The University of Panic: Leadership in the Post-Learning COVID Campus

Introduction: From Pandemic To Plandemic

Perhaps appropriately, this chapter commences with a tweet. More unusually, it is a tweet about death and higher education. On January 21, 2021, a Canadian graduate student posted the following message.

The university had not informed the class of the academic’s death. This student only discovered the reality when googling the scholar’s email address and found – instead – an obituary. In the online university, it seems that death is no excuse to stop teaching. Dying is not antithetical to working.

Online teaching and learning – through its history – has been haunted by ghosts and trailed by zombies (Brabazon 2016). Obsolete platforms and interfaces were managed by under-trained academics. A characteristic of university academics is that a Doctor of Philosophy is the terminating degree. Teaching is a hobby, an accidental activity that is the mortgage paid on a research career. But it is teaching conducted without qualifications or training. Learning may result. It may not. Without curricula expertise and an understanding of literacy theory, teaching and learning remains a hope rather than a planned activity.

Online learning proliferated through higher education in the late 1990s during the period of neoliberal, globalized managerialism. As this neoliberalism failed in an array of industries, confirmed most effectively through the Global Financial Crisis (Tett 2009), it continued to dominate leadership in higher education. This meant that online learning was welcomed with evangelical relish to deliver cheap content, delivered by contract or casual staff. University leadership could focus on the budget savings gained through the decline of full time and tenured academics, as casualized, precariat scholars ‘delivered’ content, rather than knowledge, and facilitated rather than taught. Quality was monitored through often inelegant proxies, such as student reviews or Rate My Professor. This new normal was based on high numbers of international students, academically mobile staff, and a separation of teaching and research. However, any change or interruption to this system where international students and industry-fuelled research funding subsidized the public university would deliver a fatal blow to the business model. This Russian Roulette leadership and budgetary protocol fired its deadly bullet in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic summoned the panic, the fear, the errors and the lies of the online university. Through COVID-19, higher education – like Dorian Gray – suddenly found its portrait in the attic. Students transformed into the “neoliberal subject” (Chandler and Reid 2016), taught by dead professors and using social media to complain about it.

Digital culture and higher education have danced for decades. Frequently the choreography is under-rehearsed, the set is cheaply constructed and the dancers are under-motivated. Online learning is crushed by cliches: from Star Trek’s Final Frontier to digital natives and silver surfers. It jumps from new media to old media, and a futurism that would make Alvin Toffler blush. Digitization has promised much. It has delivered online shopping and Instagram ‘influencers.’

Online learning has never been fit for purpose, because the imperatives, the goal, the rationale for higher education in neoliberalism has never been clearly specified. Teaching and learning are rarely efficient. The market duels with notions of the ‘public good’ of universities. Time, care, respect and expertise are required to enable a diversity of students to reach academic standards, particularly after the widening participation agenda emerged in many nations through the late 1990s.