Will There Be a COVID-19 Reckoning for College Administrations and Boards?
Many colleges and universities in the US have defied their faculty, staff, and students in bringing students back to campus during a pandemic, and they can’t explain why. Could this be the straw that finally breaks the back of neoliberal education anti-management?
When the COVID-19 crisis started, many of us in US higher education worried about university administrations using the crisis as an opportunity to push through policies they would otherwise be unable to enact. As the American Association of University Professors put it, “the COVID-19 pandemic must not become the occasion for administrations or governing boards to jettison normative principles of academic governance.”
There are far too many worrying signs of just that happening, all over the country.
Yet few of us suspected that the opposite might also happen: that the pandemic might become the occasion for university communities to see just how far from education the mission of higher education presidents and other administrators has strayed, and how much, no matter their talk about honoring shared governance, administrators have given up on it entirely.
It is beginning to seem like the pandemic might provide a moment of reckoning for US higher education that most of us thought…
