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In the summer of 2021, a group of Colby College leaders met to discuss how the College should respond to the threat COVID-19 presented to its operating model. Despite the pandemic, Colby's 2020-2021 academic year was almost 100% residential with the vast majority of classes occurring face-to-face, but with severely limited social life for its students. Some leaders argued that the then dominant Delta variant, which was estimated to be 60% more contagious and twice as likely to result in hospitalizations, meant that the College needed to be more cautious, further restricting contact among students, faculty, staff and the local community. One noted, 'We've always put our concern for the entire Colby community at the heart of everything we do-we can't stop doing that now.' Other leaders pointed to the fact that the campus was almost 99% vaccinated, and that social life for students was an essential part of the college experience, advocating a modest relaxation of COVID-19-related restrictions. They believed that the tradeoff of more breakthrough infections-cases in vaccinated individuals-was worth making in order to give students a more normal college social experience. One leader noted that the isolation some of the COVID-19 protocols induced could have a negative effect on students' mental health, particularly during the long, dark, cold winter. The one person in the meeting who had remained silent was the College's President, David Greene. The leaders waited to hear his opinion.