Supporting our Bentley Family

Bentley Faculty, Staff and Students,

Ever since I was a child, the month of May has been special to me. Perhaps it was growing up in the world of higher education—I watched every spring as my father, clad in regalia, marched off to commencement at the University of Minnesota. I learned early from my parents the importance of annual rituals. I understood that these important moments mark critical passages in life and encourage us to pause for a moment of reflection on what really matters.

Over the weekend, as I spent time with my husband Michael and our two sons who have temporarily relocated to work remotely in Waltham, I was reflecting with gratitude on the many memories we’ve created as a family through the years. Family and close friends can support us on our life journey, especially at critical moments. I find it important, particularly in this special season, to express gratitude for others and express thanks for the large and small ways that they support us.

This week, my thoughts have turned to our Bentley family. We are in a moment where many rituals of gratitude and celebration have been cancelled or postponed due to public health concerns. And I think many of us feel the loss of those rituals quite profoundly, especially as uncertainties lie ahead. While we cannot, in this moment, hold most of our customary rituals that mark the end of the semester, we can make the most of the days ahead with a season of gratitude.

I would like to begin by thanking all of you for making our community a force for good during these difficult months. Thank you, students, for learning how to study, collaborate and discover knowledge in a new way. You persisted through difficulties and offered feedback to help us get better at remote learning, teaching and interacting. Thank you as well to our faculty, who changed their entire mode of educating in just a few days, and who have been valiantly supporting our students individually and collectively during this unusual time. I know that many of you are concluding grading exams and papers, and my thoughts are with you as you work to bring this semester to a close.

And I would like to offer a final and very important thank you to our staff. Some of you have been on campus regularly since mid-March, cleaning, providing technical support, helping students complete graduation and schedule requirements, making our grounds as beautiful as ever, ensuring our safety, opening and responding to postal mail, and so much more. Many others have been working remotely, doing your very best to serve students and to make this semester a success. Please accept my gratitude for all that you have done and continue to do.

We will never forget this time in our lives, and, in the future, we will have an opportunity to share with future generations our stories about this moment and what we learned from it. Some of the questions that seem so pressing to us now will fade from memory and our recollections will instead focus on how we acted during this moment and how others acted toward us. In that spirit, while our rituals may have temporarily changed, our capacity for gratitude has not. Please take a moment in the week ahead to mark the end of the semester by writing a note of gratitude to someone who has helped you during the past eight weeks. Say a few words about how you saw them being their best selves during this time. Take time to make your thanks part of someone else’s memory of the spring of 2020.

With gratitude for all that you do.

Alison