4 ForOregonState.org/Stater Spring 2024, Vol. 109, No. 2 PUBLISHERS John Valva, executive director OSUAA; vice president of alumni relations, OSU Foundation Julie Lambert, ’85, chair, OSUAA Board of Directors EDI TOR Scholle McFarland GRADUATE ASSISTANT Katherine Cusumano DESIGN CONSULTANTS Pentagram Austin, DJ Stout, Davian-Lynn Hopkins DES I GNER Teresa Hall, ’06 COPY EDITOR Charles Purdy ADDRESS CHANGES ForOregonState.org/Address LETTERS AND QUESTIONS stater@osualum.com 877-678-2837 Oregon Stater 204 CH2M HILL Alumni Center Coravallis, OR 97331 ADVERTISING Kayla Farrell-Martin Kayla.Farrell-Martin @osufoundation.org 541-737-4218 ADVISORY COUNCIL Nicole “Nikki” Brown, ’04, Tillamook Vicki Guinn, ’85, Portland Tyler Hansen, Tucson, Arizona Lin Hokkanen, ’82, Portland Colin Huber, ’10, Albany Chris Johns, ’74, Missoula, Montana Ron Lovell, Gleneden Beach Jennifer Milburn, ’96, Albany Elena Passarello, Corvallis Mike Rich, ’81, Beaverton Roger Werth, ’80, Kalama, Washington Oregon Stater (ISSN 0885-3258) is published three times a year by the Oregon State University Alumni Association in collaboration with the Oregon State University Foundation and Oregon State University. Content may be reprinted only by permission of the editor. ILLUSTRATION BY JOÃO FAZENDA FROM THE EDITOR FOUR YEARS AFTER about the pandemic whose century I shared. It makes more sense to me now that such a significant event could be talked about so little, fading from front-of-mind awareness. It’s been four years since my daughter and I went frantically store to store in Portland, searching for hand sanitizer; four years since stay-athome orders shuttered everything “non-essential” and many of us learned the ins and outs of Zoom; four years since people in cities began the nightly ritual of standing on balconies and porches at 7 p.m. to bang pots and pans and cheer for frontline workers who risked and often gave their lives to protect us. Today I am grateful to be able to step past peeling social distancing dots outside the grocery store and not give them a second look. But we did live through something big and life-altering — and the world is changed as a result. Four years after the fateful spring of 2020, we’re chronicling how the pandemic affected OSU, and how the university’s great minds responded, with “7 Lessons from COVID-19” (p. 42), a deep dive into the projects and lasting changes driven by it. From new ways to teach classes, to the veterinary researchers and multidisciplinary teams working to protect us from future outbreaks, OSU is doing amazing work to learn from what we went through. That’s what’s special about research universities like ours. A problem isn’t just a problem; it’s an opportunity to find solutions, to take knowledge further, to look at the world in a new way. And that’s something worth remembering. Scholle McFarland Editor, Oregon Stater Historians notice something unusual when they look back at the years around 1918. There’s very little written, either in textbooks or literature, about the Great Influenza epidemic, or Spanish Flu, which claimed more than 50 million lives worldwide in less than a year — more than were lost in all of World War I. Of course, evidence remains. My Tennessee childhood included cemetery field trips to do grave rubbings. We would place a piece of paper over a headstone and then rub the paper with charcoal or crayon to capture the designs carved there. Row after row of those stones showed the dates 1918 and 1919 — and the chiseled names revealed how often whole families were wiped out. But as an undergraduate history major, I learned more about the Black Death of the 1300s and how it changed society than I ever did
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