Intertwined Crises: California’s Public Universities’ Responses to COVID-19 and Anti-Asian Animus, January 2020 to June 2021

Abstract

COVID-19 ravaged everyday life for individuals across the globe, but its impact was especially harmful to Asian Americans who suffered both a notably high risk of infection and hospitalization, as well as a sharp rise in anti-Asian racism. In this article, we take these intertwined issues—a synergistic interaction between a novel virus and the deeply rooted racism rendering Asian Americans as perennial foreigners—to interrogate whether and how organizations’ early responses to COVID-evidenced communicative strategies that acknowledged the crises that unraveled throughout 2020. Through the framings of Situational Crisis Communication Theory and Racialized Organizations, this study considers what repertoire of crisis communication strategies do public institutions employ to address COVID-19 and what do these responses reveal about racialized inequality in higher education? The findings draw from an original archive of 2,723 public community messages across 31 public institutions in the University of California and California State University systems and demonstrate a deprioritization of responsiveness to anti-Asian animus amid the multiple issues emergent from COVID-19; rather than taking the opportunity to foreground universities’ capacity to respond to this crisis, institutions often redirected their responsibility. Such evidence reveals that universities are racialized organizations that employ management strategies that remain ill-prepared to not only manage racialized inequality throughout the crises of the COVID-19 syndemic but also to interrupt racism’s durability.

“We stand in solidarity with …”: An analysis of university public responses to anti-Asian hate.

“…While the analysis indicated a few U.S.-based institutions communicated “the occasional condemnation of incipient racism and xenophobia” (O’Shea et al, 2022, p. 641), institutions of higher education were primarily concerned with addressing the direct impacts of the pandemic (e.g., public health guidelines and financial support). In another study, Castro Samayoa et al (2023) used situational crisis communication theory to analyze communications from public universities in California to illuminate strategies utilized when addressing the pandemic and related racial inequity in higher education. Their findings highlight a number of communication strategies that fall short of addressing the racialized impact of the pandemic.…”