A Message from the President

Dear Goucher community,

These past few weeks have been incredibly trying and have put a strain on all of us. Our global community is suddenly facing a new reality—one that physically separates us, while at the same time making the reality of our common humanity and interconnectedness all the more evident. Global pandemics transcend national boundaries.

Here at Goucher, we are doing our best to support one another and recognize the challenges that each of us faces. We, too, want to be with our students on campus, sharing a meal and conversation in Mary Fisher, enjoying the performances and exhibitions of our performing and visual arts students, celebrating the achievements of our student athletes, or learning and exchanging ideas in person. While the rhythm of our daily lives at Goucher has changed, that doesn’t mean our collective work ceases.

At Goucher, our classes have transitioned fully to remote learning. The rigorous education Goucher is known for continues and is now delivered in a new format. We have quickly adapted and built the capacity for online support of our digital learners. Virtual classrooms have been created, online office hours posted, and all of our student support services are now available remotely.

We recognize this is a stressful time for everyone in our community. That’s why we have made it a priority to support our students through this transition to online learning. The library and our librarians are fully accessible online, and the range of academic support services we normally offer is now online as well, whether that’s the Writing Center, the QR Center, ACE, or academic advisors.

As liberal arts scholars, we are adaptive. Like the Complex Problem Exploration classes we promote, we build upon the knowledge we have acquired from a range of disciplines to find new solutions to the unique challenges we face daily.

We remain deeply committed to our community principals of respect, inclusion, communication, social justice, and responsibility. We have witnessed it each day in one another. Our students have had to juggle moving off-campus and online. Our alumnae/i have continued to give generously to support our students, and our faculty and staff have pooled their campus resources to help aid local medical workers when they have asked for help. We are thankful and #GoucherProud.

Our dedicated staff is also doing the hard work to help ensure our beloved institution thrives for generations to come. We continue to recruit an incoming class to start this fall and have transitioned all of our on-campus and in-person admissions work to virtual events. These have received a tremendous response, and deposits from prospective Goucher students continue to come in. We have also enlisted alumnae/i from across the country to help participate in our newly configured Goucher Bound virtual events.

We will persevere and remain a place where intellectual curiosity continues to prosper, as Goucher has done for the past 135 years. In the end, we will emerge from this historic time as a stronger community.

Stay well, and please be in touch.

Kent

Kent  Devereaux, President