‘The COVID-19 crisis is not the core problem’: experiences, challenges, and concerns of Irish academia during the pandemic

Abstract

This article, drawing on data from an international survey – distributed in the summer of 2020 – explores the experiences and concerns of academic staff (n = 167) working in universities in Ireland and their perceptions of their institutions’ early response to the pandemic. Concerns related to transitioning to remote online working, impact on research productivity and culture, and work intensification, as intersected by enhanced managerialism, are ubiquitous to their accounts. As some respondents wrote of potential positive changes, particularly in the delivery of teaching, we conclude by suggesting potential avenues for building on successes in coping with the pandemic with some recommendations for mitigating some of the harms.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• Ireland
• online learning
• higher education
• managerialism

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Worldwide Universities Network for supporting this work and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The role of the Higher Education Authority in Ireland, from its webpage, is ‘statutory responsibility for the effective governance and regulation of the higher education system’. https://hea.ie/about-us/overview/.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Worldwide Universities Network.

Notes on contributors

Kalpana Shankar

Professor Kalpana Shankar Professor of Communication and Information Studies, School of Information and Communication Studies, Co-Director of the UCD Centre for Digital Policy, University College Dublin, Ireland.

Dean Phelan

Dr. Dean Phelan Post-doctoral Assistant. Department of Geography, Maynooth University, Ireland.

Venkata Ratnadeep Suri

Dr. Venkata Ratnadeep Suri Assistant Professor. Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.

Richard Watermeyer

Professor Richard Watermeyer Professor of Higher Education and Co-Director of the Centre for Higher Education Transformations (CHET), School of Education, University of Bristol, UK.

Cathryn Knight

Dr. Cathryn Knight Lecturer in Education, School of Education, Swansea University, UK. [email protected]

Tom Crick

Professor Tom Crick Professor of Digital Education and Policy, the School of Education (Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences), the Computational Foundry (Faculty of Science & Engineering) and the Faculty of Health & Life Sciences, Swansea University, UK.