Before the University made any announcement about moving to remote learning last spring, staff in the Office of Residential Life were making contingency plans.

In October 2020, The Herald launched a podcast with Ashish Jha, Dean of the School of Public Health at Brown University. At the end of our first call, Dr. Jha said: “If people stay focused, there’s a lot of good news coming in 2021.”

Members of the University’s administration and student body discussed changes for the upcoming summer and fall semesters, updates on the Food Access Initiative and the progress of the Brook Street dormitory project at the Brown University Community Council’s final meeting of the semester April 14.

In order to reduce the racial disparity in COVID-19 vaccination rates in Rhode Island, the state will hold two mass vaccination weekends for residents of color in the state.

Sixteen University community members tested positive for COVID-19 through the asymptomatic testing program from April 1 to April 7, Executive Vice President for Planning and Policy Russell Carey ’91 MA’06 told The Herald in a conversation April 8.

In an effort to record the voices of ordinary people during the COVID-19 pandemic, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Katherine Mason and Sarah Willen, associate professor of anthropology at University of Connecticut, co-founded the Pandemic Journaling Project to predesign an archive of people’s unique experiences. 

The University will hold Commencement in-person through two ceremonies and will open the event to students graduating mid-year in 2021.5, according to an email sent to the class of 2021 and 2021.5 April 8. 

As vaccines become much more widespread, we’re all ready to leave the horrors of the pandemic behind us. But there have been some silver linings. Looking forward as an institution, we ought to preserve the culture of understanding and accommodation that we were forced to develop in the face of the pandemic.

The University will require that all undergraduate, graduate and medical students on-campus or participating in in-person instruction receive the COVID-19 vaccine for the fall 2021 semester, barring medical or religious exemptions, President Christina Paxson P’19 announced in an email to the Brown community April 6.

The first-year experience at Brown for the class of 2024 is unique in that its challenges are unlike anything many upperclassmen have experienced before, with one of the primary difficulties being social isolation from their peers, whom they have only been allowed to meet through Zoom.