Senior Tutor's Report

It occurred to me that simply saying 'Coronavirus' might be enough for this year’s report. The extraordinary events of the last few months are no doubt adequately encapsulated for all of us in that one word. However, while it encapsulates the problem we have faced, it doesn’t in itself convey the activity and creativity that has been the College’s response.

We had, of course, been preparing for the pandemic since January. However, it was preparation in the dark: a best guess at what was coming with most of us having no experience of anything of the kind. Early preparations focused on potential isolation staircases and animagined need for the delivery of hot food, but by March it was clear that, whatever a pandemic was, it was not going to allow us to carry on in a state of near normality. At the Senior Tutors’ Committee on Friday, 13th March, we were told to look to our students and plan to get as many home as possible. For Clare, that meant announcing the evacuation of the Colony, giving students a week in which to make their plans to leave. By Cambridge standards this seemed remarkably fast, but, in fact, we were only just ahead of lockdown.

For many of our students, immersed in the end of term and working to Easter deadlines, the severity of the situation was initially hard to believe. Some had deliberately opted to stay, given the pandemic situation in their home countries; others did not have anywhere else that could sensibly be called home. We allocated accommodation in Memorial Court to those who needed to remain with us; others went home on the basis that we simply didn’t know how bad the situation was going to be. The graduate students were in a different situation, but as borders closed the College’s advice to them was that they should plan to be wherever they most wanted to spend the foreseeable future. For some of them that meant going home; for others it meant staying at Clare.

Our overseas students in particular faced the anxiety of being separated from their families, or of making several attempts at catching flights, only to come back to College again. I know of at least one early morning car journey by a Fellow taking otherwise stranded students to Heathrow, and I’m aware of countless acts of kindness by Fellows and staff.

We might have expected a brief hiatus between evacuation and the reinvention of the Collegiate University in its online form, but there simply wasn’t one. Even as we were closing the barrier at the Colony, plans were underway to transform the way in which we teach. The rapid acquisition of new skills has been impressive, as has been the willingness of students and supervisors alike simply to get on with the task in hand, whatever form it might take. We have now embarked on an academic year where at least some of our teaching is online.

We have restarted what we can and adapted everything else. In fact, ‘adapting’ has been the watchword. As I write this, we have just reached the end of a still recognisable, but very innovative, Freshers' Week. Both the UCS and the MCR have been at their creative best as they found online ways to ensure that our new students were welcomed to the College. The Matriculation dinners took place over four nights and in ten venues, but they were accomplished safely, with the catering team also providing food for those still in quarantine. We have screens and masks and social distancing and designated ‘households’, but we are here. We do not underestimate the challenges of the year to come, and we continue to learn on all fronts, but the College is populated again, and we once again feel like Clare.

Dr Jacqueline Tasioulas
Senior Tutor