has deprived our dedicated scholars of their opportunity to learn and do research. 

Lament that loss. And, above all, lament the loss of life and health of our colleagues and family who have succumbed to this pandemic. Maybe, sometime soon, we will be able to sing them a proper requiem, but we cannot even do that yet.

We haven’t been able to watch people play basketball in person. This is a loss, and to some, it is a meaningful one. But we have lost so many more important things that are at the heart of what a university is.

In December 2019, I had the honor of presenting a brilliant piece of creative writing by a student to my astronomy class. Six hundred students, stunned into silence by the humanity and vision of one of their peers, gave her a thunderous standing ovation at the end. Let’s focus on getting that back, and the innumerable other moments like it that have now faded or been lost entirely.

And then, once Knowledge can properly crown Her seekers with laurels again, we can turn our focus to sports.

Associate Teaching Professor, Physics

Walter Freeman

Published on March 4, 2021 at 10:18 pm