Compassion, connectivity, community

By Melissa Bowles-Terry

An old joke: A university is a loosely organized group of scholars, united only by their complaints about parking. We live and work in our departments, mostly: anthropologists hanging out with other anthropologists, chemists bumping into chemists. There are few places we routinely encounter one another outside of our discipline-specific spheres.

One important interdisciplinary space is the library. I worked in academic libraries for 13 lucky years, and one of the best things about the place is the serendipity of finding something you weren’t looking for. You might run into an unexpected book on the shelves, and if you go to check out equipment or use a 3D printer, you’ll probably see a colleague from another department. The library is a hub for connectivity in all senses.

Recently I moved into a new office at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the Faculty Center. It’s another interdisciplinary space, where we aim to build community and bring together resources for faculty. We offer programs to support teaching and research, as well as book groups, writing groups, guided meditation, and more. When we learned mid-semester that all instruction would be offered remotely, labs would be closed, and we’d all go home, I got together with my colleagues in IT and Online Education to see what we could do to help faculty members alter the courses they designed for face-to-face instruction and deliver them online.

We took a deep breath.

For two days we offered drop-in consultations all day. We helped language instructors figure out how to put their Japanese and Spanish courses online, talked theatre and music instructors through setting up web conferencing so they can see and hear what students are learning, and overall worked with more than 100 instructors to help them and their students finish out this semester away from campus.

Now I’m running a virtual Faculty Center and my daughter’s first-grade experience from my dining room table. We read a lot and play math games and make crafts. There are daily walks and family bike rides, too. I’m grateful that the weather is so nice, that we can get outside when we feel cooped up in our house. On the one hand, it beats my windowless office. On the other hand, I have “Momma, what else can we doooooo?” playing on a loop in the background while I try to do my job.

Thanks to Zoom and WebEx and a dozen other technologies, I’m offering weekly meditation sessions led by a colleague who is riding this out in Prescott. I’m continuing to convene a discussion group about inclusive teaching. Turns out, folks are grateful to see each other, to have a chance to check in. They’re grateful for the compassion displayed by their colleagues and their students. I’m grateful, too. We’re connecting via email and Twitter and Facebook, and it’s not the same, not at all, but we’re still a teaching and learning community. And there are even moments of serendipity.

In virtual meditation we focus on our breath. I silently repeat: Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I smile.

Karuna hum.

My essence is compassion.

Melissa Bowles-Terry is the Associate Director of the Faculty Center at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She was previously a librarian, and her book-loving cardigan-wearing heart still belongs to the library. She enjoys reading five books at a time and sometimes writes poems about her home state of Idaho.