Charlene Villaseñor Black watched her home empty out in a matter of days as UCLA students left campus en masse, many heading home to be with family during the coronavirus pandemic.
Black, a professor of art history and Chicana/o studies, as well as a faculty-in-residence on the Hill, was heartbroken as she watched her fellow residents of Sproul Hall leave one by one, she said. Yellow-and-blue UCLA carts were stacked high with personal belongings as students moved out and began scattering across the world.
“The students I had been working with, that I had formed bonds with, all of a sudden were just gone,” Black said. “We couldn’t even really say goodbye to each other.”
Residential communities were being ripped apart, she said. The dorms were quiet. Empty dorms would soon be replaced by full Zoom rooms in a week's time.
As Black and other professors hurried to tailor their classes to the new online format, a call went out to the UCLA faculty asking interested professors to create and teach coronavirus-specific Fiat Lux seminars.
A Fiat Lux class is a small, one-unit seminar taught on a strictly pass/no pass basis. Named after the University of California’s motto, “fiat lux” translates from Latin to “let there be light.” These courses are an opportunity for students to explore topics of interest in a relatively low stakes environment.
Typically capped at 20 students, Fiat Lux classes were originally intended for first-years, but students across all years and all majors can enroll. The format varies by course – either once a week for one hour, or biweekly for two hours – but the primary goal remains constant: “fostering a sense of community and understanding.”
When the call came out for COVID-19 seminars, Black jumped at the opportunity to teach another class and connect with students, she said, albeit through a computer screen. Over spring break, she designed a class titled “The Arts in Times of Contagion.”
Black’s voice brimmed with excitement as she described her seminar, which explores how artists throughout history have responded to pandemics. She detailed various case studies her class would be exploring, from the plague in 14th-century Europe to the coronavirus in the present day. However, every time she spoke with passion about her seminar, melancholy was never far off as she reflected upon the current circumstances.
While crafting the syllabus, Black decided to reach out to other faculty-in-residence to see if they’d be interested in teaching the course with her. So many of them expressed interest that two team-taught courses were then created, Black said.
“It’s the best day of the week,” Black said about her course. “I feel relieved that we can maintain some semblance of community – that we can create community virtually and digitally.”
In total, 25 COVID-19 seminars are being taught this quarter, each created in a matter of days to help students talk through the pandemic as it develops. Many of the classes explore disciplines not typically associated with the hard science of pandemics, ranging from geography to gender studies. A call has already gone out asking faculty to create more COVID-19 seminars for the upcoming fall and winter quarters.
The Fiat Lux program was originally born from a similar desire to facilitate understanding amid crisis, albeit a very different crisis – the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Two weeks after 9/11, UCLA faculty had put together 50 seminars in the fall quarter of 2001 to offer students and faculty spaces to reflect on the tragedy.
Vinay Lal, a history and Asian American studies professor, was part of the first group of faculty to teach a 9/11 seminar. His class was titled “Terrorism and the Politics of Knowledge.”
Now, he is teaching his 22nd Fiat Lux course, a COVID-19 seminar called “Social Distancing, Loneliness, and Other – Pandemics in History and Today.”
The 9/11 courses were fundamentally different from today’s COVID-19 courses, Lal said. After 9/11, students seemed more shaken up, with the question of “why us?” at the forefront of everyone’s minds. It took time for students to process 9/11 and understand everything that led up to the tragedy, Lal said.
According to a Newsweek article about the original 9/11 freshman seminars, Lal’s students used the first day of class to discuss how they’d been processing 9/11 before arriving on campus. One student described almost bursting into tears when they found an obituary online for the World Trade Center towers only hours after the attack.
In Lal’s seminar this quarter, however, discussions have focused on students’ lives at home after leaving campus, as they physically isolate themselves from friends.
But the task of educators is still the same with these COVID-19 seminars, Lal said. He wants to help students critically scrutinize what is and isn’t “normal.” In addition to considering topics like the instinct to hoard and social exclusion, one idea Lal has explored is how to view the recent reduction in pollution following the outbreak.
Lal referenced a town in Northern India where people can finally see the Himalayas in the distance after years of pollution. Although less pollution would normally be viewed in an entirely positive light, now this success has come at the cost of thousands of lives.
The original freshman seminars gave students a place to work through their confusion and sadness, and Lal said he hopes the COVID-19 Fiat Lux classes provide a similar space for students this quarter.
Ghislaine Lydon, an associate professor of history, said she also grappled with the idea of community when designing her Fiat Lux class, “Tracking Coronavirus in Africa,” which explores the history of epidemics on the continent.
Lydon wanted to keep in contact with her friends in Africa during the coronavirus crisis. When the call for COVID-19 Fiat Lux classes came out at the end of winter quarter, she decided that she might as well include students in this process of communicating with her friends overseas.
Every other week, she has a friend from Africa report virtually to her class. Students have spoken to friends of Lydon from both Ethiopia and Senegal, who have informed the class about how their countries have been handling COVID-19.
“I call it ‘quaran-teamwork,’” Lydon said. “It (keeps) me sane.”
Michelle Liu Carriger, an assistant professor in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, is hoping to use her COVID-19 seminar, “Art and Performance in Time of Coronavirus,” as an opportunity to document the pandemic with her students through a collective digital zine.
She plans to eventually contribute this publication to the COVID-19 section of the university archive, she said. Ultimately, she wants to teach students to use artistic creation when coping with other times of uncertainty.
In one seminar, a student pointed out how Zoom backgrounds are the newest form of identity, almost like the digital version of clothes – an idea Carriger hopes the student will turn into an art project for their zine, she said. People are judging one another based on their backgrounds, whether it be a bedroom, backyard or something more humorous, she added.
“Great art is made under constraint,” Carriger said.
She explained that a group of theater students in her department had performed the entirety of “The Sound of Music” on Zoom, complete with comical costumes and a slew of technical difficulties. A wide smile flashed across Carriger’s face as she recounted the simultaneously hilarious and impressive scene.
Meanwhile, in the COVID-19 seminar “Formation of Imagined Community through Digital Media,” every class begins with students sharing their diary entries from the previous week, in which they are supposed to reflect upon life in quarantine.
King-Kok Cheung, a professor of English and Asian American studies, once started class by sharing her own diary entry about delivering surgical masks to a professor emeritus and dear friend – only to have them stolen out of his mailbox before he could retrieve them. Since then, she has tried to remind herself to not be angry and that others are likely worse off, she said.
The class returned Cheung’s grin as she described more of her correspondence with the professor emeritus, including a thoughtful reference to the English poet William Wordsworth.
Her stories often break the ice, she said, in hopes to create a more comfortable space for students to share their own personal experiences while social distancing. Students have contemplated their Chinese American identity, explaining their own experiences dealing with the spike in racism amid the pandemic. Cheung then urged students to explore concepts like the “model minority” myth to work through their feelings.
Jessica Esparza, a second-year psychobiology student, said she has enjoyed hearing from guest speakers in her seminar, “University Leadership During Pandemics.” The Fiat Lux class, taught by Chancellor Gene Block, brings in a different UCLA administrative member to lecture and discuss with the class every week.
She’s heard from a slew of vice chancellors and health experts about the different options they’re currently weighing for the upcoming fall quarter and has even been able to provide feedback about these options.
“My dad asked me the other day, ‘Why are you taking that class?’” Esparza said. “I think you’re able to give a unique perspective that (university officials) might not hear from otherwise, because usually the people making these decisions might not have that one-to-one contact.”
Esparza said Block was shocked to hear a story from an Australian international student whose professor threatened to grade down students for appearing tired over Zoom. The student’s frustration at being judged at 5 a.m. quickly morphed into gratitude as the chancellor attentively listened and acknowledged how ridiculous the situation was.
Now that muting yourself on Zoom has quickly become the norm, Fiat Lux classes are one option for students to listen to one another and speak out about the details of their new realities.
“Academia helps us situate ourselves – you can feel very lost,” said Jessica Schwartz, an associate professor of musicology who is currently teaching the seminar “Surviving Uncertainty through Sound Collaboration, Cold War to Pandemic.”
Schwartz was an undergraduate during 9/11. She still remembers the exact moment when she heard the tragic news. When she closes her eyes, she’s back in the Downtown Berkeley Bay Area Rapid Transit station, she said. She can still hear old-fashioned newspaper boys screaming “Extra, extra!” as they wave around their papers, although this memory is probably reflective of her emotions in this tragic moment and not reality, she admitted.
Thinking back on 9/11, Schwartz said the tragedy was, in many ways, the impetus behind her pursuing a career in teaching. She wanted to learn more about how crises are designed, and then help students understand and work through moments of uncertainty by becoming critical listeners.
“These (Fiat Lux classes) are exactly what I would want to take if I were still a student,” she said.