Our second set of COVID stories comes from four academics from Australia and Sweden. We open with Nina Wormbs who is Professor of the History of Technology at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH) Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Nina began her career studying a Master’s in engineering, physics and applied math but took an elective in the history of science and technology and found her vocation and passion in life. During her PhD she first had twins and then a few years later her third child. Knowing how hard it was to return to her research after the twins she really focused on completing her dissertation before the arrival of child number three.

Most of Nina’s early research was on broadcasting, resulting in a number of public appointments including serving on the Swedish Broadcasting Commission, participating in a public inquiry into public service broadcasting and being the ‘public inquirer’ to the Ministry of Culture into the digital switchover for digitalisation of radio. She currently sits on the Steering Committee for the Swedish Authority for Accessible Media and the National Library of Sweden, and in the recent past served on the steering committee for the Polar Research Secretariat and on the board of the Nobel Museum.

Between 2010 and 2016 Nina was head of division and head of department at her university. She found it really rewarding, but stepped down as the working conditions were, in her words, ‘too harsh’. Since then, she has been able to focus more on her own research as well as writing for a popular audience, which is what she enjoys most. From time to time she wonders if academia is really the right place for her, suffering from the constant hunt for funds and the fragmentation of work. But at the end of the day, she really values her freedom and the possibility to pursue things she finds important.

The second account comes from Maurice (Morri) Pagnucco who is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia. He is currently Deputy Dean for Education in the Faculty of Engineering and was previously Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW. Morri obtained his Bachelor of Science (Hons I) and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of Sydney. During his undergraduate studies, and being of Italian heritage, he had the great fortune to spend a year (1989) at the Department of Computer Science of the University of Milan, Italy. Morri has also worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and a lecturer at Macquarie University along with research appointments at both the University of Sydney and UNSW early in his career.

His research is focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the field of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. He has published articles in the major AI conferences as well as the major journals in his field. He has also been part of the UNSW RoboCup Standard Platform League team that has won this international autonomous robot soccer tournament five times since its inception.

His collaboration with the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research and other researchers in the School of Computer Science and Engineering resulted in a world-first interactive cinema piece that premiered at the Sydney Film Festival in 2011, which included an AI planning system to control virtual characters as they interacted with audience members.

Morri is a career academic who is passionate about the science of computer science and also the changing face of academia. In particular, how universities can continue to be the creators and maintainers of deep knowledge in the face of a society that appears to place much less value on scholarship.

Jenny Buchan, who provides our third story, also used to work at UNSW, where she was Professor of Law. After 19 years as a commercial lawyer in private practice and 18 years as an academic at UNSW she took voluntary redundancy (VR) during the pandemic. She is now Emeritus Professor. Her Head of School described her time at UNSW as a ‘blinding career’. She had looked forward to remaining at UNSW for another five years but the inability to take long service leave when she was exhausted made the offer of VR attractive. She is now putting together an interesting and challenging mixture of projects. She has become a member of the Australian National University’s Animal Experimentation Ethics Committee and is creating courses for the College of Law. She has trained to be an expert witness. As she says, academic habits die hard! She is continuing writing and research in the diverse consumer protection areas of franchise law, and excipients that trigger allergic reactions in medication. She is pursuing funding opportunities for her excipients project with UNSW colleagues in public health. She is also contributing to franchise policy at Federal Government level and will soon sign a book contract.

For our final academic story, we return to Sweden to hear from Jesper Falkheimer, who is Professor of Strategic Communication at Lund University. After doing compulsory military service, Jesper did not know what to do, so he took casual jobs and travelled for a few years until he decided to study at a university. This was not completely obvious as his family lacked an academic tradition and he was really unsure when he started studying comparative literature at Lund University. But as a new student, Jesper got hooked by a course in rhetoric, which he blames for his future academic career in strategic communications—a field of knowledge focusing on persuasive communication processes in society and organisations. After some years, when he also worked as editor of a student newspaper and studied journalism at American University in Washington D.C., he got a job at a hip advertising agency in Stockholm. But Jesper was not ready to leave university, so he came back and ended up as a doctoral candidate in media and communication studies at Lund University, settling down with his wife and twin sons in the nearby city of Malmö. As he likes to say ‘everything went like a dance’ and after his PhD he got new positions, funding, worked all the time and made a rapid ascent up the academic career ladder. Jesper then decided to try out a managerial role and worked in four different management positions during the next 13 years—a time when he met his new wife with whom he had two daughters, making him the proud father of four kids. He kept on publishing and also involved himself in external collaborations—start-ups, board assignments and so on. Jesper describes himself as a restless and productive person, who is trying to learn to calm down, but finds that quite hard. In 2020, as mentioned in his story, he had major heart surgery forcing him to slow down, at least for a while. Jesper has also left his managerial role, as he longed to go back to academia. Now he does more research and teaching, and works as senior advisor for a communication management agency, which has given him new challenges and experiences—testing his critical knowledge of strategic communication in real cases.

Nina Wormbs’ Covid Story

Nina is Professor of History of Technology at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden.

I am Professor of History of Technology at Kungliga Tekniska högskolan (KTH) Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, working in the Department of Philosophy and History. KTH is Sweden’s largest technical university, training primarily engineering students, but also housing PhD training in a broad set of disciplines. Apart from teaching undergraduate and Master’s students, mostly being responsible for segments of compulsory courses, I supervise and teach doctoral candidates in our own division and direct our PhD training in the history of science, technology and environment. I also sit on the Faculty Council, a central KTH body focused on quality, ethics and strengthening collegiality, and I have for a long time been involved in issues regarding recruitment, career development and scholars at risk. Around half of my time is devoted to research, funded by external grants.

The impact of COVID on my work and my relationship with the university have radically changed over this past year. The enormous efforts during the Spring of 2020, in particular as we rapidly changed from onsite to online teaching, were made in a context of emerging shock, limited knowledge of online teaching and fear of the virus, combined with ingenuity, ambition and collegiality. Everyone did their very best—students, tech support and teachers—to manage a situation that was new to everyone. Over time, the steep learning curve of online tools and their pros and cons meant shifting expectations. What was forgiven in the Spring of 2020 was not necessarily expected nor accepted a year later.

This was also true for online meetings, the merit of which we could immediately see, but the drawbacks only slowly emerged in full. Information on Zoom fatigue surfaced quite quickly, but it took us time to work out how to alter our working modes and not fall into the trap of only using the screen for communication.

Second, as borders closed and flights were cancelled, many of our PhD students and visiting scholars either returned home or never arrived in Sweden. And those who remained became isolated to a higher degree than permanent faculty with family and friends close by. Efforts to engage were made at several levels, eventually resulting in (too) many social gatherings on Zoom, which still did not fulfil the social needs of human beings.

Moreover, the view on what early on was termed the Swedish strategy (even though after more than a year it was still hard to pinpoint what that really entailed) differed to a great extent and harsh words were exchanged on social media between members of our community. A few aspects of the Swedish model of governance were not generally understood, and some found themselves explaining why certain decisions were made by the authorities and in the process becoming the object of criticism themselves, against a background of unnuanced and sometimes faulty international coverage. This was and continues to be a nationwide discourse that has also impacted the University.

The impact had to do with the border between formal and informal. The absence of ‘go-betweens’ meant that key information was lost as well as the ability to connect and reconnect with colleagues. In the first instance, it became clear that, when informal paths for information exchange are removed, not all necessary information becomes formal and is fitted into agendas and discussed at meetings. Likewise, removing the exchange before meetings, at breaks, after meetings and by chance, also removed the social glue and much of the joy of being part of a collective.

For me personally, belonging to a risk group, the sudden isolation from colleagues, friends and children hit hard, even though socialising outdoors was thankfully welcomed by everyone. I vividly remember an outdoor meeting on Mother’s Day in May, taking the risk of hugging my 19-year-old ten weeks into the pandemic, holding my breath. Ironically, professional meetings and teaching, where I engaged with others but on new and specific terms, would often enhance this feeling of solitude. The normal seclusion of research made me feel less lonely, forgetting the extraordinary, but also working more than intended; what else was there to do?

Apart from not being allowed on campus, my first experience was to carry out my teaching on Zoom. I had lots of experience with online meetings through international research collaborations, but to engage a large crowd of undergraduates was a different thing. To divide them into groups and manage discussions online were all new skills that demanded an enormous amount of time and effort to master. The work done centrally by technicians and pedagogic trainers to enable the huge increase in online teaching was heroic. Lunch ‘n’ Learns, both direct and recorded, were launched to answer the multitude of queries that surfaced. Digital assets were explored and creativity was great. In particular, we helped each other out; collegiality increased. Exams were a big challenge, as many of the engineering courses have monitored, individual classroom exams during specific weeks in the term. This had to be carried out for each and every student, in their respective context, during a few intense days. In general, it went really well, even though during the pandemic as a whole, reported cheating increased.

Arguably one of the most prominent responses by KTH was a lack of clarity as to how to respond to the pandemic. This was true primarily in relation to whether people could be allowed to work and study on campus. The easy explanation was, of course, the changing spread of the virus, resulting in new recommendations from the government, which in turn had to be made into university rules and restrictions. This information challenge also uncovered the different layers of KTH. In general, even if top management posted continuously on the webpage, it had to be interpreted, and management at the level of deans or heads of department served as translators.

Practical issues, like computers, chairs, screens and other tools needed to carry out the day job, were in focus early on, in particular for administrative personnel who normally did not work from home like PhDs and faculty. When our Division Head asked at the end of Spring term what we lacked the most, access to a printer shared first place with interactions with colleagues. The response on these issues was pragmatic from lower levels of leadership, whereas general guidelines seemed unnecessarily rigorous, given the fact that enabling people to work from home with more ease should have been a priority.

The pandemic has showed us that highly structured meetings, like for example a Doctoral defence, can be carried out perfectly well digitally, avoiding long-distance travel of highly sought-after committee members. Friends, family and colleagues will still be able to gather and celebrate locally. This is also true for research seminars and teaching of advanced courses, enabling cooperation on training between universities and research groups.

As a consequence, hopefully travel will decrease for the good of the planet and the individual researcher. Some of us, myself included, have already cut back drastically on flying and perhaps stopped all together. But for many, pre-pandemic, this seemed like an impossible decision. Arguments pertaining to the exceptionality of science (which is used also about other sectors, like politics or business), or efforts to minimise emissions by suitable comparisons to other, larger, emissions, will certainly resurface. However, the context will be different and, climate change aside, many will also have realised how outright ridiculous a weekend trip across the globe is, especially if you can give your talk digitally. Those of us who miss our semi-long conference trips will also be more selective with our time, and make sure that meetings to which we indeed travel are of high quality. In this respect, the pandemic has jump-started the process of universities becoming more sustainable. Many arguments pro super mobility have simply proved to be wrong.

Perhaps surprisingly, the use of digital tools for meetings and teaching has unveiled what these technologies cannot provide. By now, we all know the cons of Teams, Zoom and Google Meet and we are knowledgeable enough to make collective informed decisions on when to use them and when not. As a critic of blind techno-optimism, I find consolation in this and hope that we will use this experience to battle unsupported demands for change for the sake of change alone. We all know what it means when you cannot sense the room, or look your colleague in the eyes. Human interaction is a multifaceted and rich practice, which technology can only partly enable.

Finally, I believe that a sense of belonging is also important for knowledge producers like universities. In an age where online will be more prominent, the value of campus presence and situated teaching and learning will be fostered and realised by higher education institutions with material resources. Older universities might have to make greater use of their space whereas new and regional colleges will have to further develop online teaching. In both cases, to foster a community that not only trains students intellectually and practically but also socially, will be essential. Perhaps we can even talk about a social turn in research and learning, as we move out of the pandemic. What it really means to need one another is deeply personal, but a university that can build a community that allows students and faculty to take on the next crisis together, will be a university of the future.

Maurice Pagnucco’s Covid Story

Maurice is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at The University of New South Wales, Australia.

I am Professor of Computer Science and Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at The University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney Australia. I am also the Deputy Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Engineering at UNSW; a role that I have held since mid-2015. In this role I am responsible for developing the education strategy of the Faculty of Engineering. In recent years this has focused on enhancing experiential learning for students, enabling and supporting academic staff in introducing education innovations into the classroom, including a substantial digital enhancement programme, and developing alternative education delivery models (e.g. fully online programmes that we have never delivered at scale previously), to name but a few initiatives. The Faculty’s education tagline has been ‘Quality Engineering Education at Scale’. I am also the Deputy Director of the Creative Robotics Laboratory at UNSW. Previously I served as the Head of the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW for nine years from mid-2010. While I have been fortunate to hold many interesting roles, one that I am currently involved in is as a Member of the Australian Computer Society Technical Committee for Artificial Intelligence Ethics.

In many ways COVID had very little impact on my relationship with UNSW. On the one hand, I was very fortunate to be in a position with significant responsibility and in a role that was charged with leading UNSW through COVID so was arguably less impacted than many of my colleagues. On the other hand, this responsibility required relatively quick and decisive actions to be taken, assisting and guiding colleagues through change and ultimately making decisions about which of my highly valued colleagues I would need to let go and which we would retain, as part of a university-wide voluntary redundancy scheme. Being very fortunate to lead a team of highly motivated and dedicated individuals who had given a lot of themselves over many years to build the Faculty of Engineering education strategy to the impressive point it was at the start of 2020, this was especially difficult. Moreover, acknowledging and caring for colleagues in these difficult times where the humanity of the situation is often lost requires all of us to make an extra effort. In more practical terms, where I was used to going into work five days per week, from March 2020 to about March 2021 I went into work about a dozen times in total. Since March 2021, I have been averaging about three days per week at the University. Since March 2020, I have only managed one week where I was at UNSW the full five days! I would much prefer to be back at five days per week, but the thought of sitting in a room at university for fully online meetings all day makes me feel that I am not making the best use of my time. Overall I feel that my mental health has remained strong and that working from home has allowed me more time with loved ones even while we’re all concerned about COVID and have been restricted in our ability to travel and have holidays overseas.

UNSW is one of Australia’s largest universities with about 60,000 students, of whom about 20,000 are international, and is a member of the nation’s Group of 8 (Go8) research intensive universities. About a quarter of UNSW’s student body is enrolled in Faculty of Engineering programmes. UNSW Engineering is the largest faculty of engineering in the country and graduates about a fifth of the nation’s engineers each year. In my opinion UNSW offered fairly traditional, predominantly face-to-face programmes, and these programmes had certainly proved not only to be popular but also very effective when viewed through the lens of employability and median graduate salaries as reported through the annual national Quality Indicators of Learning and Teaching surveys.Footnote 1 That said, UNSW had already started to lay the seeds of change some years ago, which ultimately placed the University in a strong position to deal with the effects of COVID.

At the time that COVID was starting to gain significant attention, Australia was enjoying a summer break having emerged from the worst bushfires in history during November and December 2019 and into early January 2020. As the worst appeared to be over, Australia recorded its first COVID case on 25 January 2020 in Melbourne, with more cases steadily appearing across the nation. UNSW’s academic year (Term 1) began on 17 February 2020. At that time many international students, in particular several thousand students from China, many of whom had returned home over the Australian summer, were unable to return to Sydney due to travel restrictions that remain in place at the time of writing.

In the middle of March—mid-way through Term 1—with Australia heading into lockdown, UNSW was required to shift the delivery of all of its face-to-face classes to fully online. Engineering, being a practical discipline where a good number of courses develop hands-on skills, particularly through laboratory classes and tutorials, was particularly impacted.

As a previous Head of School I had been trained to be prepared for a crisis. We had been engaged in several exercises to prepare a Business Unit Recovery Plan (BURP). As I reflect on the last 18 months, one BURP exercise springs to mind. Several years ago, we were asked to consider how we would deal with a significant influenza outbreak that forced the closure of campus. COVID was exactly this scenario! However, even with this planning in place, I would argue that, in developing the BURP, we were incapable of imagining the scenario that has played out with COVID, effectively the scenario we were asked to anticipate.

In the years preceding COVID, UNSW had already started to focus more on education innovation realising that there had already been a shift in education practices, delivery models, etc. and that we were lagging behind. As an example, the Digital Uplift project (started in 2017) had already commenced the transformation of courses, assisting them in being more digitally enhanced (e.g. interactive videos, course redesign, digital assessments, industry blended lectures, VR simulations, animations, adaptive tutorials and labs, etc.). Another example is the myAccess project, which provided a virtualised environment where students could access a suite of commonly used software without needing to install the software on their own computers. The Faculty of Engineering also developed several strategic projects, including the Course Design Institute where academic staff were guided through a week-long workshop to assist them in developing and enhancing their courses, and also provided a video streaming capability (including funding to enable lecture theatres to be modified to allow for this) where students were employed to use a Faculty designed video kit to capture and broadcast a live stream of a lecture that could be viewed in real time or later as a recording. Another example was the introduction of a virtualised Linux environment by the School of Computer Science and Engineering used in the School’s computing laboratories, which provided students with greater flexibility in accessing their standard laboratory environment from any location and also facilitated School-run practical examinations. Yet another example comes from our School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, where academics had developed a sophisticated education model using Microsoft Teams that built community, enhanced the student experience and even provided a chatbot to answer student questions during virtual laboratory experiences in the lecture.

All of these innovations and many more across the Faculty and university provided solid foundations that allowed us to react quickly and decisively once COVID restrictions were put in place. UNSW Engineering, as a technology-based discipline, was one of the best placed faculties at UNSW to deal with this change purely because staff were on average more digitally literate and thus more adept at adapting and utilising digital platforms that could be used to provide an online education.

UNSW closed its campus mid-way through the first term of the 2020 academic year. Academic staff rushed to embrace the likes of Microsoft Teams and Zoom, along with Blackboard Collaborate, which could be used for synchronous classes but also viewed later. Laboratory classes proved more difficult to replicate and some were not replaced. Schools like Computer Science and Engineering could rely on their existing virtualised computing environment while the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications expanded their remote laboratories, in which video cameras were added to equipment so that students could manipulate the equipment remotely and view the results. Others turned to recording someone gathering measurements in a laboratory experiment, which could be viewed by students who would then need to carry out the calculations and analysis. Some learning experiences deteriorated but some improved.

Other examples included the Engineering Maker Spaces, where students could manufacture items after completing induction. Once restrictions were in place, the Faculty Maker Space team took on the task of accepting student requests to manufacture items on 3D printers, laser cutters etc. that the student could subsequently collect. When it came to international students in China, UNSW purchased a local Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution to ensure that students in China would be able to have more reliable access to university teaching resources (e.g. learning management systems, software through virtualised environments such as myAccess, etc.).

Some of the main concerns that arose as a result of this shift concerned academic integrity. Concerns had previously existed for assessment tasks, for instance assignments, where tools like Turnitin were used to determine the originality of submitted material. However, when it came to other assessments, such as final examinations, this was completely new territory. UNSW decided quite early on to adopt fully online un-invigilated final examinations. This choice appeared to be a wise one given students’ unease with fully online invigilated examinations and deeply concerning examples in the press where such exams had severely comprised student privacy. This required academic staff to completely rethink their approach to final examinations. On the one hand there were still concerns about academic integrity. On the other, there was an opportunity to reconsider assessments and how they are conducted, making them easier to mark, and providing feedback to students.

UNSW and UNSW Engineering have always prided themselves on a strong sense of community. Students and staff have a very strong affinity with their school, followed by the Faculty and then university. UNSW also has the largest number of clubs and societies among Australian universities. With all classes and even events on campus going fully online, this sense of community faced a major challenge. Some embraced virtual technologies to replace regular get-togethers like morning teas, etc. My Faculty Education team bonded over the TargetFootnote 2 in the Sydney Morning Herald! Now that we are slowly returning to campus, there is a need to rethink community and how we (re)build it. There is no university without community.

Being faced with significant financial losses due to a drastic downturn in student numbers in 2020, UNSW decided to restructureFootnote 3 its operations. This resulted in the loss of 500 staff—many voluntary due to the benefits associated with being made redundantFootnote 4—and the consolidation of operations through the merging of faculties (from eight to six) and divisions, all completed by the end of 2020. Having achieved cost savings through these measures and revised its enrolment targets, UNSW is in a very healthy position at the time of writing.

The primary lesson that we learnt in UNSW Engineering is that we can innovate much faster than we are currently moving when faced with a crisis.

Domestic students have had to increasingly look to employment during their studies to support themselves and, as a result, are having to juggle study, work and personal life to a greater degree than previous generations of students. Some students have therefore enjoyed the flexibility of taking classes from home as this saves the time spent travelling to the university and back. However, others have felt increasingly isolated and lonely; a message that was strongly evidenced in comments on student satisfaction surveys. We suspect that this is particularly true of international students, who would have spent large amounts of time on campus. International students studying from their home countries voiced their frustration at not being able to travel to Sydney and the need to deal with different time zones. The need to build community is increasingly important at these times.

Academic staff were similarly frustrated. To many, the experience of teaching students over video links was also a lonely one. While some adapted quite quickly and exploited technology to make the most of the situation (and perhaps enhanced the student experience), some struggled to determine what technology they might use and how to use it. Researchers, particularly lab-based ones, were required to halt or curtail their research simply because distancing restrictions meant that there were fewer people able to use laboratory facilities, or PhD students were stranded overseas; some laboratories were closed for long periods of time.

As we start to emerge from COVID, we are struggling to engage the broader university community. The normal vibrancy of a university campus in the middle of an academic term has yet to return. While the number of people on campus has increased, it is nowhere near what it used to be. On the one hand the university is reluctant to schedule the usual number of face-to-face classes due to factors like existing distancing restrictions—even though these are more relaxed—and the fear that classes would be relatively empty. On the other hand, staff and students are somewhat enjoying the flexibility of working from home having adapted during lockdown phases. However, a university is much more than just classes and research laboratories. UNSW holds many events that are open to the broader community, students hold social events or participate in clubs and societies. Many of these were held on-line and until we can increase the number of in-person events, UNSW will remain a much poorer version of its former self.

Jenny Buchan’s Covid Story

Jenny was Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

We stepped off the Sydney-Guangzhou flight the morning of Australia Day, 26 January 2020, and received a WhatsApp message: ‘Trip cancelled, go home, the government has closed the Gobi’. We were not going to be anywhere near Wuhan, but the scene at the airport told a story. It was Chinese New Year. Usually everyone in China is on the move; Guangzhou airport was decorated to greet the year of the Rat, but it was eerily quiet. We returned to Sydney on the same plane we had just arrived on and started to lose faith in travel insurance.

I was Professor of Law in the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Business School. My job was 40% research, 40% teaching and 20% service. 2020 was my 18th year as an academic. I started the year leading two research projects with seed funding from UNSW. For my first, three researchers from UNSW and Monash University are exploring: ‘Do franchisors abuse their market dominance?’ The second, ‘Do you know what’s in your medicine?’ is a Health@Business (H@B) initiative between the UNSW Schools of Business and Public Health.

UNSW changed from 2 × 13-week teaching semesters to a 3 × 10-week term year in 2019. At the same time, the Business School was planning a major restructure of the Bachelor of Commerce degree. I taught first-year students in terms two and three, and a mixture of levels in both terms. I had two PHD students, a busy Sydney litigator and a Chinese student enrolled in universities in France and China.

I was the papers chair for the International Society of Franchising (ISoF) conference that was to be held in Noosa, Queensland, in May 2020. Papers were submitted from 12 countries. I had every paper triple blind refereed. I hold editorial roles on two journals. One I have ignored completely and the other I have spent time honouring. It does not sit well with me to have to choose to ignore responsibilities.

Internally, I was involved in two of the BComm degree restructuring committees and was a mentor in the Faculty. My mentee was a PhD candidate who stayed in Queensland and taught from there during 2020.

By late March UNSW was coming to terms with the financial implications of COVID, primarily the loss of overseas students and their fees.

I had to reduce both research projects’ budgets as UNSW wanted money back. Progressing the franchisor project became difficult as state borders closed and the demands of designing meaningful teaching and assessment for online courses became clear. I focused mainly on the H@B project, for which we were awarded $14,700 in March 2020. Funds had to be spent by mid-November. On 2 April we were told that ‘both Business and Medical School Deans see H@B as an important strategic priority’. We were asked to submit a rerevised budget. Our budget was trimmed. The money became available in May. In September we were offered another $8000, then a further $1000, and in October, a further $2500. Progressing the research in this environment of constant budget revisions was challenging.

Most of the funding went to pay research assistants. I wanted to engage a researcher who was on maternity leave from UNSW. Our HR department point blank refused to allow me to hire her. There was no logic to this as she would have been allowed to work in a pub while on maternity leave, so why not paid research? I could not find the energy to challenge this.

All teaching moved to online. We had quite a lot of help putting our courses online but although we were warned that over-assessing was a road to pain in the online environment, our Head of School refused to let us reduce the number of assessments for the large cohort of first-year students. We were not allowed to be on campus so had to teach from home. I got a very bad back from not having the ergonomic aspects of my workspace right. I ended up progressing from remedial massage to osteopath to physiotherapist before my back recovered. The teaching required a lot more time and energy than usual. While many students worked well in small online groups, free riders did what they do so well, they bludgedFootnote 5 off the workers. Despite us providing clear instructions about how to submit assignment work many just did whatever was the most expedient for them so we had to spend an inordinate amount of time behind the scenes assembling groups’ work before marking it. This took time away from our research. Students had difficulties with variable Wi-Fi strength, so most did not show their face during online classes. I now find it very frustrating when students asked me to provide a reference to prospective employers as I have never met them in person.

The ISoF conference planned for 2020 was rescheduled for 2021. It will be online.

I have a large network of contacts within UNSW, but I did not make any more while working off campus. By November 2020 I was mentally exhausted. I was ready to use some long service leave, but this was not allowed.

Initially one foreign student had COVID and was in isolation in the student accommodation. Things turned more serious when we heard that ‘a group of about 70 students was intercepted at Sydney airport, [and] detained’. Some colleagues took them food. We thought the students would soon be on campus, despite the overreach by Australia’s border security. But, no, these students were ordered, by the Australian government, to return to China despite having valid student visas. They were told:

… students can defer their study if affected, and the university will consider late enrolment until the end of February. [UNSW] will also consider allowing students to take courses online. (The Guardian 04 Feb 2020, Josh Taylor)

Many of our Public Health academics were deployed into contract-tracing and providing education and updates in the media. This meant my two H@B collaborators took on far heavier teaching loads than usual. Their Master’s programmes also became very popular as the epidemic gathered pace. They ended 2020 at breaking point too.

Our deadline for spending seed funding did not change, so we had to teach, mark assignments as quickly as humanly possible, and keep research assistants working so as to spend the seed funding before UNSW absorbed unspent funds back to general revenue. The university could have reduced pressure on researchers who were also teaching by relaxing the artificial spending cut-off date.

Colleagues in the Business School became polarised into those who were fabulous and some who were atrocious. I co-taught with one who was tenacious, well organised and very patient with first-year students. It was a pleasure to work in her team. Another, who had been a pleasure to work with face to face, went AWOL. She could not be relied on for anything, not even to answer an email or text, and eventually had to be replaced on the course.

We received numerous email updates detailing UNSW’s response to COVID, and its financial predicament in the face of the Federal government’s disdain for the university sector. For months we were not allowed to work on campus. All senior management took pay cuts. We were invited to do the same. By July, we were offered voluntary redundancy (VR).

The university calculated how much each individual would be paid to become redundant. My pay-out and tax figures changed four times. In August I received an offer of VR, stating ‘The offer will lapse in three business days’. It was impossible to process this fully in three days while teaching and marking online from my ‘office’ on the kitchen table, redoing research budgets, and liaising with research assistants and PhD students. I am an active researcher and an award-winning teacher. I am not ready to retire but was disenchanted at the structure of the new first-year BCom and exhausted from covering non-performing colleagues and working without proper tools. The best way UNSW could have helped people like me who intended to keep working after accepting VR would have been to provide guidance with rewriting our academic CVs for the commercial world. This suggestion fell on deaf ears.

I also feel that older workers should make way for younger academics. Some of the staff who should have been performance managed outFootnote 6 long ago did not seek VR. What finally made me decide to accept VR was when a friend told me I should keep working, borrow heavily to renovate my house and let my children inherit the debt. That is not me.

At the time the VR process was in play it transpired that our school of Taxation and Business Law would be disbanded. Each academic would move to the Law School, the School of Accounting, or the School of Management. I had no clear idea of where I would end up. UNSW was becoming a ‘them and us’ environment where previously it had been the happiest workplace for me.

While praising all academics who kept the teaching programme going online, UNSW never changed the research output expectations for staff. UNSW’s unwillingness to understand the demands being placed on teaching staff and their students made every day more stressful.

If I had thought I was going to be teaching online from the kitchen table from 1 June to 20 November I would not have bought the smallest MacBook Pro. I would have bought the biggest possible laptop. Although the university permitted us to take our UNSW computers home to use, I had no home office and could not leave a full-sized computer permanently on the kitchen table.

The irritating aspects of not being able to work from my UNSW office included the noise from months of hundreds of meters of rock being excavated along the road from my home. That made me grateful that I could work from my boyfriend’s kitchen table. I hated progressively losing fitness while rehabilitating my back and trying not to overeat. When working on campus we get masses of incidental exercise walking up and down stairs and even to the photocopier.

There were some happy memories too. Until my back misbehaved, and indoor exercise classes were banned, I stayed sane by kayaking and going to fitness classes. My state, where UNSW Sydney is located, is bigger than Texas and four times the size of the UK. While confined within the NSW borders we went on some amazing road trips exploring new places.

Dinosaur supervisors who had previously refused to allow professional and technical staff to work some days a week from home now acknowledge that people can be trusted to work effectively from home.

I hope future Australian governments will recognise that the opportunity to study and work with people from other cultural backgrounds is an invaluable life skill for domestic students to acquire. This would require the government to welcome foreign students back to our universities.

As for community engagement, we have to find ways to make governments understand the real value of universities. COVID has shown the benefit of government being able to call on UNSW’s medical and public health academics to explain the complexities of pandemics and vaccines for the public. That is a drop in the ocean of value that universities can add to communities.

Jesper Falkheimer’s COVID Story

Jesper is Professor of Strategic Communication, Lund University, Sweden.

After some intense years doing research and teaching strategic communication, I entered the world of academic management as head of a small communications department in 2008. Contrary to my colleagues I consciously and enthusiastically chose to invest in a managerial career that I continued until 2021 when I returned as a full-time professor. Between 2011 and 2016 I was Rector for Campus Helsingborg, a transdisciplinary and innovative arena for Lund University (LU) with one tenth of LU students studying strategic communication, service management, fashion studies and law, or training as social workers and engineers. During these years I was a member of the Vice-Chancellor´s Management Council. Between 2017 and 2020 I was Head of Division for Research, External Engagement and Innovation at LU. This management position included overall responsibility of five departments: LU Innovation, Engagement, Fundraising, Commissioned Education and Research Services. I was also a member of the LU management administration.

The year 2020 was strange for many of us. For me, the year was a turning point in several ways. The first two months everything was as before, and I continued my managerial duties and did what I could to motivate and steer the department directors and co-workers in the right direction. But I did not feel well, besides the fact that SARS2 coronavirus started to spread. In the beginning of March I was hospitalised and was diagnosed with heart disease. Some weeks later, in the middle of the first pandemic wave, I underwent major heart surgery to repair a heart valve and have an ICDFootnote 7 implanted. Outside the thorax clinic the pandemic spread all over the world. I was in contact with LU during this period and returned to work some months later. In line with the Swedish pandemic strategy, co-workers were not forbidden to work from our office. The university remained open but with restrictions for gatherings. After summer we also had physical meetings in smaller settings, but when the pandemic hit our part of Sweden hard in November 2020, things changed and the office more or less closed. Personally, I decided to return to my professorship to get more time for intellectual work and left my managerial role at the turn of the year. Some of my main research interests are crisis management and crisis communication—in theory and practice.

The Swedish pandemic strategy has been debated not only in Sweden. In contrast to many other countries, the Swedish government did not close down society through so-called lockdowns and face masks were not recommended at all for a long time. Swedes, similar to our Nordic neighbours, have a high level of trust in government. During the first phase of the pandemic, the national epidemiologist Anders Tegnell was praised by most people. There were critical voices but the first phase of the pandemic in Sweden was a typical example of ‘rally round the flag’ during societal crisis. Journalists were not particularly critical and politicians hardly debated at all. This changed during the second phase in the Fall, when trust in government decreased, journalists started doing their job properly and the public debate about what was right or wrong exploded. So what happened at LU? Strangely enough, things worked rather well.

From my and I guess also many others’ view, large decentralised universities are not well-known for taking quick decisions or making instant organisational changes. While research as a process may be both agile, innovative and disruptive, the academic organisational structure is rather the opposite. While there is a need for strong leadership in crises, academic leadership is usually weak. The collegial steering model at LU, where all academic leaders are appointed after elections and most decisions demand full consensus, does not fit at all with crisis management best practice models. Still, things went rather fast, not least when it came to moving to online teaching. The LU administration was well aligned with the academic leadership, but the conditions for academic compared to administrative or technical staff were completely different. In my division with over 100 employees, most people were obliged to be in place during regular office hours during normal circumstances. Following the Swedish (soft) national pandemic strategy, the university management did its best to be concise when it came to recommendations and regulations. Still, most decisions were delegated to the nearest manager. This led, as far as I understand, to different interpretations of the recommendations and, as a consequence, a variety of implementations. This was both good and bad. Giving the managers and co-workers mandate to decide what is best for them in their context has advantages, but may also lead to confusion and an increased wish for leadership. The complexity in these processes mirrors what happened in Swedish society as a whole, where the restrictions and recommendations from government were, according to my analysis, rather unclear and messy.

During the Fall of 2020, the Vice-Chancellor set up a learning group focusing on consequences for the university. The selected participants included professors, administrators and students, and the discussions were constructive and proactive. The group concluded that the pandemic crisis placed five topics at the centre, highlighting both opportunities and threats. First, the transition to online teaching, which has been positive in some ways, especially in learning the possibilities of digital forms of education. But the use of digital education has also led to an increase in cheating, problems with legal issues and not least a loss of social interaction for students. Second, the fact that most co-workers started working from home has had good and bad consequences. Less travelling is good for the climate and the productivity probably has not decreased, but the loss of direct physical interaction may have a negative impact in the long run. Third, internal communications have been problematic. In fact, internal communication is always problematic in university organisations where most academic staff have a very weak relation to overall organisational strategies or a common identity. But during the pandemic this weak connection to the university as a whole becomes even more problematic, especially when management needs to communicate messages instantly to all at once. Fourth and fifth, the crisis management and decision-making processes were highlighted—and, as I wrote earlier, this seems to have worked better than anyone could anticipate. The big question is whether it is possible to develop this further under normal organisational circumstances. The unnecessary part of the (also in many ways important) bureaucracy surrounding organisational processes at large universities such as LU will probably not disappear after the pandemic, but hopefully there will be revisions.

In my division the staff acted in different ways. This was partly due to the rather open recommendations that were given. Most if not all staff did the best they could and worked efficiently from their homes. Some co-workers preferred to work at the office as long as this was possible. One observation that I made was that younger co-workers seemed to be more afraid of getting ill than the senior staff. I have no idea why that was so. Another observation was that many of the co-workers made special efforts. As a very minor example of this I can mention the Christmas party that was organised at my division. The whole party happened online, of course, but was very well organised and prepared with party kits sent to all beforehand, instructions, self-made movies and so forth. The interesting thing is that the event was a truly agile project totally self-managed by creative co-workers. Crises may be demanding and horrible, but they are also litmus tests of organisational and societal capacity.

One overall lesson is that, even if university organisations are slow by nature, they—or rather the people working within the university—can act quickly during a crisis. The problem for LU, as already mentioned, was that the communicated restrictions and recommendations were rather vague. In an emergency situation unlike the pandemic, which may be defined as a slow-burning-crisis, this may lead to serious problems. The question is if and how it is possible to learn and change. Universities ought to be good at learning while organisational change is a challenge. The post-crisis phase is crucial for organisational development and preparing for coming crises. There is a risk that most emphasis is placed on plans and evaluations, while what is needed is training and organisational changes. This is not to say that we should turn the traditional and collegial university organisation upside down, but perhaps limit the parts of the bureaucracy that are not effective.

Crisis management aside, the most important long-term impact on universities related to the pandemic is connected to the increased transparency of how scientific knowledge is created. During the pandemic people all over the world have gained insight into the uncertainty of the research process and the constant search for truth. The roles of experts and scientists are and have been crucial for managing the pandemic, but there has also been constant questioning of new findings. This critical discussion is sound and a part of a democratic public sphere. But parts of the debate are based on misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories. There is no space here to develop this discussion further, but basically there is a risk that the legitimacy of science and universities will be increasingly challenged as a consequence of the pandemic.