Our first story comes from Karim Ali, who recently graduated from King’s College London (KCL) with a Master’s in Pharmacology. Karim was born in Amman, Jordan, and is a diaspora Palestinian. After realising KCL’s relationship to organisations involved in arms development, he became a student activist focusing his efforts on KCL’s commitment—or lack of it—to human rights. Following months of campaigning with his team, in 2019 Karim worked with KCL to develop a system to push for a more ethical approach to university partnerships and investments. Since the beginning of the pandemic, he has been involved in assisting grassroots community efforts in his local borough and beyond. While helping to found aid groups in his community, his proudest work has been linked to the success of the Funnel Support Network in supporting local organisations to provide food donations at a time of shortages. Since graduating, he has started work in the tech agricultural space, where his interests lie in food, research and technology. He is now trying to develop a programme to educate youth on the importance of food security and collective action.

William Weidow, who wrote the second student story, grew up in Halmstad, Sweden, moving to Lund to begin a BSc in Business & Economics in 2018 at Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM). During 2019/2020 he was active in LundaEkonomerna’s Student Union (LE), managing the student representatives at department level, later moving on to become the Vice President during 2020/2021, representing the opinions of the students at faculty and university level. In this role, William worked towards LUSEM becoming a triple accredited faculty, establishing a forum to learn from the forced digitalisation from the pandemic, serving as a counsellor at LUSEM, revising the guidelines for discrimination, harassment and unequal treatment of students at LUSEM, supporting a forum for equality at LUSEM and creating a student representative handbook. William is interested in reading, analysing and writing and hopes to write books in the future. Apart from this, he plays the piano, likes skiing, travelling, riding his motorcycle and spending time with friends and family, especially his grandmother. Above all else he loves dogs in all shapes and sizes despite being very allergic to dogs.

The third story comes from Nicole Votruba, who passed her PhD viva during lockdown. Nicole describes herself as a political scientist and psychologist, feminist, and European citizen living in London. She cares about people, social justice, diversity and inclusion. She strives to improve population health and access to quality health and mental healthcare for people in disadvantaged contexts and to reduce stigma and discrimination. Having worked for several years as a consultant in the European research policy environment, Nicole went on to lead a global campaign to include mental health targets and indicators in the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Driven by curiosity and desire for impact, she returned to academia to research global mental health, knowledge translation and implementation science. Currently, she is a post-doctoral researcher coordinating global mental health research programmes at King’s College London. She is also policy officer of the UK All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. Nicole grew up in post-communist Europe, with a great appreciation of the values and aims of the European Union, and the UK Brexit vote broke her heart. She loves art and political philosophy, in particular Hannah Arendt, and believes that everyone should read Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism. She truly appreciates British politeness and diplomacy, and London’s tolerance, and sometimes wishes she were better at manifesting these qualities herself.

Anne Quain, who wrote the final student story, grew up in Newcastle, Australia, moving to Sydney to undertake an undergraduate degree in philosophy. After completing an honours thesis on Spinoza’s ethics, she applied to study veterinary science, graduating in 2005. Since then she has worked as a veterinarian in companion animal practice, completed her Master’s in Small Animal Medicine and Surgery (Murdoch University, Perth), obtained a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education, and become a member of the Australian and New Zealand College of Veterinary Scientist’s Animal Welfare chapter by examination. She is a Diplomate of the European College of Animal Welfare and Behaviour Medicine in Animal Welfare Science, Ethics and Law, and co-authored Veterinary Ethics: Navigating Tough Cases with Siobhan Mullan. As a clinician, she has experienced ethical challenges first-hand, experiencing the moral stress that can result from these. She enrolled in a PhD to explore ethical challenges faced by veterinary team members. Her research informs her teaching.

Karim Ali’s COVID Story

Karim was a third-year undergraduate pharmacology student at King’s College London, UK when the pandemic struck.

What is the role of universities in the future? Are they to be propagators of knowledge and righteousness or factories for the commodification of education? Amidst poor responses to COVID and mass confusion, these questions found themselves in the limelight for many university staff and students. For me? Well, I’ve been asking these same questions since I moved to the UK in 2017 to attend King’s College London (KCL).

By the start of 2020, I had upgraded my degree to an MSci in Pharmacology with a Professional Placement Year. I was studying at KCL while working a full-time placement as a pain neuropharmacology researcher at the Wolfson Centre for Age-Related Diseases (CARD). In my spare time, I led student groups pushing for social justice on campus. I focused on the ethics of certain university partnerships, where I often observed an underwhelming lack of commitment to institutional values when revenues were put on the line.

When the pandemic first hit, it felt as if a storm had turned the world upside down. Amidst the harrowing silence of life within the first national lockdown, my work in the laboratory was labelled as non-essential, and I was no longer allowed to return and complete my research. Additionally, my ongoing social justice advocacy at KCL came to a screeching halt, becoming as irrelevant to supporting pandemic relief as the Tory’s advice to keep washing your hands. With both government advice and family pressure mounting to return home, I instead decided to tell a few white lies and stay in the UK, with the goal of helping vulnerable people in any way that I could.

It was a cold February day when the first mutual aid flyer made its way through my door in South London. Due to austerity and excessive military expenditure, western powers found themselves more prepared to bomb the pandemic away than to feed children or provide front-line staff with personal protective equipment. While underfunded local authorities struggled to adjust to working remotely, members of my community recognised that some people would fall through the cracks in our systems. They decided to act, distributing food and medicine while supporting people suffering from loneliness and domestic abuse.

At the point that I joined, we needed to quickly spread the word about our efforts. Because non-commercial printers were closed, leaflet production was slow, making it difficult for us to effectively utilise our volunteers for growth. I quickly made contact with a local printer who helped and within four days we had reached out to the entire local community.

With the group quickly growing to 130 members, we needed to find ways to manage and finance our support efforts. Moreover, the growing size of the group was causing difficulties concerning the safe management of people’s information. To help with this I created a case management and volunteer onboarding system from scratch, as well as producing full documentation on how to use the group’s infrastructure. Meanwhile, our team created a constitution and we agreed to pilot for Lightning Aid, a Fintech solution that allowed us to accept donations and begin supporting our community members in need.

By now, the districts we created had successfully come together to create the infrastructure needed to support community members. We selected regional coordinators for each district to relay cases to the volunteers and allow for more devolved management. With money flowing and volunteers running, I took over the helpline and people in the community slowly started reaching out for help, while others volunteered to support them. The North Bermondsey Community Support Network was born, facilitating the activities of the nine devolved mutual aid groups.

At this point, the thought in our minds was, why not take it further? Shouldn’t we expand, if it means helping more people? The group then established a social media, web, and graphic design team who supported our launch onto digital infrastructure and allowed us to reach even more people requiring support. This is when I decided to take up web design, which allowed me to upgrade our case management system by making it digital. With upgraded technology and safeguarding policies, our outreach team then launched a campaign aimed at supporting existing charities. We ended up supporting organisations including AgeUK, Southwark Council and local pharmacies.

In late March last year, I realised the underlying issue we were trying to address was food security. I was surprised to learn that there were as many as 7.4 million people in the UK experiencing food insecurity on a daily basis. I found this was a direct symptom of our current system’s failure to address wider societal inequalities surrounding class, gender, race, and immigration status, which all contribute to poverty and malnutrition. When a third of children report being too hungry to focus in class, we need to turn our gaze from beyond our borders, and start paying attention to the impacts that our current priorities are having on people’s lives.

Due to the lack of mobility caused by COVID, food aid projects were suffering from a severe lack of donations. Coincidentally, as the other groups that were formed around the borough arrived at a similar conclusion, the potential for cross-ward collaboration was becoming apparent. It was at that point that I came up with the idea for Funnel: a network of food donation points on the streets and in residential buildings to make it easier to support existing food-aid infrastructure. At our peak, Funnel’s team was bringing in enough food to feed 50 people per week from over 28 donation points set up around Southwark. Every Wednesday morning, I was responsible for planning and executing the collection route with volunteer drivers. Now, with a larger team, we’ve gathered £26,000 worth of food since Funnel started in March of 2020.

While situations here mirrored those seen elsewhere in the world, I was left perplexed by the impact this pandemic could have on life in developing countries. As economic despair spread, transnational intersectionality seemed undeniably clear. I could see that we were all in the same boat, and that boat was in trouble. It was directly after the formation of Funnel that George Floyd was murdered by police officers in the USA. Iyad Al-Hallaq, an unarmed disabled Palestinian man, was killed by Israeli occupation forces that same week. With the mounting pressure of annexation in the West Bank and worsening conditions in Kashmir and Xinjiang, the world was protesting the injustice faced at the hands of corrupt regimes from Russia to Ramallah. While many were dissuaded by the pandemic, ironically it was those communities most affected that took to the streets to bravely protest against the injustice they faced. I too felt it was a moral imperative to act and decided to assist in organising a series of socially distanced demonstrations in London over the late summer of 2020. During this time I began assisting a group of BAME students at the Wolfson CARD to pursue measures to enhance inclusivity and help correct for systemic under-representations of minorities in academic leadership positions.

Throughout the work I have done, I have found that people in positions of power often do not see the value in discussing their ‘solutions’ with all the stakeholders in the communities they affect. For example, our institutions champion diversity yet allow the statues of slave owners to tower in our courtyards, we build hospitals while investing in the industries that put people in them, we close roads to decrease congestion without increasing the quantity and quality of public transport. Decorative policies allow institutions to block their ears to the collective experiences of our communities in order to deny the hypocrisy lining much of their actions. This perpetuates a cycle of band-aid solutions to avoid changing the status quo. I was 20 and inexperienced when we first started this pandemic response. If we didn’t listen to our community and address people’s concerns, I would have never found the solutions to any of our problems.

While we continue to fight for the soul of our institutions, we are often met with more obstacles than one should expect. If universities are to continue being facilitators of knowledge and societal change, they must become better at empowering future change-makers beyond lecture halls. Universities should be tearing down barriers, providing more opportunities for connection with surrounding communities, all while holding themselves accountable to their values and ethics. This will enable a conscientious community of learners and will inevitably lead to fewer decorative measures laced with ethical contradictions under the guise of supporting social justice and the environment. The years of stagnation caused by the inaction of those in positions of power is the reason we were so poorly prepared for the pandemic. After all, eight million people do not become food insecure overnight.

Ultimately, the next time you’re in a position to empower someone, ask yourself to imagine a better world, and remember what can be possible by helping people take the first step forward.

William Weidow’s COVID-19 Story

William was a second-year undergraduate economics student at Lund University, Sweden, when the pandemic struck.

After finishing the second year of my BSc in Economics at Lund University School of Economics and Management (LUSEM), I stepped into the role of Vice President and board member for LundaEkonomerna student union (LE) in July 2020. LE is an organisation built on voluntarily engaged students and hosts everything from a welcome week for 400 students to the biggest careers fair for Business and Economics students in the Nordic region, the ‘eee-days’. The core activity of LE is to represent the opinions of our members in the preparatory and decision-making bodies of the faculty and university. My role in LE as a board member has been to shape the strategic direction the union takes, and as the Vice President to be responsible for representing LE’s opinions to the faculty and university regarding educational questions.

Having the responsibility of being both a board member and the Vice President, I was affected twofold when the pandemic hit. Being a board member, COVID made almost all of our, admittedly short, organisational memory obsolete. We had to review and renew the entire way that we think and operate and this without knowing if the partner companies would still want to collaborate with us. As Vice President, I lost much of the student contact, the opportunity to represent students informally, which is a big part of the way we as unions provide educational surveillance, and the opportunity to build relationships through meeting people in the hallways and chatting before and after meetings. Overnight, we lost contact at ground level and were forced to become proactive in our approach rather than reactive. Previously, things could be planned and executed at the last minute with no difficulty, but now an event which previously took a couple of hours to prepare and execute suddenly turned into a long process of internal discussions where the varying messages from Sweden’s public health agency and the regions had to be interpreted before even discussing the event itself.

Working from home prevented us from meeting members of our 28 committees, and having to participate in many digital meetings was difficult for me and for many of the active members of our union. For most members, becoming active is important for creating a social context and finding friends. In a digital meeting room, this has been proved to be difficult despite it being possible. In my personal experience, I found it difficult to maintain focus when losing the social context in many forums, the break of moving between different (physical) meeting rooms, change of environment and breaks from screens. Having to sit at home all day proved difficult for many, especially for students that had little or no context in a new city where they have no family or friends.

Sweden, being a country where soft regulation rather than hard legislation was the approach to COVID, was not affected initially compared to many other countries. In mid-March, all education went digital overnight, but without lockdown. The all-digital teaching affected students and their mental health greatly, and most, if not all, students experienced increased issues with motivation, wellbeing and the lack of social interactions, with some new students not having met a single other student or teacher in-person since the beginning of their studies. All that said, overall digital teaching seems to have worked surprisingly well.

The fact that digital education meant not having to be in the same classroom, city or even country, with some international students studying solely remotely, raised questions about the future of teaching. MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, have become increasingly popular in recent years, as well as initiatives such as ‘Studiechansen’‘, semesters with all-digital cross-scientific education and integration of several subjects. In the future, will physical teaching and exchanges be the norm, or will there be alternatives of cross-university collaborations where the universities start competing not only with their BSc and MSc programmes but also with individual semesters or courses? Why not build a BSc with management courses from one university, economics courses from another and programming courses from a third? The answer might be ‘no’ based on the loss of a social and cultural context, but the development of more interactive digital tools might create the opportunity to create a good social context in the digital meeting room.

The response from the university towards the students and student unions was quick but of very varying quality from faculty to faculty and from department to department. What was obvious was that the things that had been working well kept working surprisingly well with quick initiatives from both the organisation itself as well as from individuals. However, for the things that had not been working optimally pre-COVID, the flaws became apparent. For many teachers, the digitalisation and adaptation to digital tools with little or sometimes no experience of computers proved to be difficult. For students that had little social context before, many experienced problems with not having anyone that they met regularly.

The university quickly initiated different preparatory and decision-making groups to handle COVID. For a decentralised university, centred around physical teaching with regulations up for interpretation at best and no clear guidance at worst, having to transition to all-digital teaching overnight seemed to be surprisingly difficult. With unclear mandate comes unclear decision-making, which may prove advantageous in some cases but difficult in times of crisis.

As the Swedish government increased its support to student unions (after many years of discussions, COVID happened to be the stick that broke the camel’s back), Lund University decided to match this increase. This led to much-needed economic support to unions that were unable to perform their activities as usual. Especially for LE, this was valuable as our operations are to a large extent centred around careers events which are, with some variation, more difficult to execute all-digitally, at least at the beginning of the pandemic.

There have been many initiatives to handle the issues related to the pandemic from different parts of the university. One is increased economic support to the Student Health Services, which provides counsellors and information about available services to students, as a result of more funds from the Swedish government. Another is the Wellness Weeks on LUSEM, a collaboration between LE and LUSEM to host social and informative events, providing a social context and information about the support available to students. The university management team has been attentive in its pursuits and open for input from the student unions in Lund on how to handle the issues at hand.

Many initiatives, both at faculty and university level, were conducted to learn from the pandemic and ensure that we go into the post-pandemic world well-prepared for the hybrid teaching that most likely will take place in the wake of COVID. Forums at faculty and university level have been implemented, such as a learning group under the university educational collegium and one under the LUSEM educational collegium called LUSEM Learning Forum. The forced digitalisation has both shown what works exceptionally well in a physical room but also what can be performed with maintained quality online. Preliminary conclusions that can be drawn at this stage of learning are that few new tools that were not previously used have been implemented, rather the tools already at hand have become more accepted and well-developed, both from increased organisational knowledge and to some extent from system development from distributors of digital tools (e.g. Zoom).

Nicole Votruba’s COVID Story

Nicole was a PhD student who submitted her thesis and successfully passed her viva during lockdown.

I work part-time as a researcher and until very recently, I was also a part-time PhD student at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London (KCL). In my current role as post-doctoral researcher, I coordinate several studies in global mental health and stigma research. I also contribute to teaching on several programmes. I am engaged with other junior and senior academic, research and administrative staff at my university, and colleagues placed at collaborating universities in the UK and abroad. I am also involved in a number of projects outside my university, which is helpful for me to ‘keep a foot on the ground’ where things I research are being implemented.

As a PhD student, I investigated how mental health research translation to policy can be improved in low- and middle-income countries and developed a framework called EVITA (EVIdence To policy Agenda-setting) to support the process of knowledge exchange. In this role I got a very different perspective on how things work in the university, my institute and department. I had regular meetings with my supervisors, took training opportunities run by the university and was in exchange with fellow PhD students. I also contributed as student champion to my institute’s Diversity and Inclusion team and the Athena SWANFootnote 1 Self-Assessment Team. Through this, I got insights into the workings of our institute and departments and experienced a group of highly motivated individuals that aim to drive change for greater equity and inclusion for the staff and students working and studying at our institute.

On 31 January 2020, the UK had just completed its withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit. It was a year-long process of insecurity and anxiety for many university students and staff, threatening peoples’ workplaces, homes and livelihoods, and the future of international research collaborations and funding. That’s when the news about the COVID pandemic started spreading around the world.

Around this time, I became a full-time student to complete my final data analysis and was aiming to hand in my PhD by early summer. When the news about the novel, fast-spreading respiratory disease increased, and with it emails from the university and institute about the situation, I continued holding on to my usual office and life routine. In early March, I visited my 93-year-old grandmother in the Czech Republic, and subtle worries made me ask a doctor in the hospital for a face mask for my flight home. Shortly after I came back, my supervisor suggested working from home, but going to my office and seeing my colleagues was a routine I really valued. Relatively early on in 2020, KCL had begun emailing regular updates on the spread of COVID, assessing risk and the impact on the workings of university life. The information was based on evidence from WHO and Public Health England and was to some extent a source of clarity and reassurance, in an increasingly uncertain situation. Eventually, and before the national lockdown, KCL decided to take intensive measures to prevent spread of the virus on campus and protect all students and staff, and closed the university. On Wednesday, 18 March, the Principal announced the temporary closure of KCL, describing the weeks ahead as being among the most difficult since the Second World War. I felt devastated having to leave my office, and scared, hit by the severity and reality of the situation.

From that moment on, all teaching went online, while the country moved into lockdown, with some intermittent episodes of dual remote and in-person teaching with voluntary attendance when lockdown was eased. Conferences hosted at our institute went fully online. To enable remote teaching and conferencing, my colleagues had to set up an entirely new system in a short time, including all technical challenges that came with it. They clearly did a brilliant job, as the fantastic reviews that I heard about the first fully online UK Implementation Science Research Conference proved.

KCL regularly shared specific health, safety and wellbeing updates for guidance on travel and research fieldwork. To better cope with lockdown and manage the stressful uncertainties of the pandemic, the university, institute, and department set up a number of additional online information materials and events around mental health, wellbeing and resilience, such as wellbeing newsletters, cooking workshops and counselling. King’s Sports programme moved online offering a range of daily exercise and meditation sessions. With gyms closed and even outdoor exercise limited, these daily sessions offered invaluable support for the entire community’s mental and physical wellbeing. Seeing the motivated trainers, who were fellow students or colleagues, working out every day from their own bedrooms and terraces, gave me a valued sense of stability and connectedness.

Many colleagues with children, however, have had a particularly difficult time, trying to keep up with work while being responsible for home schooling, managing day to day life, and the pandemic’s other challenges in addition. The university, and our department in particular, repeatedly stressed that they appreciated these additional challenges and encouraged those affected to arrange work time flexibly as far as, and only as much as, possible to make things work.

The situation was also particularly challenging for professional services staff, such as colleagues working in the canteen or cleaning staff, both under the threat and realities of furlough (and Brexit), and the increased risk of contracting the virus while working on campus. I am also aware that several of my colleagues volunteered to vaccinate people in the affiliated Maudsley psychiatric hospital.

For PhD students in their final year, the university added an automatic three-month extension to the submission deadline. For those students on a UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) studentship, a scheme was set up offering funded extensions for up to six months, in collaboration with UKRI. The process was relatively quick and easy, and it was extremely helpful not having to worry about income in addition to all the stress. The three-month extension I received through KCL from my funder, the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), enabled me to complete my thesis in summer 2020. I understand that the university also supported students who were self-funded to apply for external funding, although challenges for those students seem to remain, particularly those earlier on in their PhD and those with data collection rendered impossible by lockdown and travel restrictions.

The next months passed in a blur. I set up a fairly rigid routine at home, with a daily quota for my data analysis, sharing times for work/living spaces, gym sessions, walks and disinfection procedures. I guess it helped me control the little that could be controlled, while all around the pandemic unfolded uncontrollably. In South London, where I live, many people started wearing masks only when government made it mandatory. George Floyd was killed, and worldwide people went on the streets to demonstrate against racial discrimination and violence, under the movement of #BlackLivesMatter. By April and May, my Twitter timeline was full of messages and pictures of people who had succumbed to the virus. At times, I checked the nationally reported infection numbers three times per day. I sent pictures of empty supermarket shelves to friends and family abroad. Everything was unprecedented.

My supervisors regularly checked in on me and my PhD progress, and the times when I had meetings with them, and my colleagues, were often the only external social contact I had. It was helpful to hear that many of my colleagues had similar problems, concerns, and routines, to myself. It was Spring, and the UK was in lockdown. If at any point in my life, a national lockdown could be of use, it was now. I was writing up my thesis, working weekends and evenings. I handed in my thesis in August, sent as a pdf to an automated email address. No fireworks, no handshake, just another pandemic neighbourhood walk (and, to be fair, some bubbly with my friend).

During the pandemic, increasingly hostile, Sinophobic comments from certain policymakers and (social) media led to concerns and sadly also experiences of discrimination and racism among foreign students and staff, in particular those from or with a background from Asian countries. Myself and colleagues from our institute’s diversity and inclusion team flagged this up, and the institute and university provided anti-racism support information online, and spoke out to the community against racism and the violent outbreaks of, and around, the murder of George Floyd and others. Increased awareness and support emerged towards the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Researchers involved in national and international research projects faced additional challenges as their programmes were abruptly halted. Any research that involved in-person data collection or travel was stopped, while funding continued to run according to pre-COVID deadlines. In Autumn 2020, the university offered a limited budget from UKRI to apply for costed extensions for projects in their final six months. In summer 2020, I took over the coordination of a global mental health research programme, involving partners from Nepal, Nigeria and the USA, which according to protocol should end in Autumn 2021. The programme Principal Investigator and coordinator had already set up a contingency plan and protocol to mitigate the COVID impact at the sites and we are monitoring and adapting this regularly. COVID led to several months of delay, which meant that we had to apply for a costed extension to be able to complete the programme. This was declined, presumably because of the overall UK aid and research funding cuts. We managed to fend off early termination and have applied for a no-cost extension. At the time of writing, we are waiting to hear the outcome, uncertain whether we will be able to complete the study. The impact of these abrupt, substantial funding cuts on colleagues and so many people working and relying on UK aid and research programmes, is disastrous, short-sighted, unfair and irresponsible. We know that millions of vulnerable people worldwide will suffer and die early as a consequence.

My speculation on the longer-term impact of the COVID pandemic on universities, and the related community engagement strategies, is that structural change in higher education is imminent. Many universities around the world rely heavily on international tuition fees, which have slumped in 2020 and seem unlikely to recover in the near future. This and the linked decrease in university revenue have been predicted to impact the number of academic, research and administrative staff positions in universities.Footnote 2 It appears likely that, with distance learning skills and platforms rapidly increasing, universities will move to a permanent solution of dual digital and in-person education. In addition, this is likely to impact on the structure, funding and quality of research activities. These fragmentational changes will be additional, however critical, challenges for universities to manage, in terms of maintaining and engaging with their communities and the people who constitute these.

An opportunity, however, may be associated with these transformations, in particular hopefully for people in low- and middle-income countries, for a fairer and more equal access to education and development.Footnote 3 With remote teaching accessible across the world, students may be able to access university programmes from their home country, which may offer substantial savings on living and accommodation costs, albeit depriving students of the cultural exchange experience of living abroad. Collaborations between universities in high- and low- and middle-income countries could enable dual or even multiple degrees, while at the same time contributing to strengthening local universities and research capacity.

Support from funders and governments will be necessary to manage these transitions and ensure high-quality university education in all regions of the world, while unions and other bodies will be needed to support an equitable and inclusive representation of the members of the communities.

After the submission of my PhD, I started two new positions, one of them part-time coordinating a research study at KCL and the other as policy officer for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health in the UK Parliament. In November, I had my viva, remotely, with official permission to have it from my office for better internet. It was a bizarre mix of joy and alienation, returning to my desk in the empty department. And wonderful seeing a few colleagues to celebrate afterwards—outdoors and socially distant. Later that month, in the midst of a world in the second lockdown, my grandmother passed away. Due to the travel restrictions, the risk and a limitation on people attending funerals, I was not able to fly to Czech Republic to be with my family and attend the service.

Anne Quain’s COVID Story

Anne was a part-time lecturer and PhD student at the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, Australia, when the pandemic struck.

I am a part-time lecturer in the Sydney School of Veterinary Science, part of the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney. In this role I coordinate a unit of study, undertake my own research, supervise research students and engage as much as possible with the media and veterinary organisations in educating the wider community about animal welfare, particularly that of companion animals. In this role I see the incredible dedication of my colleagues, specifically their passion to deliver exceptional education and support our students.

I am also undertaking a PhD, looking at ethically challenging situations encountered by veterinary team members. In this role I experience the University, and my school, from the perspective of a student. I answer to my supervisors, I sweat over deadlines and appreciate first-hand the constant challenge of managing life, work and study.

I teach my unit of study intensively, about a month before the majority of students are on campus. When I began teaching in February 2020, Australia had just seen its most devastating bushfire season in living history. Much of the East Coast of Australia had been covered in smoke for months, thousands had lost their homes and an estimated three billion animals had perished. Our postgraduate conference was postponed due to high fire danger. In the midst of that media coverage, increasing numbers of news headlines gave the impression of a Draconian lockdown in Wuhan, and a tsunami of cases of a novel agent overwhelming the surge capacity of healthcare systems in Northern Italy. The footage of people gasping for air in overcrowded intensive care units was terrifying. At this stage the media portrayed this as a remote problem, a safe distance away.

One of our students listened to lecture recordings from her home in China as she was not able to return to Australia. In the second week of teaching, public health posters began to appear outside of the lecture theatre, in the bathrooms. Students were more concerned about revising lecture content. They sat in lectures, and I am grateful they had that time to connect with one another face to face. Australia went into lockdown on the week our intra-semester exam was to be held. Fortunately, with help from our education support team, I was able to convert this to an online exam. We all found ourselves working and studying from home, for which some were better set up than others.

As a locum veterinarian, I transitioned to no- and low-contact consultations, working in split teams to ensure business viability if anyone came down with COVID or had to isolate due to contact with a case. This was challenging for clients and veterinary team members alike—all struggling to communicate via technology and through layers of personal protective equipment (PPE). Hand sanitiser and surgical scrub were nowhere to be found.

From doubling down on handwashing to trying to shop for groceries during the quietest period, no part of life was untouched by the pandemic. Footage of people fighting over toilet paper in the supermarket went viral.

I’ve never experienced such a period of mass uncertainty. Fears about the virus among community members were intense. Early in the outbreak, there was much discussion in the media about the rationing of ventilators, and the shifting of healthcare ethics from a principalist to a utilitarian approach. Reports of potential infections of companion animals with SARS-CoV-2, coupled with pre-peer review publication case reports, fanned community concerns about the risks posed by companion animals. A number of staff in our school, including myself, were mobilised by our university’s media office to address those concerns based on a critical review of the available evidence.

The Centre for Veterinary Education, a university-based organisation which delivers continuing professional development to veterinarians, provided a series of free webinars and resources on the developing information about zoonotic aspects of COVID for veterinarians, attended by hundreds of veterinarians from around Australia and overseas. I believe that this stream of reliable information helped veterinary team members educate and reassure their communities and clients.

As an academic, it was made clear that we had to change everything we did—from timetabling to interacting with support staff to communicating with students. Practical classes and placements needed to be rescheduled, redesigned or replaced rapidly to ensure that student progression was not negatively impacted. Everyone dropped everything to make it happen. All in an environment of profound uncertainty. Our school worked with the Australasian Veterinary Boards Council and other institutions to ensure that our DVM students would meet accreditation requirements.

I am aware that the university provided financial assistance to many students experiencing hardship. But I also know that online learning, and the ability to catch up everything—including class discussions—enabled a lot of students to better juggle work and studies. The reality is that many of our students do work, and need to be able to support themselves and their families.

I predicted less engagement from students, but to my surprise found the discussions in online lectures to be more active. I suspect that some students feel less threatened being able to type a question into the chat. They can also ask questions in real time. It was lovely when cameras were turned on and I could see students, often sitting with a dog, cat or bird, in their respective study spaces and keen to learn.

As a student, I received increased communications from the university, including personal emails to determine my specific needs, as well as links to additional resources. I was contacted by veterinary colleagues who felt that the pandemic posed unique ethical challenges for veterinary teams, and developed a survey in conjunction with my supervisors. The Human Research and Ethics Committee expedited their review of that application to ensure that I could capture the challenges encountered early in the pandemic, enabling me to collect data in a timely fashion. Our postgraduate coordinators set up a weekly online chat to check in.

Administration became much easier. Most tasks, including applying for a new student card, could be done online in a more streamlined fashion, and student support services were very responsive.

I found I could still connect with fellow students via Zoom. Our Student Admission and Retention team ran live cooking classes, for which I purchased the ingredients, already measured, via the University of Sydney Union. I learned how to create homemade pasta from a bona fide Italian chef—in Italy—and cakes from our very own Instagram star @cakeboy—with students dotted all over the world.

Later in the year, the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre began running bi-weekly online ‘shut up and write’ sessions, attended by students at universities around Australia and the world. These, based on the principle of short periods of fiercely protected time to pursue a very specific goal, were and continue to be goldmines of productivity, and I hope they continue forevermore.

The global pandemic meant that students could not speak at national, let alone international conferences in the main. But the university created other opportunities. For example, colleagues in the Marie Bashir Institute held a one-day symposium for Early Career Researchers under the One Health Umbrella. I was fortunate enough to be able to speak at conferences that I would otherwise have been unable to attend, including the International Society of Feline Medicine conference in August and the Humane Veterinary Medical Association virtual symposium in November. The former attracted some 15,000 delegates.

My preliminary research results show that one of the key ethical challenges facing veterinary team members was conflict between their professional obligations to animal patients, clients and the wider community, and their personal obligations to their families and networks. That is, veterinary team members faced a critical choice: do I turn up to work, knowing there is potentially some risk to myself and those I come into contact with, or do I protect myself and my family by avoiding work? It is an ethical challenge that faces most of us, and one which I think we will all face with increasing frequency.

It has been argued that, like the global financial crisis, the COVID pandemic is a transboundary mega-crisis, the likes of which we will see more of.Footnote 4 We cannot ignore the reality that climate change is likely to exacerbate concurrent and cascading crises,Footnote 5 which will impact the wellbeing of humans, the welfare of animals and the health of the ecosystems that sustain us all. My prediction is that universities will increasingly divest from fossil fuels, and formally declare climate emergencies.

The way that academics disseminate their findings may have changed forever. Conferences aren’t the most efficient or cost-effective means of sharing one’s data, and when the impact of air travel is factored in, they aren’t benign either. I think we will see more innovative, virtual academic meetings.

The potential for spread of a highly infectious disease, and the need to avoid unnecessary travel, will be factored into work health and safety policies at universities and elsewhere. I think we will see a lot more people working from home, at least some of the time, and a leap in technological innovation to facilitate this.