Higher education and its post-coronial future: utopian hopes and dystopian fears at Cambridge University during Covid-19

ABSTRACT

The Covid-19 crisis has given rise to existential questions around the university during and after Covid-19. How might we re-imagine the future of HE and the post-coronial university? This article reflects on utopian and dystopian imaginaries which have emerged from the pandemic by narrating the hopes and fears for the future as held and felt by students and academics at the Faculty of Education at Cambridge University. My podcast Cambridge Quaranchats forms part of the methodology of this project: set up as an affective, collaborative and open access audio journal, I have used podcasting since the beginning of the UK lockdown to publicly document the crisis of Covid-19 and its impact on Cambridge’s academic community. Podcast conversations were used in private research interviews with students and academics to sonically elicit further reflections on new horizons of the possible for the post-coronial university. The resulting data reveal that in the shift to online learning, the most prominent fears connect to the loss of education as an embodied and communal experience. A fully online university is consistently described as a dystopian outcome of the pandemic, yet moving some educational activities online may lead to increased accessibility and participation in HE. The post-coronial university will need to develop a blended approach to education that safely and flexibly combines virtual with face-to-face teaching in order to inclusively accommodate the diverse needs of students, whilst retaining a sense of embodiment and community in HE.

KEYWORDS:

• Utopia
• dystopia
• higher education
• post-coronial
• university
• Covid-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data on the location and download frequency came from the Anchor platform, which allows podcast creators to gain insight into the performance and reach of their work. The four months refer to the April–July period, which is the time during which I was actively podcasting for Cambridge Quaranchats.

2 This article builds on key findings presented in my MPhil thesis “Reimagining the Post-Coronial University through Podcasting: Hopes and Fears for the Future of Higher Education after Covid-19” (Eringfeld 2020b)

3 We are currently still in the middle of the pandemic and we are not (yet) in a ‘post-Covid’ world. The exercise of re-imaging possible ‘post-Covid’ worlds includes the possibility that the future will be characterized by recurring pandemics. The post-Covid university may mean a university which has to adapt to this ‘new normal’.

4 To my best knowledge, the term ‘post-coronial’ has not yet been developed as a theoretical term. The term has casually emerged in a few blogs (see Chabrol et al. 2020). In an online opinion piece, Indrajit Roy (2020) connects ‘post-coronial’ to ‘postcolonial’ but refrains from developing the notion of the post-coronial itself. In my definition and treatment of ‘post-coronialism’, there is no relation to ‘post-colonialism’.

5 This exercise of reimagining the future is different from predicting the future; utopian and dystopian thinking do not serve to predict most likely outcomes of the pandemic but rather to reflect on one’s biggest hopes and fears.

6 The podcast is available on a wide variety of platforms, including Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and Anchor, by searching for ‘Cambridge Quaranchats’.

7 Massive Open Online Courses

8 For example, the podcast Cambridge Quaranchats is itself a direct result of the pandemic. In addition, the Faculty of Education started the Post-Pandemic University initiative, which includes an open-access online magazine, a podcast and a ‘flipped format’ conference series.

9 For example, deadline extensions and permission to work remotely from home, outside of Cambridge and even outside the UK, are now granted more flexibly and frequently.