Global crisis management and higher education: Agency and coupling in the context of wicked COVID‐19 problems

Abstract

Campus crisis management remains an understudied topic in the context of COVID‐affected higher education. In this paper, we contrasted the ability to tame the wicked problems brought by the pandemic of COVID‐19 in private and public universities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia, India, Kazakhstan, Uganda, and Ukraine. The cross‐country analysis and diversity of institutional types allowed us to consider a wide range of challenges faced by academic leaders and their institutions during the global pandemic. By drawing on institutional policy reviews and interviews with university administrators, we have examined tensions between the human and institutional agencies on these crisis‐stricken campuses given differing institutional coupling, sizes, resources, and missions. The focus on agential co‐dependencies and institutional coupling lays the ground for conceptualizing campus crisis management as a culturally specific construct in the context of higher education affected by the global pandemic.

COVID-19, geopolitics and risk management: Towards framing a reciprocal, coordinated, responsive and empathetic international education sector

“…Participants concurred that international education needs to follow an interrelated and collaborative approach instead of each level, stakeholder and dimension operating in silos and that they needed to share expertise and practices that worked with regard to international students. The agency of crisis management is subject to an amalgam of institutional and human agencies so the collaboration between institutional agency, linked to the ability of units and authorities to respond promptly and responsibly to a crisis, and human agency, related to the willingness and ability of individual members to act and collaborate, is critical in crisis management ( Oleksiyenko et al, 2022 ).…”

Higher education as public good, sustainable development goals, and crisis response in neoliberal political economy

“…Apart from that, being more humanistic towards students, the university administration waived the residential hall fees, transport fees and admission delay fees for the students (Prothom Alo English Desk, 2021b, June 19). This finding indicates that human society, for example, an initiative by the DUTA or an individual academic or a group of academics or any department/institute or student response to crisis management (Oleksiyenko et al, 2022), promotes the public good, despite the fact that the university strictly operated under neoliberal conditions. That is why the university did not receive any direct government funding for needy students.…”

Editorial

“…In the same vein, another emphasis of Part 2 lies in the examination of several Asian countries and their respective HE systems as potential mobility destination for inter-Asian and toward-Asian mobilities (e.g., the case of Thailand — see Pongsin et al, 2023, and the case of Vietnam for students from Asian countries — see Mai and Chau, 2023). These surveyed phenomena and the associated key trends can enhance inter-Asian student mobilities; they can also stimulate and strengthen HE capacity building in general and capacity building of and desire for world-class universities in the previously underprivileged regions and countries (Oleksiyenko, 2019; Oleksiyenko et al, 2021b; 2022).…”