ABSTRACT
This study was designed to provide insight and to reflect upon the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on living, learning, and leading in universities. The research methodology drew on metabletic phenomenology, which is an inspired approach developed by J.H. van den Berg and followers in the latter part of the twentieth century. Metabletics is the study of significant change, a shift in existence, and phenomenology seeks to capture the lived-experience of the phenomenon. Phenomenology encourages the researcher to insert themselves into the research and present their findings through narrative, prose, poetry, and metaphor. In keeping with this approach, the chapter includes three original poems on living, learning and leading university reform in the pandemic shadow. The study also exposed the inadequacies of many contemporary western university business models to cope with the changes demanded during the pandemic. In particular, the immediate transition to online and remote learning and the dramatic decline in international students due to extended border closures. In practice phenomenology promotes the technique of raising questions rather than providing answers and this study follows this strategy when discussing the need for university reform © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.