High Hopes for a New Academic Year.
High Hopes for a New Academic Year
A note of welcome, and a challenge, for our school community.
I hope that all members of our community have had a restful, restorative summer. The start of a new academic year is a time of renewal, a chance to reconnect with friends and colleagues, to welcome new students, and to anticipate all we will do in the coming semester. To the new members of our community: welcome. We are so happy that you are joining us at BUSPH. It will be a joy indeed to get to know you during your time here.
We now look ahead, with excitement, to the coming year. It is a time for seizing opportunities, for making new connections, and for redoubling our commitment to the work of building a healthier world. I draw enormous energy from the dynamism of our field, emerging as it is from the crucible of an historic challenge to apply the lessons of a pandemic to supporting health in a changed world. Opportunities are also present in the new ideas and perspectives that come to us by way of the students and faculty who have recently joined our community. To our students: your presence helps us to see fresh approaches to the work of public health, as you, the next generation adds to the knowledge that sustains our field. In welcoming the newest members of our community, we add to the connections that are at the heart of all we do. We are reminded that scholarship and activism are at their best when they are characterized by good fellowship. It is this fellowship that animates our work at BUSPH.
As we look ahead, we must also acknowledge the difficulties of the moment. Over the summer, many changes to the status quo around health emerged, some of which were shocking, disruptive. The mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas was a tragic reflection of the ongoing challenge of gun violence in this country. While the bipartisan legislation passed in the wake of the shooting was a step in the right direction, there is still much to be done to address this uniquely American challenge. The summer also saw the Supreme Court overturn Roe v. Wade, ending federally protected abortion access and devolving decisions about the legality of abortion to the states. We also face an emerging challenge in the form of an ongoing monkeypox outbreak. These issues have deep significance for health. They have evoked feelings of anger, despair, even hopelessness. Going forward, it will take our collective effort as a community to engage with these challenges, while providing support and compassion to each other and to all those most affected by polices which undermine health.
The start of the academic year is inextricably linked to a redoubling of our collective efforts towards this goal. In June, we came together for a Public Health Conversation about the future of reproductive health in a post-Roe world. We have also long engaged with the challenge of gun violence, through our events, our academic engagement with the issue, and our activism. On August 29, we will host a Public Health Conversation on how we can address the challenge of monkeypox without encouraging the spread of the stigma that can accompany outbreaks.
As we engage with new challenges and opportunities, we do so as part of a rich tradition, informed by our nearly five decades as a school. This helps us see the possibility for radical progress in what might appear to others as simply the disconcerting whirl of history. Our hope, then, is rooted in our experience, in the years of work we have already done to shape a healthier world.
As I close, I would like to issue a challenge to our whole community, but particularly to our new students. I challenge us all to engage. We are in a moment when it has perhaps never been easier to avoid doing so. Technology provides ample distractions, screens let us communicate from a distance, ideological disagreements give us reasons, we think, to write off whole groups. In this context, simply choosing to engage, in-person and in good faith, can be a radical act. When we transcend the boundaries that keep us apart to have a human moment with someone, we lay the groundwork for the understanding and connection that shape a healthier world. In these moments, we glimpse possibilities we might never have imagined otherwise. It is the task of public health to make such moments scalable, to build a world where the divides that keep some groups healthy and others sick dissolve as surely as the divide between two people who assume there is no way they could ever possibly connect, and then somehow do.
Thank you to all who are working towards this world. It is a privilege to be part of this community. Here is to the start of a new academic year, full of conversation, progress, and renewed connections.
Warm regards,
Sandro
Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Dean and Robert A. Knox Professor
Boston University School of Public Health
Twitter: @sandrogalea
Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Eric DelGizzo for his contributions to this Dean’s Note.
Previous Dean’s Notes are archived at: http://www.bu.edu/sph/tag/deans-note/
