Precarity, fear and hope: reflecting and imagining in higher education during a global pandemic

‘Unprecedented’ is a word that has been heard all too often this year, the year the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) set off a global pandemic. For the higher education (HE) sector globally, this pandemic may prove to be something of a watershed, as it drives radical changes to the way universities operate, and to the day-to-day experiences of the people who work and study within them. Across the globe, higher education institutions (HEIs) have been radically reshaping teaching and learning in unprecedented ways, and with rare exceptions, education has moved into the online space at breakneck speed. Work practices have altered significantly, placing new pressures on staff and students. Funding for HE has become more precarious than ever, particularly in countries which have been heavily reliant on fees from international students to fund its core business. Questions about universities’ and governments’ duty of care for the well-being of students encountering economic and emotional hardships and physical isolation have become more urgent. At the same time, the social, psychological, economic and health impacts of the pandemic raise new questions about the future of HE, its purpose and sustainability.

Recollecting Donald Schön’s (1983) work on reflective practice, the HERD editorial team decided to make space within the journal to reflect-in-action now, in the midst of the pandemic. According to Schön, the purpose of reflecting-in-action is to gain a new perspective on a problem, rather than necessarily arrive at a fixed or final solution. In this special collection of essays, our authors record and reflect on this extra-ordinary global crisis, and its impact on their universities, themselves, their students, their peers, their families and communities in order to gain new perspectives on their experience. But they do more than record and reflect on the present – they are also engaged in the work of imagining the future. As Appadurai (1996, p. 1) argues, in this era of globalisation, imagining plays ‘a critical part of collective, social, everyday life and is a form of labor’. These essays are performing the vital work of not only imagining our way through the current crisis but also, we dare to hope, contributing to the re-making of a post-pandemic world.

Each essay presents a unique perspective, written from a particular part of the world and a particular position in relation to HE. The collection includes essays written from a range of disciplinary, cultural, and geopolitical perspectives by researchers, students, new graduates, professional and administrative university staff, international student organisations and commentators.

Despite the very different positions these essays represent, a number of common themes reverberate through them. Most striking is the recognition of the extra-ordinary significance of the pandemic. In several essays, the effects of COVID-19 on HEIs are described, for example, as disruptive, circuit breaking, turbulent, or transformative. At the same time, these essays reveal experiences of the pandemic that are strikingly differentiated. Those whose connections to HE were tenuous prior to the pandemic – Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Migrant and/or Refugee (CALDM/R), international, regional and remote and first-in-family students, Indigenous students and staff, casual staff, people of colour, and women – voice particular challenges, and share some unique ways of facing them. Likewise, the pandemic has had very different ramifications in different national and geo-political contexts. Regardless of these different positionalities, however, all of the essays are also concerned with HE futures. In the following, we highlight the common threads running though this collection of essays, comment on the differentiated nature of the experience of the pandemic and finish by considering how these essays respond to questions posed by Rizvi in his essay: What might ‘recovery’ from the impact of the pandemic mean for the HE sector? What is it that we want to recover?

Shared experiences and common themes

A key focus in these essays is the mass-scale experiment in remote and virtual teaching, learning, working and relating in universities, necessitated by new social distancing norms across the globe. As several authors explain, universities around the world have embraced the transition to an online teaching and learning environment with remarkable speed. Those who have never before experienced learning and teaching solely online – that is, the majority of students and academics in many countries – have suddenly found themselves on steep learning curves. Yet, as Yang, Coates et al., and Ho and Pham explain in relation to China and Vietnam respectively, their HEIs have developed a new appreciation for the potential of online teaching to enable innovative, interactive learning, and they are consequently investing heavily in its development. Nevertheless, the essays in this collection also reveal the many challenges associated with new modes of teaching and learning, including increased pressure on academics (Blackmore), and inequitable access for students (Baker et al.; Ho and Pham; Lagi). Takayama considers what is lost in the ‘“margins” (yohaku) of learning’ when we only connect virtually; that is, ‘the loss of possibilities for accidental moments of learning’ such as chance encounters in the corridor. This latter concern is explored by doctoral students Wang and DeLaquil, who find it challenging to develop networks and engage in ‘complex’ conversations while working solely online.

This collection also highlights the shared experience of the pandemic’s grim economic impact on HEIs across the globe. Ross predicts the loss of thousands of university research jobs in Australian HE, while Blackmore suggests that such job losses will likely be gendered, since women are over-represented amongst casual and temporary staff pools. Writing from the US context, Bolumole discusses the particular impact of reduced employment prospects and increasingly uncertain career futures on early career staff and graduate students, who were already precariously positioned within marketised HE prior to the pandemic. Blackmore brings a feminist lens to her analysis of the pandemic’s negative impacts on staff and students, arguing that it has exposed a broader, systemic ‘carelessness’ in marketised HE, where commercial considerations are valorised as a primary consideration. This theme is echoed in many of the essays, which reveal the toll the pandemic is extracting from students and staff in many countries, regardless of their position and place. At the same time, the essays expose something of the pandemic’s differential and uneven impacts on particular people and places.

Specific implications for specific people and specific places

Authors in this collection consider the specific effects of the pandemic at a range of scales – national, institutional, and individual – and show how people in HE are positioned differently in relation to the pandemic’s economic, embodied and emotional effects. Taking a national perspective, Ho and Pham, and Yang, celebrate pandemic-driven teaching and learning innovations in Vietnam and China respectively, suggesting that, despite the associated challenges, new ways of enacting HE may extend beyond the pandemic. Yang argues that a high degree of trust between universities and the Chinese government has helped curb COVID-19 in China. In contrast, Lo writes from Hong Kong of the dual impact of the pandemic and political protests – many led by HE students – in response to legislative changes imposed by China. Lo’s view of Hong Kong’s HE future reveals deep uncertainty, but anticipates irreversible changes including reduced academic freedom. Some essays point to the significance of geography and topography in shaping the pandemic’s impacts. While lauding the response of the Vietnam education sector generally, Ho and Pham acknowledge specific challenges for students in rural and mountainous regions. In Oceania, topograpy has contributed to many island states’ COVID-free status, however, Lagi highlights the costs of this ‘freedom’ for individuals, families and communities. While the region has long experience in online and distance teaching and learning, Lagi notes the anxieties provoked by the closing of ocean borders. Lagi describes creative innovations aimed at bolstering student and staff wellbeing when ‘normal’ life events cannot be marked in ‘normal’ ways. She also notes the likely effect on the region’s HE institutions of reduced foreign aid in the face of a global economic recession.

Baker et al., Nguyen and Balakrishnan in Australia, and Bolumole in the US highlight the impacts of institutional carelessness on particularly vulnerable cohorts of students. These authors critique the assumption that all students have a home environment in which they can study and engage in online learning, and that they ‘will seek help if and when they need it’ (Baker et al.). International students Nguyen and Balakrishnan respond to the Australian Prime Minister’s abrupt injunction that international students ‘go home’, expressing a sense of betrayal given Australia’s concurrent and longstanding dependence on international student fees to fund public education. Their essay explores what the Australian Government’s ‘othering’ of international students during the pandemic has revealed about the myths and prejudices underpinning policy and practice in internationalised HE. Notably, many CALDM/R, graduate and international students must work in order to live – an impossible prospect when required to ‘stay at home’ (Bolumole). Naepi et al. highlight the specific costs of the pandemic for Indigenous students and staff who must fight for institutional recognition, while supporting family and community faced with threats to lives and livelihoods.

What could ‘recovery’ look like?

Despite its dire impacts, COVID-19 provides a critical moment to reflect on the current direction and values of HE and re-imagine the sector as a more resilient, humanistic and transformative model. Essays by Beard, Leask, Nguyen and Balakrishnan, and Rizvi all argue that COVID-19 has exposed how risky and transactional the HE model is in key education export countries such as Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand. Marginson’s analysis links the current vulnerabilities in the HE systems of the UK and USA to the individualisation promoted in their political discourses. According to Rizvi, the valorisation of student mobility in largely economic terms in public discussions about HEI’s recovery has overshadowed the transformative possibilities of international education. Now, COVID-19 is presenting us with possibilities to re-think the roles of universities beyond the ‘hyper-intensified form of temporal logic’ and commercialised understandings of ‘productivity’ (Takayama).

COVID-19 has opened up valuable possibilities to transform disruption and precarity into creative, flexible and inclusive teaching and learning. In a context where cross-border mobility is significantly constrained, Ho and Pham argue that virtual programmes could potentially offer meaningful and inclusive learning opportunities and widen educational access, especially for non-mobile students and those from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Leask imagines how such programmes could be linked to genuine commitment to social and environmental responsibility and internationalisation at home to enrich learning for all rather than predominantly the elite mobile staff and students. The pandemic has exposed the equity implications in the transition to remote learning and thus catalysed a more concentrated push towards enhancing student experiences, especially for disadvantaged groups such as CALDM/R students, Indigenous students and international students. COVID-19 presents possibilities to reform equity practice, policy and funding to ensure targeted academic and welfare support for the under-represented in HEIs, and to genuinely recognise and build on cultural and linguistic diversity as strengths and resources to enrich teaching and learning in HE.

In the wake of COVID-19, these essays gesture towards the possibility of drawing strength and resilience from communal solidarity and collective spirit. Lagi and Naepi et al. point to the creative ways in which Indigenous staff, students and communities have initiated and sustained social practices that foster life, wellbeing and connection, despite, and because of, social distancing requirements. Many of the essays express the hope that the adversity, disruption and precarity caused by COVID-19 may catalyse a renewed focus on the importance of community, connection and care as fundamental to a vision of HE that promotes human, and planetary, flourishing.

Arundhati Roy (2020, n.p.) argues that ‘historically pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew’. But, how we imagine that new world depends largely on how much of the old world we are willing to change – and how much we are prepared to fight for it. Each in their own way, the essays in this collection expose the fault lines inherent in HE systems that are over-commercialised, hyper-intensified, individualistic, careless, instrumentalist, corporatized and paralyzed by tradition, and reimagine forms of ‘recovery’, which are more equitable, inclusive, sustainable, communal, humanistic and resilient.