COVID-19 Crisis Response of Higher Education Institutions: Tampere University (TAU) and University of São Paulo (USP)

Introduction

This chapter considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis to which the world and organizations have responded differently. The impact of the crisis on higher education institutions (HEIs) has been enormous. In the early months of the pandemic, more than 20,000 HEIs suspended or postponed teaching and research activities, affecting more than 200 million students worldwide in more than 200 countries (Brown, 2020).

HEIs used a variety of strategies to limit the spread of COVID-19, the most common approach being to move teaching and learning activities online. However, many HEIs lacked the technological resources and preparedness of staff and students to adapt to new educational delivery modes. The World Bank estimates that the impact of the pandemic on higher education was exacerbated by insufficient preparedness of HEIs. Very few institutions had pre-existing plans to respond effectively to the crisis (World Bank, 2020).

The existing literature on HEIs’ responses to COVID-19 is fairly generic and does not provide a more in-depth analysis of their responses. This chapter aims to fill this gap by examining the initial response to COVID-19 by two case universities - Tampere University in Finland and the University of São Paulo in Brazil. The authors focus on the timeframe from January 2020 to May 2020. Brazil is one of the largest Latin American countries, and Finland is a small country in a group of Nordic countries. They have different cultures, histories and socioeconomic conditions. Despite these differences, HEIs in both Finland and Brazil played an important role in the continuity and sustainability of their societies during the pandemic. This chapter analyzes how the two institutions responded to the COVID-19 crisis and considers differences in institutional approaches.

The authors use a crisis management framework, which comprises three basic stages: pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis, widely used in crisis response studies of private and public organizations, including HEIs (Drennan and McConnell, 2007; Drennan, McConnell and Stark, 2015; Pursiainen, 2018). As the COVID-19 crisis is still ongoing and HEIs are still in the midst of it, it is impossible to analyze all three stages of crisis management. In this chapter the authors will focus on the first two stages of crisis management and their components – pre-crisis (crisis assessment, prevention and preparedness) and crisis (response).