Change is afoot at Guilford, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.From the pizza parlor to the smoking policy to the solar-heated water in dorm showers, students arriving for fall semester have discovered a whole slew of new places and things to puzzle over, fight about and celebrate.

For the wide-eyed first-years, these all seem like intrinsic parts of the Guilford College they know and might come to love. For the grizzled veterans (super seniors included), the Guilford we see every day is startlingly different from the one we first laid eyes on two, three, or maybe even five years ago. For staff and faculty who measure their time here in decades, the campus might hardly resemble the one they knew as youngsters.

This is inevitable. Just as generations of students have celebrated and lamented changes in the alcohol policy, larger first-year classes, the loss of Keiser House, the shifting demographics, the construction of the south apartments, and any real or perceived threat to the stability of the way of life at Guilford, we too will confront changes.

We often react to change with apprehension or outright anger: murmurs of discomfort when a favorite gazebo goes missing, cries of foul play when a professor doesn’t get tenure, gasps of panic when a pile of gravel appears near the entrance to the woods trail.

It doesn’t take much to set off the alarms that warn us of impending “change” or a “different” Guilford. It’s the blurry semantic line between change and progress that keeps some people tiptoeing around campus as if the Quaker values themselves were about to be ripped off the quad’s light posts.

The good news is that Quakers (who for the most part still pay the bills around here) love to make change a group activity. Between the SLRP and Diversity Plan, Community Senate and student organizations, compassionate faculty and dedicated staff, there are plenty of avenues through which we, the student body, and we, the individuals, can nudge that rolling ball of change in the right direction.

If what we define as progress is different from what we see around us as change, then there are an awful lot of reasons to be a part of the process rather than resist it. Time and the face of Guilford itself have shown that change is inevitable. As we sit on the horizon of a new year, it should be our goal to ensure that each person works toward what they see as not just change, but progress.