Perspectives

In the fall issue of The Common Reader, the university’s online journal, seven WashU faculty members share essays on topics ranging from race and COVID-19 to police brutality and America as the house of pain.

The COVID-19 infection rate among Black and Latinx people and white people remains disproportionate. Looking back at the AIDS epidemic, René Esparza in Arts & Sciences finds a striking similarity in the country’s historical treatment of viruses that disproportionally affect minority communities. 

Psychiatrist Jessica Gold, at the School of Medicine, co-writes an op-ed published on CNN’s website about the strain health-care workers are under as the COVID-19 pandemic rages on. “We, collectively, say that we are ‘tired’ because we have no other, easy words to describe how we are.”

Chancellor Andrew D. Martin reflects in a blog post on the difficulties of this past year and shares a message of hope and gratitude as we head into Thanksgiving.

Robert W. Duffy remembers Chancellor Emeritus William H. Danforth. “In turn, the institution was rewarded by having this exceptional man— this great man — in its midst, a man who stood tall because he was tall, not because he set out to be tall or proclaimed his stature as tall, but because he was tall, and exceptional,” Duffy writes.

Sarah Elgin, the Viktor Hamburger Professor Emerita in Arts & Sciences, discusses ideas for engaging undergraduate students in hands-on science from day one and how to reach a wider range of college students on a national scale.

Health care providers know plenty about working hard. And we are not strangers to burnout. Even before Covid-19 hit the United States, our health care system was in trouble. Many emergency departments were overflowing, too often workers were being asked to do more with less, and average Americans couldn’t afford their ever-rising insurance deductibles and premiums, writes Jessica Gold.

Marie Griffith, director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, writes about the work we Americans still have to do in the wake of the presidential election. “While America is not unique in its sins as a country, we are unique in our refusal to acknowledge them.”

Sociologist Caitlyn Collins in Arts & Sciences writes in a piece for the Harvard Business Review’s Big Ideas series that the child care crisis created by pandemic lockdowns has highlighted the need for the U.S. government to do more to support working parents.

In this Q&A, scientists Nan Liu and Katharina Lodders, both in Arts & Sciences, describe their award-winning work in meteoritics and planetary science.