Five years ago, on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. The next day, Queen’s University made the decision to cancel all in-person classes.
In the following weeks, the University was flipped on its head, treading into uncharted territory both academically and socially.
Phrases like “oil thigh na Banrighinn a’Banrighinn gu brath” would be a sweet reminder of an alum’s time at Queen’s, but now, it’s a hodgepodge of mispronounced words.
Milestone events like convocation were cancelled, and the Queen’s community was left to pick up the pieces of a completely online experience.
At the time, the choice was a matter of health and safety, led in large part by Dr. David Walker, professor emeritus, former Dean of Health Sciences, and the special advisor to Principal Patrick Deane on COVID-19.
The University had been aware of the threat of a pandemic for weeks before cancelling in-person classes. Dr. Walker recalls receiving an e-mail from Principal Deane in late Feburary 2020 while he was on a holiday in Barbados. The next day, they were meeting in his office discussing what was considered an epidemic. In preparation, a COVID-19 management structure was created by Principal Deane, consisting of students, leaders, and s, as well as the local medical officer.
“The reason he asked me, I think, was because I had chaired the expert on SARS, the previous Coronavirus for the Government of Ontario,” Dr. Walker said in an interview with The Journal.
Despite his previous experience with the SARS virus, the team was dealing with an unknown threat without the benefit of hindsight.
“There was a concern that we didn’t know how lethal it was. We weren’t completely sure exactly how it spread. It was obviously close airborne, but it was spread easily,” Dr. Walker said.
As an institution where large numbers of people gather, Queen’s was identified to be at particularly high risk for a rapid spread of the virus across the community.
The solution suggested was to take immediate and drastic action.
“The advice of the medical officer of health was that we should shut the place down, send everybody home and convert to remote learning processes, so that’s what we did,” Dr. Walker added.
Then students received an e-mail from Principal Deane on March 12, 2020, announcing all in-person classes would be cancelled the following day, with the remainder of the semester shifting to a remote learning model.
Part of that process was stripping the University to only the essentials it needed to continue to function as an academic institution.
“We sent everybody home, […] [and] we sort of shut the place down to the extent that was possible,” Walker said.
“Things like the heating plants, the critical staff for infrastructure, our research labs, couldn’t be shut down,” he added.
In hindsight, the swift actions to minimize the spread of COVID-19 likely saved countless lives, especially those that had direct to elderly or vulnerable communities.
However, by reducing the University to its bare bones, the traditions that define the Queen’s experience were lost for years over the pandemic. It was up to the Class of 2024 and 2025 to buy into campus culture, at least enough to push past the brink of those dark, lost years.
When Abigail Rugg, ArtSci ’25, was deciding where she wanted to spend the next couple years of her life, it was the overwhelming sense of school spirit that drew her to Queen’s.
Rugg, the current operations manager for Queen’s Bands—one of the staples of the University’s spirit and tradition—now plays a key role in upholding a legacy that dates back more than a century.
Founded in 1905 by a group of first-years eager to boost school spirit at football games, Bands takes the title of the oldest Canadian university marching band and has evolved from its humble beginnings of only brass instruments.
The name can be misleading. Queen’s Bands isn’t a single group, but rather a collection of six distinct performance units: the pipe band, brass band, cheerleaders, highland dancers, drum corps, and the colour guard. Together, they have been the heart of school spirit, leading marches from Grant Hall to Richardson Stadium for football games, performing the “Oil Thigh” at Homecoming, and keeping century old traditions alive.
However, many of these so-called traditions were either put on pause or lost in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
If you were to go around campus and ask students to sing the words to the “Oil Thigh” today, you’ll most likely be met with blank stares.
Once a staple at football games and university events, the “Oil Thigh”—Queen’s beloved school song, dating all the way back to the 1890s—is now just a memory from a pandemic-disrupted orientation week that never truly captured the Queen’s experience.
“Not a lot of students know the ‘Oil Thigh,’ especially the words. I’ve seen it kind of come back slowly over the past couple years,” said Rugg, who’s been a part of Bands since her first year.
“There’s a bit of a loss there in the middle along with some of the cheers and chants,” she added. “There were things that were really core to football games that have gotten lost over the past couple years with Bands.”
It was only this year Rugg finally set foot on Richardson Stadium’s scratchy turf field, performing alongside the Highland dancers. Bands’ Highland dancers are traditional Scottish performers who have paid homage to their Gaelic roots since ing Bands in 1938.
Prior to the pandemic, the entire six-piece unit used to be right there on the field for football games, adjacent to the players. Now, only the cheerleaders and Highland dancers perform at sea level, with musicians taking a seat in the stands.
The shift may seem minor, but to those who lived and breathed game-day traditions, no longer seeing Bands on the field is a stark reminder of what was lost.
“I feel like that’s been a bit of a loss, in of that game day atmosphere and kind of bringing energy up,” Rugg said.
Bands’ job doesn’t start once they get to the stadium, it begins long before kickoff, as they march through campus, rallying students along the way. Before the pandemic, the traditional march from Grant Hall to Richardson to Stadium was an event in itself, with students falling in line, creating a sea of tricolour energy heading into the game. Now, the numbers have dwindled.
“People would march with us and everyone would go to the game together, that’s definitely reduced quite a bit from what I’ve seen. It still happens, just in smaller groups,” Rugg said. “I feel like not everyone knows you can just come and the marching band.”
While Rugg may be right, a lot of students’ first instinct upon seeing a marching band is to watch from their residence window or pause for a moment on their way to the dining hall, treating it as an entertaining spectacle rather than an invitation to .
The instinct to participate—to be part of something bigger—was weakened by the pandemic, leaving behind a student body that’s only now learning how to engage in traditions that once felt automatic.
Bands and engineering students share one significant similarity—tradition.
Baked deeply in the culture of Queen’s engineering, students in the faculty have always found creative ways to push what’s safe in the name of tradition.
To an outsider, the idea of climbing a pole covered in grease to grab a Scottish wool hat, just to officially become “a year” sounds ridiculous.
The idea of going to a pub in the middle of a Friday to get a fabric bar to sew on a jacket, just to slam it on the ground might be a bit absurd, but for a majority of Smith Engineering students, it’s at the core of what it means to be a Queen’s engineer.
Part of ensuring that these events still run year to year are the executives of the Engineering Society of Queen’s University, including the Vice-President of Operations (VPOPS), who has overseen the management of services such as Clark Hall Pub since the 1960s.
“[The portfolio was] offices, but from that came Clark Hall Pub, and then came the offices of the services like CEO and Golden Words, so tradition is a huge, huge part of that portfolio,” Jacob Badali, Sci ’25, last year’s VPOPS said in an interview with The Journal.
Fighting against that portfolio are the wants and needs of programs that often don’t align with the regulations of University s.
Traditions being lost isn’t a foreign concept.
Paul Stock, Sci ’89, looks back on the former engineering interdisciplinary intramural program fondly.
“If it wasn’t for the intramural program, I would have failed out, it saved me. It got me out of Clark Hall. It got me to do something physical for my body and my mind,” Stock said in an interview with The Journal.
Even more, it was a way to create lasting connections with classmates in his year.
“I went to Palm Springs with three of my closest engineering friends, who also happened to be the mechanical engineering bowling team, curling team, broomball team,” Stock said.
Despite the merits of the program, for one reason or another, the university began to faze out programs over time.
Now it’s something that his daughter, Lindsay Stock, Sci ’25, isn’t able to experience anymore. Since then, the intramural program has shifted to be university-wide and requires students to find their own teams.
“It’s too hard to [now]. But if you do it by program, then every program has an opportunity to participate,” Stock said.
In the case of Clark Hall Pub, COVID-19 expedited that process, causing a steady stream of word of mouth transitions to suddenly stop.
The few motivated people during the pandemic were forced to put their teachings into writing to down for future managers.
“There wasn’t a formal transition manual or operations manual for Clark in of, how do you change beer gas, and how do you do all these things. And so when COVID-19 happened [the head manager] wrote it all down, and then it’s been updated since then,” Badali said.
Things have naturally been lost over the two year break, but a new set of eyes has allowed for change to happen for the better. Hazardous practices have been removed in interactions of the manual, as a post COVID-19 student body comes in more cautious about health and safety.
“I think that now Clark’s in a spot where all the bad [traditions] have sort of been weaned out through, like regulation from Queen’s, and then also through just student bodies realizing their sort of antiquated nature. And then I think a lot of the good ones still stand strong,” Badali added.
Now, for father-daughter duo, Paul and Lindsay Stock, tradition lives on through the family. Having applied for the incoming head manager position of Clark Hall Pub and getting it, Lindsay now has her own chance to rewrite the traditions that engineering students connect through.
“There was a lot of review of her application, really, a lot of discussion about the interview and the interview process,” Paul added.
Connections at Queen’s go deeper than arbitrary events created years before anyone cared to their origins. Seeing that another person went to Queen’s implicitly evokes a positive feeling for those that have bought into any form of tradition.
“If I interview someone, and if I see they went to Queen’s, they move up my interview scale,” Stock emphasized.
It’s a mantra of mentorship and willingness to help that is familiar to every student at Queen’s. The medium of tradition creates community that lasts a lifetime.
“Queen’s still has a reputation for togetherness and spirit, so I suspect it’d be hard to scrub that entirely,” Dr. Walker said.
The COVID-19 pandemic was undoubtedly an event that changed the history of Queen’s, but five years on it’ll be that toughness and spirit that will rewrite traditions for the best.
Like the lyrics remind us, “soiled as they are by the battle and the rain, yet another victory to wipe away the stain”—the spirit of Queen’s may have weathered the storm of the pandemic, but it is far from lost.
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