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Leadership

A message from the chancellor: Reflecting on two years

"Through the toughest days of this pandemic, we kept learning, kept advancing scientific knowledge and kept looking out for one another. I’m proud of that, and I hope you are, too."

The Old Well in the spring.
Trees bloom around the Old Well in the spring of 2021. (Photo by Jon Gardiner/UNC-Chapel Hill)

Dear Carolina Community,

It was two years ago this coming week when our senior leadership team at Carolina gathered to discuss a drastic step. With a novel coronavirus spreading fast across the world, we decided not to bring students back after spring break, shifting thousands of classes online for what we all hoped would be a short-lived state of emergency.

“The days to follow will continue to bring us more change and challenges,” I wrote then. “Carolina has faced uncertainty throughout its history, and those who have walked this campus before us have always found ways to adapt, advance and thrive.”

Those days of change and challenge lasted far longer than any of us expected.

When you return to work or class on Monday, masks will be optional in most campus settings for the first time since 2020. That will be a welcome change for many of us and a difficult transition for others. I hope all of us will be gracious and understanding of our fellow Tar Heels, recognizing that a mask-optional policy is exactly what it sounds like, making room for different levels of comfort as we all continue to learn to live with COVID-19 in our midst.

As a longtime member of the Carolina community, I think we’ve shown remarkable solidarity over the last two years. We’ve made sacrifices, weighed the demands of safety against the imperative of providing an education and learned to be humble before judging the actions of others or assuming we can know exactly what’s right in moments of profound uncertainty.

Through the toughest days of this pandemic, we kept learning, kept advancing scientific knowledge and kept looking out for one another. I’m proud of that, and I hope you are, too.

Sincerely,

Kevin M. Guskiewicz
Chancellor