March 07, 2024 | OPINION | By Zeke Lloyd
This article came as the product of deep reflection about the experiences of our graduating class. I encourage every member of the class of 2024 to contribute to The Senior Edition, a commemorative magazine which will include photos, memories, moments, and stories from the last four years in addition to superlatives. Cutler Publications and CCSGA are collaborating to publish it during Block 8, so it’s crucial for us to get the necessary material before fourth Wednesday of Block 6.
Around midday on Friday, March 1, 2024, I drove north along Nevada Ave. I rolled down my windows, grateful to see that the cold front had finally given in. It felt like we might skip springtime altogether and head straight into summer. To my right, Tava Quad burst with life. In the golden afternoon light, no less than a hundred people occupied the open grass. Hammocks and slacklines stretched over what, just a few days before, had been little more than a white, wind-swept tundra. Today it looked like Easter Day on the lawn of a megachurch.
I feel surprised every time I see something like that, the image of students lounging about, enjoying the early days of college under the fickle, though benevolent, Colorado sky. I believe it will remain a foreign sight to me for many years to come.
Months before I arrived in Colorado Springs as a first year in the fall of 2020, Colorado College announced a delayed return for sophomores, juniors and seniors. Only my class, the class of 2024, would make their way to campus that August.
Our hope for normalcy was short-lived. Just a month after I arrived in Loomis, I moved out of my third-floor room and into a new apartment over four miles from campus. My relocation came days after the administration dismissed the class of 2024 from the premises, a decision made on the heels of building-wide quarantines in each of the big three dorms. Aside from select first years who underwent a school-sanctioned process allowing them to remain on campus, everyone left. Some went home, while others searched for alternate housing in Colorado Springs. The school gave us about two weeks to decide, pack up and leave.
Those who chose to stay via direct petition with the school assumed an enormous risk. The dorms’ quarantines of August and September were inhumane. For example, students in Loomis received meals three times a day, the food left outside the dorm-room door. Though cooked at the dining halls, it was always cold by the time we received it. It rarely provided enough calories for a college student diet and the school made little effort to provide alternatives for students with dietary restrictions. In terms of recreation, those inside Loomis were granted a single hour each day to be outside, with each student forced to sit or stand in a specific designated area on Stewart field. Residential advisors kept careful watch on the first years, barring any action which violated the stringent protocol guidelines.
Two weeks after the end of the Loomis quarantine, when CC told our class to leave campus, many took it as a welcome opportunity to escape. I don’t blame them.
Those of us who chose to stay in Colorado Springs hoped, without any evidence or rationale, it could be a fresh start to college.
Not surprisingly, we were mistaken. I did not return to residential living that year and instead lived off-campus both semesters, seldom able to visit the school at all. I had little reason to. My first in-person course took place during Block 8. When one member of my three-person class tested positive one week in, we were back on Zoom.
Occasionally over the course of that year, I would visit the library. It was a whopping 45-minute bike ride from my first-semester apartment, but I desperately wanted to be a part of something that felt like college. The library’s website required each student to book a time slot in the library, marking down the location and duration of the stay. They checked each reservation at the front desk before allowing anyone to enter. Every floor became a quiet floor.
It’s strange now to write about the world we knew back then.
The class of 2024 found glimmers of humanity despite the cruelty imposed by our administration. Of the four roommates I lived with during my freshman year, all four remain some of my closest, most-trusted peers. And, in mid-October, sitting in the 1991 Classroom, I made my first friend beyond the small, tight-knit group of Loomis evacuees I had chosen to live with off-campus. She is still one of my closest friends to this day. We still like to meet in the same classroom, just to remember how different things are now.
It’s important that those who came after understand what this place was for us, the seniors who were never freshmen. How foreign this landscape has become.
I feel a kind of retrospective envy. Now, with post-college life on the horizon, I wouldn’t ask to be in a dorm. But through the years, even after the dystopian quarantine conditions, a small part of me never got older. A voice in my head never went away.
I remember looking up at Loomis from the parking lot, spotting my room-to-be on the north-eastern edge of the third floor. I remember hugging my parents and saying goodbye, making my way upstairs, and sitting in the room waiting for my roommate to arrive. Fewer than 24 hours later, the shutdown began.
But part of me is still there, sitting in the dorm room. Looking out at Boettcher and Tutt Library, thinking about what the next four years might be.
I like to trick myself. I look for a moment at Loomis or Mathias and think of the lives within, the routines I never had, the freshmen who will one day be seniors. I wonder what four years makes a person into. I wonder what senior year is supposed to feel like.
But when I think of the people who kept me going, the people who pushed me to believe in our class even when our class was spread out across the country, I start to wonder if we’re not so unlucky after all. We are the smallest class by far, and those of us who came back at the outset of sophomore year found rubble. It’s been three years of healing, learning and building. I’m proud of every day I spent alongside each of them. We are the seniors who were never freshmen. This school should never forget it.