Changes in university missions across institutional and national boundaries, and at different times, form the basis for this study. While universities tend to resemble one another and confront similar challenges and tendencies irrespective of location, there are significant differences in how they identify and pursue their missions and tasks based on geographical, social and political distances, as well as institutional variations across countries and settings (Altbach, 2016). We therefore compare not only between organisational responses but also between institutional settings, which include how universities are funded, governed and led; how they fit into the political economy of their environments; notions and traditions of leadership and decision-making; and cultural conceptions of the value and utility of academic work.

Our ambition is to formulate and describe a ‘social revolution’ in universities, which is taking place in response to a new landscape of expectations, and new modes of communicating and forming directions in society. This transformation of university roles has been accelerated and put under immense stress by the COVID pandemic, but it was already underway before 2020.

Pre-pandemic Trends, Debates and Theories

While universities are often claimed to be immune to radical change and redeployment, their history abounds with ruptures and transformations, and indeed fundamental crises. One such transformative instance was the first ‘academic revolution’, when universities took on the mission of research in parallel and in addition to education (Brockliss, 2000). This transformed the task of a university and the academic profession from reproducing and preserving a cultural heritage to producing new and sometimes irrelevant knowledge as well, a challenging change for an institution wedded to social stability. This academic revolution is still to some extent unfinished and unresolved, as shown in the limited articulation between teaching and research (Hattie & Marsh, 1996).

Another transformation was when universities were turned into organisations rather than loose federations of scholars, with the inception of departments and schools in which the missions of education and research were more broadly integrated (Clark, 1983). The autocratic disciplinary chair structure was replaced with a variable and flexible system of academic positions filled via recruitment and promotion, malleable to internal and external dynamics and pressures. This transformation is also unresolved, or at least contested, as the relationship between the individual academic and the organisational setting in many instances is strained (Altbach et al., 2012). Similar tensions appear in the governance of universities, where different logics and forms of representation co-exist uneasily (Marginson & Considine, 2000), with universities having different layers of governance where professorial dictum and managerial fiat struggle for dominance.

A third and ongoing transformation is when universities include a social function (‘service’), which occurs for a variety of reasons. The role is not only mandated but also enacted by the higher education institutions themselves, in mobilising different social forces to build ‘pillars of excellence’ internally (Lowen, 1997). Universities have, of course, always been part of a social fabric, but the form and direction of that alignment have seldom been articulated or made subject to strategic considerations. In different waves, and under different historical political and social circumstances, the alignment has become articulated more explicitly. During nation-building in the nineteenth century, universities performed different societal functions, such as the land-grant system or the Californian master plan in the USA, and similar models in countries as diverse as Japan and Germany (Merritt & Rokkan, 1966). With the Cold War, the service function was skewed in the direction of national mobilisation, transcending the boundaries between national security concerns and academic work (Edgerton, 2005). More recently, the social function has evolved against the backdrop of the instabilities and uncertainties of our time, where traditional institutions and organisations have been subverted by a combination of separate but related forces, such as digitalisation, globalisation, populism and new forms of political mobilisation; marked social and regional inequalities and disparities; and mounting pressures on the public budget. The social function of universities is thus both an imperative and a constraining factor, and universities have responded very differently to the social instabilities surrounding them.

Thus the emerging social function of universities can be understood as a part of the evolution of the academic system as an organisational field, and universities within that field must devise specific strategies and action patterns to engage with the social expectations around them.

Theoretical Overview

How and why do universities change their missions and activities, and how and why do change processes—ways of articulating general directions, such as a greater social and service orientation—differ between settings?

The fundamental instability of the university mission has been made abundantly clear during the global pandemic, when universities worldwide have seen their directions, identities, funding and organisation strained and altered at record-breaking speed. In parallel, the importance of universities has never been greater, both as providers of education and as contributors to research to counter the impact of the pandemic, whether directly or indirectly. Universities have been mobilised as a result of the pandemic, but they have also been challenged and questioned.

What does this say, then, about how universities operate? A theoretical framework is needed that can make sense of university identity, activity and impact in order to understand how universities develop and how they change, with a special emphasis on recent changes towards a more pronounced and deeper role for universities as contributors to social development locally. For the purposes of this study, we adopt a set of assumptions that together form an understanding of universities as stable yet malleable (‘dinosaurs with wings’, as the social historian Harold Perkin once put it).

This is certainly not the first attempt at grasping what universities do. Institutional higher education studies has exploded as a field in both size and complexity in recent decades. In its initial orientation, historical and comparative perspectives dominated, focusing on the historical evolution of missions and identities (Clark, 1983). During this phase, studies included the transformation of higher education and research under a growing social mandate (‘massification’), as well as the interplay of academic and political interests in research priorities (Greenberg, 1967; Scott, 2019). Theoretical studies were mostly implicitly functional in orientation, grounding higher education in social structures and evolutionary directions occurring in stages depending on degrees of modernisation. The view was that universities reflected and boosted national identities and state formation. With the growing significance of universities as explicit contributors to social and economic development, the field aligned with the nascent field of innovation economics. Within this, universities were studied as variable contributors of economic value rather than—as previously—integral parts of national identities (Etzkowitz et al., 2000).

In parallel with the emergence of universities as engines of economic growth—which in itself was partly a historical artefact, partly based on the emergence of science-based sectors and industries (Rosenberg & Nelson, 1994)—the politics of university governance became an increasingly topical and pertinent issue. Historically framed as an outcome of the power balance between academic elites and the state (as chronicled by Clark, 1983), with the growing economic weight attached to universities—in markets for students, competition for academic elites, and for spin-off revenue and external funding—new ideals of leadership disseminated quickly across the globe. As a result, a branch of higher education studies showcased the shaping of governance in the interplay between collegial remnants and global and generic leadership models (Marginson & Considine, 2000; Krücken & Meier, 2006). In parallel, global forces (embodied in and propelled by ranking organisations, international regulatory agencies, student and faculty mobility, etc.) reshaped educational curricula and research, with an increasing gravitation to generic and portable templates (Salmi, 2009). As a result, higher education studies came to reflect how universities responded to, and acted upon, global forces, and how they translated them into practices that were both globally legitimate and locally adapted (Drori et al., 2006).

The latter stream is still the dominant theme. In higher education studies, institutional forces form the foundation, including how universities are shaped in the interplay of normative, coercive and mimetic processes. Thus, the field has left its descriptive and largely historical heritage and become something of a sub-field of institutionalist organisation studies. Mainstream contemporary university studies deal with the alignment between the different roles and tasks of universities, and in particular how the emergence of steering techniques has (or has not) been translated into purposeful action.

While the main focus of higher education studies aims to illuminate how universities form their identities and how they incorporate and mould different forces from within and without, it does not fully capture how universities are affected by rupture and change. Instead, the field is more oriented towards gradual change and complexity—how different steering signals emerge and are enmeshed within academic organisations. The implicit argument is that universities are becoming increasingly interlaced with different layers of steering. Here, higher education studies articulate with organisation studies more generally, which tend to view organisations as sets of multi-layered steering ambitions that together create increasing complexity in setting directions and ambitions—despite proclamations to the opposite (as expressed in critiques of the ‘myths and ceremonies of leadership’). This emphasis on the ‘iron cage’ of organisational life serves as an antidote to the overly technocratic understanding of organisational leadership, and to overly prescriptive notions of managerial discretion as the driver of organisational change (Clegg et al., 2006). In doing so, it has been instrumental in forming a much more reflexive understanding of how organisations evolve and how they are constituted by a variety of sources and inputs, and has contextualised notions of steering and change. But, as a consequence, the theory is less well equipped to deal with rupture.

Hence we look at universities as an active (or latent) source of renewal, and search for mechanisms and procedures of renewal and activity in society as a whole, including higher education institutions (Etzioni, 1971). From this, the stress on the service function of universities emerges.

From their very inception, universities have evolved out of an articulation with societal interests and needs, formulated and shaped in inevitably protracted processes (Gibbons & Wittrock, 1985). We begin with the assumption that universities are formed and shaped by expectations and intentions that extend beyond the remit of the universities themselves. Universities are thus inherently social, although the form and influence of the social foundation of universities vary immensely between, say, an elite university in the USA and a regional university in India. This also means that universities are malleable to societal dynamics, albeit in a protracted manner. They evolve in contexts that are marked by waves of stability and change, both of which confront universities with dilemmas and opportunities. In stable phases, universities may experience long periods of relatively predictable conditions, but also creeping change, resulting in a dynamic steady state where many different tendencies are contained within the organisational framework (Ziman, 1994). Such periods of countervailing tendencies have, as mentioned, focused contemporary higher education studies on examining the interplay between ambitious policy streams and established routines in the academic system. In periods of rupture, change comes much more radically and forces universities to adapt in ways where the established behavioural patterns cease to give guidance and identity. Here, the very foundations of how universities function are subject to transformative forces and ideals.

Available historical and geographical evidence suggests that, from the very outset, universities articulated with societal missions, and their inner mechanisms and alignment with social processes evolved in parallel over successive waves of inception and transformation (Clark, 2006). On occasions, the connection between the inner life of universities and broader social change has taken on even more radical forms. Wars are an obvious example, as were the emergence of the post-war compact around Keynesian state policies and mass market-based economic circulation and, subsequently, the emergence of a global knowledge-based economy. During such historical ruptures, universities not only had their work modes transformed but also their societal interplay—the ‘mass university’ transformed notions of recruitment and learning ideals, while the warfare-welfare missions integrated universities into the societal fabric. The same tendencies emerged when a period of partial stability was coming to an end and a new crisis was beginning. When the frictions of the post-war societal model were becoming more obvious in the late 1960s and early 1970s, universities took on more direct roles in aligning with their immediate environment, in recruitment, urban development and service provision (Shils, 1997).

A very different but similarly radical overhaul of university missions is linked to the emergence of a socioeconomic model based on knowledge-intensive inputs within global value chains (‘academic capitalism’, Slaughter & Leslie, 1997). With it, universities became directly involved in the development of technologies, and students became carriers of technological change through spin-offs. Campus became an extension of corporate research and development, as well as a breeding ground for recruitment and networking between companies and students. This, together with the rapidly expanding global recruitment of students and faculty in turn fostered a service ecosystem around universities to cater for the much more flexible and fluid movements in and around academic settings.

Our analysis begins with this recent stage of academic development (circa 1980–2015), which is characterised by a dynamic yet volatile form of university-society articulation in a new ‘endless frontier’ of knowledge-based development. The period had many stabilising properties, including a growing global exchange of faculty and students and consequently increased global research networks, the rise of global measures of performance (ranking and bibliometrics), and public and private faith in the virtues of research and education. These translated into, among others, unprecedented resource hikes, a global proliferation of academic institutions, and academic spin-offs and other forms of engagement with external stakeholders. However, the period was also marked by signs of fragility, especially in the broader societal realm, in the form of a rampant climate crisis, an unstable global financial system, and political unrest, accompanied by rapidly increasing economic disparities and declining social cohesion (Fagerberg et al., 2015). The promise of the new endless frontier of the period, namely that a knowledge-based paradigm would deliver growth and inclusion in parallel, seemed to be elusive, and there were mounting calls for so-called purpose-driven, inclusive innovation as a new mission for universities (Mazzucato, 2018).

Along with these transformative influences, the very foundations of the long period of university expansion were questioned, encapsulated in critiques of an allegedly myopic understanding of research quality, and trivialisation of educational ambitions (Science 2.0 and similar). Universities were, of their own accord but also through policy expectations and funding arrangements, interwoven into this critique and the responses to it, which primarily took the form of ‘grand challenges’, where universities were enrolled, along with a wide variety of other actors, organisations and stakeholders, in the formulation of common goals and ambitions (Åström et al., 2020). However, the forces of stability and inertia were still strong, and no impetus for fundamental change could, it seemed, overcome them (ibid.).

This pre-COVID phase saw universities (in various forms, depending on their position in the global institutional hierarchy) searching for a wider role beyond that of tech-global hubs of varying distinction, and attempting to meet and articulate with broader societal issues such as equity and sustainability in a society constituted by a vulnerable stability around hyper-globalisation and hyper-complexity. Here, we assume that there are significant differences in the management of different forces between the countries under study, depending on their institutional set-up and legacies, as well as their political economic structure.

During COVID, our second phase, we assume that immediate action in response to the pandemic forms the core of university engagement, according to our conception of universities as malleable to external forces under specific conditions. States and governments pursue policies that go beyond the consensus of the ‘great moderation’ preceding the pandemic, with interventions in social and economic affairs of a magnitude and invasiveness unprecedented in periods without a war. We expect this to have repercussions for universities, some driven by the universities themselves, others by governments and other patrons, often in tandem. This entails changes and adaptations in the technical provision of education and research—digitalisation of education most prominently as well as online forms of scientific exchange and collaboration. We also predict that universities will be expected to make immediate contributions to resilience in society more widely—in biomedicine, naturally, but also across the scientific spectrum, given the magnitude and enormous repercussions of the pandemic. During this phase, we also envision university staffing, funding and task set-up to be strongly affected by the pandemic, especially universities which rely heavily on international exchange of students, faculty and other resources. The governance of universities will also take on quite different and untested formats. Governments will make repeated and hurried changes in resource appropriation and task assignment. University leadership will have to mitigate the effects of the pandemic through direct interventions in how units, faculty, staff and students operate; adaptations in various forms (ranging from self-organisation to withdrawal) among these groups; and potentially new forms of interaction between groups. Here, we also assume that comparisons will reveal quite distinct patterns of adaptation, depending on the societal configurations and, in particular, the structure of the political economy and adjacent institutional set-up (Hall & Soskice, 2001).

The evolution of universities after COVID, the third stage, is of course a more speculative matter. Different scenarios for social and economic directions, both international and domestic, are plentiful and contrarian, from the dystopian to the transformative (Philippon, 2019). If anything, COVID has revealed the vulnerabilities created by the endlessly combinatory hyper-flexible society of recent decades, and how that has hampered efforts to combat the pandemic. We envision an opportunity to create a more resilient and inclusive society that can better predict, frame and counter major instabilities, involving a wide range of interests and institutions in new and more flexible relationships. However, this will probably co-exist with residual vulnerabilities and instabilities from the hyper-globalised compact of the pre-COVID phase, which may result in more contentious global relations and a wider, possibly more autocratic, role for the state in providing services and opportunities that were previously the remit of civil society and market forces (neo-dirigisme). As for universities, we expect the post-COVID period will see global relations tested, but also a rediscovery of local dependencies and relations. Universities will be seen more as assets in the direct sense of the word, rather than tokens of visibility and credibility, or as organisations that can capitalise on the international mobility of students and faculty. We also expect issues of legitimation and directionality to be critical in matters of university governance; leadership will be driven primarily by the identified missions of a university (Crow & Dabars, 2020; Gumport, 2019). We also anticipate that the methodological underpinnings of comparisons such as rankings—important as they will continue to be in a constantly evolving and complex landscape of higher education institutions—will become more inclusive and nuanced, to move away from the stereotyped global ideals of previous eras.

Theoretical Starting-points: Power in the University

Our analytical framework structures and organises these observations and the depictions of higher education systems and COVID experiences in three countries. We match them with the underlying assumption that universities are malleable, particularly in periods of radical change. This aligns with our macroscopic starting point, where we assume that universities are inherently social, forged in broad and complex contexts that largely reside outside the academic confines (even though education and research in themselves are central in the remoulding of society; Stensaker et al., 2012). While broad societal forces such as technical change, trade, financial flows, and wars tend to cross national boundaries, the contexts in which these forces play out vary, depending on institutional set-ups and trajectories, the political economies and social mobilisation. Even though there are strong globalising tendencies, policy diffusion and standards in operations, and historical and contextual differences, also form and translate such forces. This is why we identify national higher education systems as critical nodes in transformative periods and why we search for trajectories and interests that are particular to those systems and the function as filters and funnels of the transformative elements.

While a systemic analysis is critical to understanding how transformations evolve, we need to complement such a macroscopic perspective with a mesoscopic and microscopic framework that enables an understanding of how universities function as organisations, how the societal framework conditions are translated into action and direction, and how actors respond to and enact these changes. In doing so, we attain an understanding of how specific organisational settings and specific groups act as carriers of a transformative experience such as a pandemic. This also forms a critical bridge between systemic change and real-world experiences, or in sociological terminology, how systemic and social integrations are bound together (Mouzelis, 1991).

To allow for a nuanced depiction of how organisational settings interact with experiences at the level of individuals and groups in academic settings, we now outline an analytical framework—adapted from Grant (2021)—which pinpoints critical aspects of how universities are constituted and operate in a dynamic environment. The key components are: the structure of power; motivation; strategy; process and decision-making; people and recruitment; place and spatial relations; and engagement with students.

The Structure of Power

The first aspect of university dynamics is the structure of power within universities. Core dimensions of power include how different forces are mobilised within and beyond academic settings, the forms and expressions of authority, the articulation between organisational and private values and engagement, modes of engagement and commitment, and the temporal alignment between members and organisations.

Universities are multi-actor organisations with devolved and complex authority structures. They comprise different groups, each with their own specific positional assets based on credentials and accumulated experience (for faculty) but also on professional training (for staff) and access and entry (for students). These in turn are shaped by interdependent processes: while faculty holds a privileged position in the pursuit of education and research, that position is contingent on staff support and collaboration with students. Power relations in universities are therefore based on task interdependence, and even more so in turbulent times when adaptation and learning can be assumed to be critical elements.

These nested interests are in their turn blended with external inputs articulated by a variety of stakeholders holding governance functions and other positions of influence. This can partly be understood as a formalisation of the social embeddedness of universities, but also as an expression of the presumption that universities are more effectively run when they are infused with external perspectives. This we assume is more salient in turbulent times, when traditional roles and notions seemingly do not hold. The structuration of actor interests—internal and external—has varied over time, and can be expected to vary also between types of universities, depending on historical trajectories, national regulation, and the organisational direction of a specific university (such as the mission it aims to serve, or its articulation with the surrounding society). It is also dependent on authority forms in universities. Authority may, typically, either reflect a non-interventionist stance, namely to reproduce existing power relations, or a maximalist stance aiming to remould interests and directions (Lowen, 1997). Similarly, we assume that universities engage with the private commitments and engagements of their different actors to various degrees, either quietly accepting them as they are or reshaping them in specific directions (for instance community engagement, entrepreneurship or public duties). Temporality, finally, refers to the degree to which universities form relations that span the life-course of its actors, even if they are no longer formally part of the organisation. The temporal dimension therefore refers to the degree to which a university forges relations that go beyond the strictly regulated framework of membership.

Overall, this aspect points at how power is structured and enacted within universities, and—for our purposes—most importantly at how and in what form the engagement of its different actors and groups (students, staff and faculty) is mobilised and how that mobilisation is channelled within the organisation. Our basic assumption is that power is a relational aspect of any organisation, and that universities, with their flexible and malleable mandate, are particular examples of this phenomenon. In times of crisis and upheaval, the configuration of power relations is particularly salient—such configurations may be flexible and responsive to transformative forces, or may aim to disregard or neutralise them (in Grant’s terminology, ‘new’ versus ‘old’ power). For our purposes, we will be looking at how the pandemic—as a major transformative impetus—has affected the relative position of different groups within universities in specific contexts, and how these groups, alone and in combination, have configured the response to the pandemic.

Motivation

Motivation is the second aspect of our analytical template. For our purposes, motivation is understood to be the public purpose of a university, and how it is manifested. Thus, motivation takes shape in the formulation of the missions and visions of a university. Specifying and articulating the directions and ambitions of academic institutions is a fairly recent phenomenon, although universities of course have always had an implicit mission and vision. Such directions have traditionally not been subjected to explicit design and execution until rather recently, and then mostly as a response to transformative expectations and pressures (Frølich & Stensaker, 2021). Motivation thus serves as an indication of ‘the idea of a university’, and the location of it in the wider academic and social context in which universities operate. We assume that motivations are particularly important in framing how a university—viewed as a coherent organisation—may deal with insecure and volatile conditions (Rothblatt, 2009).

Motivation may take very different forms, grounded in a wide range of situational, political and historical factors, such as the long-term evolution of a university, its location in the national polity and its relationship to other places of learning. Such university ideas and missions are, however, also malleable, linked for instance to the first aspect, to the power structure. When forms of power change for whatever reason, the direction of a university may also change. A historical example of this is the aftermath of the political upheaval in the late 1960s, which in retrospect can be seen as having fostered a more acephalous structure where professorial dominance was partially dethroned and a more flexible and adaptive motivational direction was instigated, even among some of the most staid places of learning. Motivation thus serves as an indication of the directionality of a university, how it envisions itself and the world around it, and the resources, networks and power structures it links to.

Drawing on Grant (2021) and his terminology, we may distinguish between old and new motivations. Expressions of the former tend to emphasise stability, exclusivity and control in the disposition of academic affairs (where universities and their dominant power structures are in control of their boundaries). The latter instead emphasise the flexibility and contingency of university missions and directions, formed and forged in the internal and external interplay between different interests and power holders (an embedded understanding of the idea of a university). For our purposes, we shall be looking at how universities formulate the balance between different activities, their specific role in their immediate setting and in the world as a whole, and the kind of obligations and expectations it ties them to.

Strategy

If the first two aspects of our analytical template pinpoint the idea of a university and how it links to potential and realised power structures, strategy showcases how universities formulate attainable aims and distribute resources and authority towards the realisation of those goals. For our purposes, the strategic aspect is therefore intended to showcase how power structures and motivation are linked to the overall priorities of a university, that is, how general ambitions take shape in the form of organisational goals (Morphew et al., 2016). Strategy may, again following the dichotomy of old and new university directions, address various aspects of a university, both internal and external. We primarily orient ourselves to the potential renewal and embeddedness of strategies, and how strategy in times of turbulence and transformative pressures may open up to incorporate new avenues and vistas. This also highlights the procedural dimension of strategy, namely how it is developed and enacted. Traditionally, strategy has been envisioned as a vertically controlled entity, where goals are identified in a controlled and closed manner and then enacted by means of stringent and measurable sub-goals (Pettigrew, 1977). The strategic focus is therefore on securing the framework conditions of an organisation. Potentially, crises and upheavals circumvent and even prohibit such controlling ambition, and instead view instability and change as an opportunity to renew and stretch the mandate of a university (Whittington, 1996).

For this study, strategy is indicative in two ways: first, how and by whom it is developed, especially the degree to which strategy formulation draws on a diversity of perspectives. Second, how strategy is enacted and delivered, and to what extent it is embedded and draws upon the capacities and ambitions of its members and various stakeholders. Taken together, we assume this links strategy to the formation of power and the articulation of a purpose within a university. Strategy thus serves as a token of an organisation’s sensemaking, where the internal and external conditions of a university are outlined, and what it aims to do on the basis of those conditions.

Process and Decision-making

Turning to process and decision-making, we highlight how universities enact their missions and strategic objectives through the allocation of resources and the distribution of authority. These are the main properties of a professional organisation like a university—resource allocation illuminating how remit and performance are appraised and rewarded, and authority revealing how and by whom the governance of activities is regulated and conducted. Resources and authority have, like strategy and motivation, historically been hidden aspects of a university, where positional power has instead been based on given categories and professional types (types of subject and types of position). As a reflection, this aspect of university power has been largely understated and not subjected to closer consideration until fairly recently. With mounting expectations of utility (social and/or professional), the distribution of resources and authority have become both increasingly significant and variable (Larédo & Mustar, 2001). Such procedural practices have increasingly been tied to expectations rather than historical parameters. The growing complexity of the academic profession and the changeable organisational matrix of universities have in their turn fostered a more reflexive approach to how universities allocate resources and mandates, and the relationship between departments, centres, missions and other organisational entities (Langfeldt et al., 2015).

We assume that social crises and upheavals trigger reconsiderations of how mandates and resources are set within higher education institutions, how they interact with funders and stakeholders in the process, and how they balance that with the internal power structures and motivations. We also expect that there are ideal or typical responses, either isolating and controlling external turbulence when resources and authority are set (old power), or instead embedding such transformative pressures into the formulation and delegation of the same entities (new power).

People and Recruitment

People as an analytical aspect includes those who populate universities, and more specifically the processes of recruitment, retention, and motivation of individuals and groups to positions within universities. With this we move from people as carriers of power interests to those who actually ‘do’ teaching, research, and service functions in and around universities. It is through embodied work that universities come to enact strategies and motivations, and the processes through which people are recruited, retained, motivated, and possibly demoted, are therefore indicative of how universities see themselves in and around the world. Historically, this aspect has been discretely structured and hierarchical in nature (Ben-David, 1971), with sharp entry barriers but relatively stable positions thereafter. It has gradually evolved into a much more continuous flow of appraisal and contingencies through the course of an academic career (Hermanowitz, 2009). The main issue for our purposes is how the flexibilisation of academic careers and passages can be aligned with, and perhaps even benefit from, turbulence and change in and around universities. The procedures that have been established to monitor and incentivise impactful efforts among academics have most likely enhanced efficacy but arguably also constrained novelty, variation and innovation. In doing so, they may have contributed to a cleavage between internal stringency and external interaction—the more efficient academic work is in its own right, the less engaged it may become to external interests. We therefore foresee a potential duality (in line with the old and new power dichotomy) between processes that aim to strengthen internal mechanisms that mollify external impulses, and those which instead aim to leverage external impetuses to reshape understandings of what academic work means and aims for, in a continuous and flexible remoulding of academic work modes and work places—using external turbulence as an inspiration and as a means to question existing dogmas in recruitment, retention and placement.

Place and Spatial Relations

Where universities are located and their relationship to that place direct us to the locational aspect of university dynamics. Historically, the location of universities has been either unassimilated (‘town and gown’) or symbolic (with the inception of turn-of-the-century universities to mark the alignment with state-building and industrialisation). More recently, universities have been established as part of an expanding welfare state with its need for appropriate professional training, in the third stream of university establishments (in our cases, Gumtree universities in Australia, million+ universities in the UK and regional university colleges in Sweden). While such waves may be seen as different ways of articulating with specific locations (clerical cities for ancient universities, industrial and capital cities for turn-of-the-century universities, and regional service centres for newer universities), the locational aspect can be seen as variable, not tied to a specific institutional age. Locational articulation may instead be tied to the aforementioned aspects of motivation and strategy, and thereby subject to potential alteration and redefinition.

One way of respatialising universities has been the globalisation of some universities, with branch campuses spread across the globe (Wildawsky, 2010). This connects with the pre-COVID phase of seemingly borderless exchanges and frictionless attainment of value—in this case institutional value—far beyond its original location. Another form of engagement with spatial forms, perhaps more relevant for our purposes, involves the rearticulation with the original location, for instance by engaging with local communities, stakeholders, and with service and goods providers. University locational value would in this case not merely be seen as an entity that is cultivated and made portable throughout the world in a controlled manner, but also a property that can be nourished and indeed recreated in resonance with place and placeholders around universities. This would then be in much the same vein as in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when universities transformed their local relations as a response to critiques by students and other dissenting voices (Shils, 1997). Thus, we also identify a potential duality in university responses to turbulence and change, namely to embed in and be embedded by the location in its variety and dynamism (new power) or to control the boundaries with the location in order to secure positional value (old power).

Engagement with Students

Students, their attitudes, ambitions and expectations, allow us to explore how universities engage with the experience and direction of learning and embodying knowledge and experience. Historically, the role of a student was dynamic, with students serving as fairly independent transmitters of knowledge in their moving between fixed locations populated by scholars (Cobban, 1971). Gradually, and under the banner of such icons as Cardinal Newman and Wilhelm Humboldt, the student experience was made central to the notion of the modern university as a place of learning and concentration, but also a core part of nation- and state-building. With the increasing institutionalisation and massification of higher education and learning, the student experience was increasingly seen as a standardised good to be inserted into labour markets without friction. More recently, and in the light of an increasingly volatile and flexible labour market, education is seen as a set of skills to be matched with the vagaries of the market, with employability as a leading concern (Garsten & Jacobsson, 2004).

In parallel, the relationship between students and universities has been one of the most complex and varied, where students from time to time have moved to the fore in institutional critique and change (Altbach & Cohen, 1990). Current debates on sensitive matters on campus may therefore be seen as only the latest of such reconnections with student power and student interests. We may also distinguish between old and new power in this context, which in turn sensitises us to the different ways of aligning with different forces in and around universities, either to control them and minimise their aberrant effects or to connect with them and use their energy to experiment with and improve institutional conditions and viability.

It is against the theoretical and analytical framework that we explore the impact of COVID on universities in three countries—the UK, Sweden and Australia. To do that we take a quasi-ethnographic approach by commissioning a series of ‘COVID stories’ from a range of different actors who lived through, and shaped, how universities responded to the pandemic. These personal accounts provide us with the analytical material that we use to explore, in the final section, the longer-term consequence of COVID on higher education. We are particularly interested in examining whether there will be ‘reset’ in the ambition and ways of workings of universities, or whether they will ‘revert’ back to the pre-COVID stagnation. In other words, whether out of rupture and crisis will we see reform and if so what that may look like?