Five years later, the class of 2020 reflects on a graduation wrecked by COVID-19

Five years ago today, University of Kansas senior Caroline McCray woke up and connected through the internet to a remote yoga class. She practiced the poses in her mom’s kitchen, family dogs at her feet. 

For McCray, May 16, 2020, was a typical Saturday in Fairway during the COVID-19 lockdown.

She finished her yoga class and saw something unusual out the front window of her home. Foot-high letters in the front yard read “YAY LELA!” along with stars and a smiley face wearing a graduation cap. A celebration coordinated by her mom also featured McCray’s sister and boyfriend, plus mimosas during an outdoor brunch that morning. 

McCray posted photos from the day on Instagram. The caption: “this year’s graduation ceremony consists of yoga clothes and dogs.”

“I think as a 21-year-old college student at the time, I was still kind of sad not to be with my friends,” McCray said this week. “But I only have good memories from the morning, and looking back on it now, those are still the three most important people to me.” 

If the pandemic had not forced the closure of campuses at KU and hundreds of other universities, the weekend of May 16, 2020 would have been a raucous and jam-packed graduation weekend. Instead, the class of 2020 — from kindergarten to PhD graduates — celebrated remotely and modestly. 

If not for the pandemic, McCray and thousands of fellow KU students would have descended the “Hill” on the Lawrence campus from the Memorial Campanile to the football stadium. Prospective Jayhawks often hear about the campanile tradition during campus tours, before they even apply to KU. 

“If you walk under the bell tower,” they are told about the superstition, “you won’t graduate on time. Or maybe never graduate.”

As a KU instructor, I have been thinking about the class of 2020 this week on the five-year anniversary of their not-so-graduation ceremony. In many ways, this weekend’s graduates, the class of 2025, will have the commencement that the class of 2020 envisioned. 

Putting on make-up and fine tuning your hair with your roommates. Gathering on Jayhawk Boulevard and running into four years’ worth of friends. Snapping pictures by (or in) the Chi Omega fountain. Popping open champagne with whoops and cheers. Spending one last night at your favorite Mass Street bar.  

Curious about how the canceled in-person graduation looked to the Class of 2020 with the distance of five years, I interviewed students from my documentary class held that 2020 spring semester. 

The class, like graduation itself, ended with a thud. We had arranged to tag along with Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas as he managed the city and taught at the KU Law School. The pandemic mangled our plans for that documentary project. The mayor’s office couldn’t invite a student-journalist film crew to tag along as the city hunkered down.

Students in the class pivoted to creating podcasts about fellow students, asking them about their pandemic realities. Emily Beckman, who earned bachelor’s degrees in journalism and women, gender and sexuality, said this week that those interviews stuck with her. 

“I would check in with four students regularly to hear how they were navigating lockdown,” Beckman said. “There was something so human about knowing we were all moving through a time of major uncertainty and isolation together.”

Riley Wilson, who came to KU after graduating from Wamego High School and is now a lawyer in Texas, remembers returning to campus in June, a month after graduation because there was no in-person option. 

“We went to campus later with just me and my family,” Wilson said. “I had my graduation stuff on, and my mom took pictures of me, and I did get one in the bell tower. I got to walk through the bell tower, but instead of it being with all my friends, it was with my family. So it was just a very different experience.”

Five years later, she had forgotten about the bell tower tradition until it came up in our interview.

“Had graduation happened the way I thought it was going to, (the bell tower) would have been one of the first things that I would talk about with anyone,” Wilson said, “You finally get to walk through the bell tower and signify that you’re graduated.”

In April 2020, the news that in-person graduation was canceled wasn’t a surprise to Wilson and McCray. Both agree that it was the safest choice, especially because traveling and flying was seen as particularly risky. 

“Once other schools started canceling, I had the feeling that it was going to happen and definitely was bummed,” McCray said. “I think at that point, I knew that my family wasn’t going to be in town anyways. So I guess I wasn’t super shocked at that point, just because I saw it coming.”

Five years later, she describes the canceled graduation as feeling like “loose ends.”

Graduation “was supposed to be like our last celebration of college,” McCray said. “No one was mad or upset about having some classes online. But (graduation) was definitely more of a celebration that we didn’t get to have.”

Wilson’s brother was graduating high school the same weekend, and she remembers her family bracing for the possibility of a hectic weekend. 

“I remember thinking that that was going to be really exciting and fun too, because we could do that together and have everybody there that we wanted to be surrounded by, all in one place for a weekend full of celebration and fun things,” Wilson said.

On commencement weekend 2020, the university offered a video that graduates could stream online in place of the in-person ceremony. The 35-minute video presented congratulations from men’s basketball coach Bill Self, actor Rob Riggle and assorted university faculty. It also provided a performance of the alma mater, “Crimson and the Blue,” lyrics laid over campus scenery. 

“I remember being bummed that it was on YouTube,” Wilson said. “I mean, I knew that there was nothing else that the university could do. They were doing the best that they could, given the fact that we can’t gather together.”

Watching the commencement video today, it’s perhaps more emotional than in 2020. The chorus of the “Rock Chalk,” chanted by a Brady-Bunch screen-collage of students, nearly brought me to tears while rewatching it this week. Plus, the script addresses the sadness of an empty campus in an honest way. 

“For so many of us, the distance on our minds was not the one that we kept from each other, but the one from a campanile to a stadium full of friends and family,” the video narrates over footage of student life. “It can be easy to dwell on the steps that you won’t take, but pause now to think of the strides you’ve made.”

The video may work better as an emotional time capsule today than it did in 2020 as a huzzah for new graduates. 

Beckman watched that video on commencement day and also attended the in-person graduation the next year, because KU allowed 2020 graduates to attend in May 2021. 

“It felt so special to walk down the hill and celebrate my time at KU in a meaningful way, with family in attendance,” Beckman said. 

As Wilson and McCray see it now, other ripple effects from the pandemic were far more disruptive and consequential than the graduation decision. 

As a new graduate, McCray hoped to find a job with a professional sports team in the summer of 2020. She was on the right trajectory after working for Sporting Kansas City and a Kansas City radio station. The pandemic scrambled that. 

Because sports teams couldn’t sell tickets to in-person events, they laid off employees rather than hiring new ones like McCray. 

“After a year, I said, ‘Okay, you know, maybe this isn’t happening,’” McCray said. “COVID in general at the time did make a very, very significant impact on my career. I didn’t end up doing what I always thought I was going to do because of it.”

McCray now works from Denver in the travel industry, a job that she loves for its flexibility. Just a few days ago, she married that boyfriend from her senior year — the one who made the road trip to share brunch with her. 

Wilson remembers how difficult the pandemic was on college friendships, like the one she had with her senior year roommate. One day you were living together. The next day you didn’t see one another at all. 

“Someone who I had lived with for four years was now like … I didn’t live with her anymore, and all our stuff was still at our town home,” Wilson said, remembering of her trip back to campus to move out. “We were just overnight separated. She had to go back to St. Louis, and I had to go back to Wamego. Someone who I had lived my life with for the past four years — we were just separated.”

Three years after moving out of that town home, Wilson graduated from law school. That ceremony showed her what she had missed in 2020. 

“Being able to be there with your classmates, all in the same place, and just really excited and nervous all together,” Wilson recalls. “And then you get to walk out into the auditorium and you see the thousands of people around you there to support everyone. I think that is what makes it so special.”

Wilson is reciting a sacred graduation recipe: a campus you cherish, the people you love and a coveted diploma. Graduations make memories.

So, to the class of 2025 from the class of 2020: Don’t take this weekend’s days of celebration for granted.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.