My PCP warned me in February to stop going outside. She didn’t say much more than that, but I heeded her words. Canceled two conference trips. Switched my classes online, privately grateful for years of experience in doing so during fibromyalgia flare-ups or excruciating menstrual cycles that annihilated my ability to move. Being able to go through the motions in emergent catastrophe is a rare luxury.

Pace University put out statements of solidarity and guidelines for quarantining that were as hasty and minimal as the capitalistic approach adopted by the CDC. I’m considered officially high-risk for COVID-19, but unofficially, we all are. I can’t help but think of HIV, polio, a whole host of post-viral syndromes whose material costs weren’t discovered until years later.

From our front-row seats to crisis in NYC, my Pace University students and I strode grimly through March, April, and May, while the morgues overflowed and freezer trucks were mobilized to store the excess. Death was all around us in the news. Death lingered in my students’ homes, in their dorms. Without regular healthcare maintenance, my pain climbed drastically. Pace offered buzzwords of compassion but tacitly suggested we were responsible for overcoming our limited capacities and successfully completing the term, “unprecedented times” be damned.

But what’s really unprecedented about this, anyway? Disease ravages us, emergency measures are briefly taken, and we rush back to feigned normalcy. I diligently taught my courses so I wouldn’t lose my job, and my students diligently wrote their research papers so they wouldn’t fail, in a semester that felt designed for our failure.

Weariness and pain made it easier for all of us to say the quiet parts out loud. I’m used to having these conversations anyway, but the pandemic gave these questions renewed urgency for me this semester, and made my students more open to reflecting on them:

• What does success and failure mean to Pace University, your professors, your student organizations, your future?
• What kind of student or person do you need to perform to be successful?
• What happens if you succeed or fail, at school, at home, in society?
• How has the pandemic changed your ideas about success and failure?
• From what institutions or structures did your original ideas about success and failure come from?
• How can we ensure our needs are met at Pace, if not by Pace?

I’m teaching writing in the disciplines courses, but writing is influenced by an entire social, textual, environmental, and material ecology; it’s natural enough to consider questions like the above in process reflections about research writing.

Now, at the end of May, final grades submitted, the last university administration deadline met, I’m flooded with feelings of failure. I feel invisible. I feel like I’m dying. I feel like an impostor. I feel like I have let my students down, because academia insists that successful BIPOC professors double as successful social workers, but the problem is you can’t save everyone. Even with the Pass/Fail option, many of my students failed. Some quietly vanished, only for me to learn later that half their family had passed away, or they themselves had been hospitalized.

I’m lucky. I did not die. I did not lose a family member, chosen kin, or close friend. The sort of good fortune that feels like a failure of personhood. It’s internalized ableism and the slow violence of model minoritization speaking, I know.

At least I can tell myself that, in my classrooms at least, we managed to find new ways to care for each other in the university… not the university’s definition of care as a temporary tool means of optimizing functionality, but care as a means of recentering our own definitions of personhood, success, and failure.