Welcome Back!

I hope everyone had a good, relaxing holiday break. Because we'll have some rather ugly business to attend to this semester...

How would you feel if you came to class one day and were told you wouldn't be allowed to leave campus at the end of the day? Then you were told the "authorities" weren't sure how long you'd have to stay put. Oh, and - by the way - you're also not allowed to communicate in any way with anyone off campus.

Pretty horrible, huh? But what if it gets worse? What if, after a few hours of being stuck on campus, people - the same people who are stuck here just like you - start getting very, very sick...

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These are some of the nightmarish scenarios that befall the townspeople of Oran, Algeria, in Albert Camus's The Plague. As we go through this discussion, we'll look at the different ways Camus's characters deal with their situation and talk about how we might handle it today.

Since The Plague is a campus-wide reading project, my hope for this discussion blog is to benefit from the various backgrounds and insights of all the different groups reading the novel. English students learning from Biology students, and vice versa. Math students learning from Psychology students, and vice versa. Faculty and staff learning from students, and - well, you get the picture.

So, without further ado, let The Plague begin!