The burnout warning

This chapter covers three distinct themes that encompass the concept of burnout warning: inherent adversities in the modality shift, fear and ambiguity in higher education, and attempting to work in suboptimal conditions. While thriving represents a concept that denotes success and achievement, burnout represents exhaustion and fatigue. The behavior exhibited by staff and its correlation to burnout is best explained by the works of Maslach and Leiter using the areas of worklife (AW) model entailing organizational risk factors. The AW model explains how burnout is expedited when there is a disruption to balance in the following areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. The findings indicate that staff members at the University of Utah displayed early signs of burnout warning. The factors that contribute to early signals of burnout include resource shortages, an increase in overall workload-including persistent emotional labor-and a lack of acknowledgement. The chapter illustrates how stressors, aggravated by COVID fatigue, fostered an environment that mobilized the onset of burnout. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Loss of organic community and decentralized communications

This chapter explores the barriers and disruption to community and communication resulting from remote working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The University of Utah's decision to abruptly transition to a fully online model resulted in several communication impacts for staff. First, staff participants received little and inconsistent communication from the University. This caused uncertainty within departments, which trickled down to the students staff serve. Second, this led to staff participants feeling disconnected from the institution and increased their concerns around misinforming students. At the same time, the move to online learning and work decreased efficient communication between colleagues. Casual interactions in the office became email threads and extended feedback processes. Third, staff reported that online communications with students became less personal, which created difficulty for building and maintaining rapport. Finally, staff members' overall sense of community consistently dropped as the COVID-19 pandemic raged on and they were forced to continue to work remotely. The discontent and apprehension felt by staff members around the communication provided from University leadership was compounded by the impact of working from home. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The way forward

The profound sadness, anxiety, depression, and loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is difficult to fathom. This chapter offers both scholars and practitioners the opportunity to reconsider the purposes and potential of higher education in a world after COVID-19. The importance of community and a sense of belonging, the power of learning new strategies during changing times, and acknowledging that the COVID-19 pandemic had significant consequences for individuals are themes that describe the experiences of the pandemic for faculty, staff, and students at the University of Utah. The University of Utah is offering most classes in an online environment and most students are not on campus, but students, their families, faculty, and staff are gathering for small, COVID-safe in-person graduation ceremonies. The chapter illustrates pockets of thriving across the University of Utah: students creating communities wherever they could to overcome lags in motivation;faculty feeling vitality as they learned new ways to teach and recognized their growth in this process;and staff realizing they could find new ways to solve problems with students. It offers broad recommendations for higher education with the intent that the findings may help others attempting to thrive or survive during times of crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Interpretive methods as a window into individual experiences and the pandemic

This chapter aligns with an interpretive qualitative research project. It discusses the development of this project, the site, the participants, the researchers, the data collection, and the data analysis. The chapter offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to further conceptualize the importance of individuals' lived experiences, especially during tumultuous times. It demonstrates throughout the findings that the contextual variables are important in understanding how students, staff, and faculty experienced the organizational and societal changes that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. In March of 2020, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the University of Utah elected to close campus to all non-essential personnel and move all classes online when students returned from spring break. It acknowledges the mental health toll associated with conducting research during a pandemic. Members of the research team were forced to confront their own feelings about the pandemic while interpreting those of others. The researchers tries to understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the people in higher education, and as people in higher education who are impacted by the pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Understanding individual experiences of COVID-19 to inform policy and practice in higher education: Helping students, staff, and faculty to thrive in times of crisis

Utilizing findings from more than 200 interviews with students, staff, and faculty at a US university, this volume explores the immediate and real-life impacts of COVID-19 on individuals to inform higher education policy and practice in times of crisis. Documenting the profound impacts that COVID-19 had on university operations and teaching, this book foregrounds a range of participant perspectives on key topics such as institutional leadership and loss of community, managing motivation and the move to online teaching and learning, and coping with the adverse mental health effects caused by the pandemic. Far from dwelling on the negative, the volume frames the lived experiences and implications of COVID-19 for higher education through a positive, progressive lens, and considers how institutions can best support individual and collective thriving during times of crisis. This book will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in the sociology of education, higher education management, and eLearning more broadly. Those specifically interested in student affairs practice, as well as the administration of higher education, will also benefit from this book. The chapters describe the experiences of students, staff, and faculty at the University of Utah as they adapted to the new COVID-19 reality in spring and summer 2020. The logistics of adjusting to online learning and working, the juggling act of managing their online learning and teaching while taking on responsibility for the learning of children in their homes, the reality of a struggling economy, and the social-political environment of a presidential election year and a burgeoning racial justice movement provide the backdrop for the experiences described in this monograph. This study has important implications for higher education leaders. It offers an in-depth and institutionally broad view of how different higher education stakeholders experienced the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Pandemic privilege

Many felt that the challenges related to COVID-19 were more difficult for students than for faculty and expressed concern for students struggling to manage the impacts of the pandemic. Pandemic privilege is illustrated several ways. First, faculty appreciated the privilege in the fact that, generally, their employment was not at risk. This was stronger for tenure-line faculty than for contract, clinical, and adjunct faculty. However, across the board, faculty expressed that they were privileged in their ability to continue working in meaningful employment and to do so from home. Second, faculty whose children were grown and more independent felt privilege related to the extra burden on colleagues with younger children at home. Additionally, many of the White faculty recognized a racial privilege, both in terms of the virus and more generally as a result of the racial justice movements across the country. And, faculty who were relatively healthy acknowledged the different impact of the virus for those with health-related complications or risk factors. Finally, faculty talked about their privilege in comparison to students. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Introduction

The COVID-19 crisis that emerged in spring 2020 was unprecedented in its impact on the day-to-day operations of higher education worldwide. This chapter describes the experiences of students, staff, and faculty at the University of Utah as they adapted to the new COVID-19 reality in spring and summer 2020. Participants' experiences of the transition to online learning and work during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic illuminate a number of findings that can provide guidance to higher education for future crises. The chapter explores whether it is realistic to expect campus communities to thrive during crises like the COVID-19 pandemic. As it becomes clear that the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to impact higher education in the near future, it is important to look back on the experiences of those in higher education as leaders consider the best ways to move forward in this dynamic environment. The chapter offers an in-depth and institutionally broad view of how different higher education stakeholders experienced the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also offers an opportunity to consider how the theoretical concept of thriving operates in practice when an institution is in crisis. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Critical race studies in qualitative research: a review and future directions

In 2021, former President Donald Trump issued a presidential memo halting and prohibiting "divisive" and "anti-American propaganda" in federal contracting--described as "any training on 'critical race theory,' 'white privilege,' or any other training and propaganda effort that teaches or suggests either (1) that the United States is an inherently racist or evil country or (2) that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil". Unsurprisingly, the concerted attack against CRT grossly misunderstands what CRT is and often equates teaching about individual racism, privilege, unconscious bias, systemic racism, and U.S. history with the teaching of CRT. As of October 2021, 28 states have restricted education on racism, bias, and the teaching of CRT. [ FROM AUTHOR]