As we ring out 2020 and celebrate the arrival of 2021, I send thanks and best wishes to the entire Princeton community.

This has been a year unlike any other, filled with unprecedented difficulties.  To all of you who have lost loved ones, or experienced personal hardships, I extend my sympathy and warm thoughts.

I expect that we are all eager to turn the calendar page and put 2020 behind us.  Yet, when I look back on the year, I am struck not only by the challenges we faced, but also by the way Princetonians stepped up to meet them.  I am grateful to all of you:  to the teams in our Office of Information Technology, the McGraw Center, and Instructional Support Services who enabled us to move Princeton online; to the staff in dining services, facilities, campus life, and other units who continued coming to campus to support our students and operations; to all the people who enabled us to restart laboratories and reopen libraries; to the undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty who found ways to teach and learn effectively in an online environment, and to the staff who supported those efforts; to the colleagues in University Health Services, the Department of Public Safety, and other units who worked diligently to keep us all safe and healthy; to all the people who creatively juggled family and workplace responsibilities; to our teams in Advancement and to our alumni who found new ways to connect with one another and with our students; to the staff who took on new responsibilities or worked tirelessly to keep their departments running as smoothly as possible; to students, faculty, and staff who found ways to reach out and assist the communities around them; and to everyone who stepped up in one of the hardest years this University has faced.  You have been amazing, and you have my thanks and my heartfelt appreciation.

Let’s hope that 2021 is a better year, and that by the time it ends, we will once again be able to enjoy one another’s company in the way that we did when 2020 began.  But let’s remember, too, that we should take pride in what our community did to address the challenges of a historically difficult chapter in the history of our University and our world.

With gratitude to you all, and with best wishes for a Happy New Year,

Chris Eisgruber