We've heard a lot about the effects of the work-from-home model on the students (listen to the PBS news hour). Many students are battling mental health issues while others are falling deeper into virtual realities, either way leaving their coursework and research unattended. The lack of structure, the lack of human interaction and the uncertainties associated with present and future is a lot to cope with!
We've heard a lot about the effect of the work-from-home model on parents, and in particular working moms (listen to a whole FreshAir interview on the topic). Being a mom, I know too well what it means to have the home become simultaneously an office, a conference room, a classroom, a playground, all the while feeling the responsibility that it is up to me that my kid does not fall behind in english, math, science...
What we don't talk about is the effect it has on the faculty as a whole and on the academic endeavor. In my male-dominated environment, faculty hardly ever admit to suffering because it is seen as a sign of weakness. However I do want to openly acknowledge that many of us are struggling in ways that are different than students and working moms. Yet it is severe and, like the other cases, it can have a long lasting nefarious effect on the academic endeavor.
When we first started working from home, I repeatedly heard the comment that finally, with no more interruptions, faculty could get so much work done. It felt odd to me because in my view those interruptions are a big part of our job. Those interruptions allow us to know what is going on, what needs our attention, what must be brought to someone else's attention. Albeit the annoyance, so much would get done through those interruptions. And a lot of that work, essential for addressing possible train-wrecks before they happen, is just not getting done anymore.
The second aspect has to do with our social skills. This is an essential element for our work, equally true for teaching, research and service. Like most skills, they require practice. The pandemic has reduced our social interactions to the bare minimum. And after one full year, we are loosing some of it and we don't even know it. At work, our relationships are becoming tenuous and fragile. Since all our opportunities of informal interactions are gone, we have no idea about the realities of the people that used to be our office neighbors, and they in turn know nothing about ours. When we come to a meeting, we have no sense of the collective state, because body language is no longer available to us. Since all conferences are now virtual, we lost the most important avenue to connect with our larger networks. We adapt because we must, but the integrated gap is very significant and weighs on our sense of connection to the organization and belonging to our larger group.
On top of all this, and arguably the most dangerous, there is the loss of creativity. Many of us took it for granted that we could just bump into each other and have a sequence of random discussions with different sorts of people throughout our day, keeping our minds bubbling with creative electricity. From these many daily interactions, some would lead to one new special idea, and then further brainstorming sessions would shape and transform this new idea into a concrete new research project. Universities thrive with these fertile unstructured cross-disciplinary exchanges. Independent from COVID, the room for innovation at universities has been shrinking over the last decade, with the corporate model infiltrating our campuses. But the pandemic all but eliminated the precious casual exchanges that provide the breeding ground for creativity, and no reasonable technical solution has been found to fill that gap.
Perhaps it's time to stop being distracted with all the busy work and pay attention to the losses that COVID has brought to our academic endeavor. As we prepare to go back, perhaps it is time for us to start using our creative minds to ensure that these losses with not be lost forever.
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