© Andy Maguire
Like every other sector, higher education is suffering the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are still waiting to see whether the emergency transition to online teaching will work out and whether alternative assessments will deliver fair and appropriate results. This will forever be the ‘COVID-19 academic year’, but we still do not really know what it will end up looking like.
We are also yet to understand the deep implications of the pandemic on the functioning and sustainability of universities and academic communities around the world. The UK is perhaps in a particularly strange and vulnerable position due to the marketisation of its higher education sector, the associated waves of strikes over the last two years, the economic dependence on international student fees (mostly from China) and the global mobility of its top talent.
There will be temptations to go back to ‘normal’ or as close as possible to ‘business as usual’ (perhaps with an intervening sector-wide bailout). I would argue that, in many fronts, this should be resisted. The current shock to the way things were done should make us reflect upon what does not work in academia, what scrambling through the challenges of COVID-19 is teaching us, and what we want for the post COVID-19 academia. I have a few thoughts.
First, COVID-19 and the associated collective disorientation, fear and confusion in its immediate aftermath have created massive tensions in the governance of higher education institutions, with many of them displaying levels of dysfunctionality that will only be fully visible in the medium to long term. These challenges in governance and the vacuum or excesses (and sometimes, both) of decision-making and communications (with staff and students alike) have only been partially mitigated by the commitment and the collegiality of most, starting with those on the most precarious contracts, which are at the frontline of interactions with students. Only this attitude will carry us through this, for the unavoidable truth is that the worse is yet to come and it will be with us for quite some time. The sense of community that (the lucky ones, amongst which I am blessed to be) have been experiencing shows us something about the real meaning of academia. We must build on it.
However, making this commitment sustainable will require a very significant rethinking of the system of values and rewards in academia and, importantly, a levelling up of working conditions and an end to casualisation. ‘Citizenship’ is now the gold standard and the only way of keeping Departments/Schools afloat and, with them, the heavier University structures. This is a time where it may be all too easy for some to hide under the efforts of most. More than ever, keeping tabs with everyone’s contribution, demanding that senior colleagues pull our weight, and recompensing those that go above and beyond will be crucial. Only resilient institutions can get to the other end of this (and the next, and the following) crisis and the institution can only be as resilient as the worse-treated, paid and rewarded of its members.
Second, this crisis has shown how most of our lives are unbalanced from a personal/work life perspective and the fragility of the support structures that allow us to overwork, oftentimes to the point of neglecting our closest and dearest, as well as ourselves. The unavoidable ‘reduction in academic productivity’ that has come with the pandemic — except for some, specially in the fields of knowledge of more direct relevance, of course — should make us reflect on whether we are all doing too much, and also perhaps too little. We should take stock of what is it we think is at the core of our function as academics, as members of a scholar community. We should also take stock of all the things we would ordinarily be doing but cannot do anymore due to time constraints, or other reasons. Perhaps the current prioritisation can tell us how to refocus our efforts and how to reshape our jobs — and perhaps our personal lives — so we have a better balance.
Third, the crisis has grounded (almost) everyone. Yet, academic activity has not stopped and we are all getting used to a volume of online activities we would never have dreamt of. From the perspective of the need for academia to get serious about climate change and transitioning to a truly environmentally sustainable model, this can be one of the silver linings. I know it is unrealistic to expect everyone to join me in my pledge not to fly for work, and I understand that the reasons why that would not be feasible or fair remain. However, I think that now that we have all been forced into the exercise of 'trying it out’, we should collectively adopt a position of restarting as few activities requiring travel (and in particular flights) as possible. To a certain degree, this can also apply to distance learning, as we will very soon have accumulated significant experience in online teaching, which should make us rethink the traditional structure of campus-based degrees (not to abandon them, but to consider a better mix of presential and online activities, as well as broadening our horizons to part-time and distance-learning as potentially more inclusive options).
Finally, but this is less new, the crisis has once again brought into sharp relief the inadequacy of the methods of academic research publication and dissemination. When push comes to shove, peer review procedures can be dispensed with or minimised, publication is carried out in open access and dissemination is maximised as a true attempt at discharging the social responsibility of those with the relevant knowledge, a platform and available resources. It has been heartening to see so many specialists team up and work on the modelling and analysis required to inform public health policies, as well as robust scrutiny of political (in)decisions and other valuable interventions. There is plenty that resonates with what the academic mobilisation around Brexit already showed. This really seems to me to be the day of reckoning for the current model. May the movement to make academic textbooks and then parts of the catalogue backlist freely available online by some publishers serve as evidence that knowledge can no longer be kept behind the crumbling paywalls.
There surely is more to reflect upon and many more changes that are desirable for a post COVID-19 turn of the academy for the better but I would be satisfied to see an increase of the sector’s resilience by securing all its members and aligning the systems of incentives and rewards to what makes us collectively strong and puts us in a position to discharge our social mission sustainably; a rebalance of the personal and the professional in a sector where jobs tend to also be people’s passions (at least for the lucky ones, such as myself); a transition to a net zero emissions academia by 2025 at the latest; and a move to open access, agile and quality-assured publication and active and engaging dissemination of academic research.