Covid-19 Enters College but to What Degree?

Abstract

This article considers the potential long term implications of university emergency responses to Covid-19. While empathetic responses are important in a time of crisis, emergency measures should not necessarily entail the infringement of or the abandonment of rights articulated in existing policies, procedures, collective agreements, or contracts. Areas of particular vulnerability include academic freedom, faculty workload, and intellectual property rights. The author also suggests that crisis responses by higher education may be seen as more of an intensification of neoliberal pressures than as signaling new pressures from the pandemic alone.