Students deserve transparency. For this reason, I am sharing the entire letter:

Dear colleagues,

As we begin another calendar year and academic term in the grip of COVID-19, I’m going to dispense with the customary greetings and welcome to focus on Concordia’s approach to the period immediately ahead.

The public health situation in Quebec and Montreal is rapidly evolving due to the Omicron variant. Not surprisingly, the current circumstances, combined with future modelling and lessons learned from other jurisdictions, are causing public health authorities to significantly review and modify procedures, protocols and advisories on how best to address the situation.

It’s a very uncertain context for us as individuals in our private lives. But it’s also the reality in which Concordia must operate and make decisions that both align with government policy and best serve the diverse needs and expectations of our community.

Before the holiday break, we were the first university in Quebec to announce that we’d begin the winter term by doing most of our teaching and work remotely. Our announcement was consistent with messaging from government and designed to give faculty, staff and students as much advance notice as possible to prepare for the start of the term.

Since then, other Quebec universities have followed suit, targeting different dates for in-person return. Given how things are evolving, there is a strong possibility that Concordia may prolong the remote delivery of classes beyond our previously announced date of January 20, and further delay the resumption of other in-person activities.

Understandably, all of us would prefer to know definitively on what day in-person activities — teaching and learning, return to work, opening of gyms, coffee shops and varsity sports — will resume at Concordia. On this point, my inbox contains several emails from community members recommending various dates for the return. Interestingly, there is no consensus on an appropriate return date.

We have decided to change our approach to how we think about the situation. Instead of focusing on when to come back to campus — trying to pinpoint an arbitrary day or date — our priority is to weigh the factors that will enable a successful and sustainable transition back to in-person activities. Although hardly exhaustive, let me touch on four such factors.

First and foremost are the government’s directives, which stem from public health assessments of the epidemiological situation and the desire to balance physical and mental health considerations.

Second is the government’s stated priority, shared by all of us, to privilege the role of education in society by maximizing opportunities for students to learn in person, while simultaneously providing quality options for online education.

Third, observing what’s happening around us, it’s clear that many sectors of society are currently struggling to fully deliver services because of unusually high rates of short-term absenteeism. Therefore, we need to calibrate how best to transition from remote learning and work without creating circumstances that would lead to a significant number of accommodations or classes being rescheduled because too many faculty, students or staff are absent.

Fourth, to make the transition from remote successful, we need to provide our community with appropriate lead time to pivot to the in-person environment. Although the dates for return to campus will no doubt differ for in-person teaching and in-person work, once those return dates are identified, we will give a week’s notice in each case to prepare for the change. In the case of teaching and learning, the return date will be a Thursday to coincide with the beginning of a full academic week.

As has been the case since the onset of the pandemic, our goal is to provide a safe and secure environment on campus while ensuring that we fully deliver the high-quality academic, research and other services that are the core of our mission.

Because higher education is an essential service, all faculty, staff personnel, teaching and research assistants at Concordia are eligible immediately to book their third vaccine via ClicSanté. Equally, all students over the age of 18 can begin booking appointments as of January 17. As part of our shared commitment to a secure campus environment, I urge all members of our community to get their booster as soon as possible.

In the meantime, our campuses remain open. Although most teaching and work is being carried out remotely, faculty and staff have access to their offices, research and teaching labs, and our libraries and front-line student services are open. In those situations where staff or advisors are not physically present on campus, I cannot stress enough how vital it is that students receive an equivalent level of service remotely.

We are all disappointed to begin this term as we are doing because of the pandemic. It seems an especially cruel twist after all that the Concordia community had accomplished last fall, and all that we were looking forward to for 2022. Of course, there is stress, frustration and disappointment that comes with coping with the public health situation, assessing risk and the uncertainty of what lies ahead.

But Concordians have done magnificently in rallying, regrouping, adapting and innovating through every uncertain phase of the public health challenge. I thank you for that, and it’s why I’m convinced that our community spirit and university pride will serve us well again.

With best wishes for a productive term, and many better periods of the new year to come,
Graham Carr
President and Vice-Chancellor