Will Brehm  0:21
Mark Carrigan and Susan Robertson, welcome to FreshEd.

Mark Carrigan  0:32
Hi, Will. It’s great to be here.

Susan Robertson  0:53
Wonderful to be here, Will.

Will Brehm  1:00
Today, we’re going to talk all about COVID-19. and higher education. Big, big topics. I want to start by maybe thinking about your own biographies and what you were doing when COVID hit. You both were working at the University of Cambridge. So, take me back to March of 2020. What happened to the university and your daily experiences when COVID hit?

Susan Robertson  2:09
Mark and I were actually in the Faculty of Education. I was the head of the faculty. And I do remember almost to the date, around about the 15th of March. And my sense is initially there was a kind of freson in the air if you like. People were joking a bit, bumping ankles and elbows and things like that. And then suddenly, there’s a sense when everything is going to be shut down pretty much overnight. In other words, people were rushed into their office to get anything that they wanted out that the building was going to be closed. Anyone that was to be on the streets more or less needed a piece of paper, which I actually did, I had a piece of paper as a critical worker. But it is eerie to think about it now. Quiet cities. Cambridge is incredibly busy thronging with tourists. Dead buildings. Two to three people at best in a building. And not really a sense of how then to get this huge enterprise called higher education where its buildings, and its people and its classrooms, and its timetables, and its examinations and so on, that all of that routine that makes for the structure of higher education suddenly was just, it melted. A bit like the glacier kind of warming at the moment. It was so startling. Yeah, sure, the birds loved it, but it was a very eerie place to be in. And certainly, as a senior manager in the university because there were so many constant and daily decisions to be made. And essentially, there is in universities what are called, is different groups. So, I’m in a “gold group” and that gold group is always, as part of the risk assessments in the university, made up of certain kinds of people. Your journalist, a person that looks after IT infrastructure, a school manager, in this particular case, admin, mine, as the head of the faculty, and you had to come together and meet together almost in a kind of a war office like manner to each day, try and get some decisions on the table. And we were always having to then be kind of tuned in on a weekly basis, sometimes on a daily basis to what was called the “crimson group”. And that crimson group was the group in the university that’s then having to make all kinds of decisions that actually, in some cases, you know, slow lots of things down appointments, for instance. And if someone would leave, either something happened or they took a job somewhere else or left, it wasn’t straightforward about how we would actually do that recruitment and even indeed get permissions to do that recruitment because universities were worried seriously about their budgets. So, that was my experience. Mark, what about yours?

Mark Carrigan  4:59
It was very different than a lot of ways. I mean, I was a postdoctoral researcher, so nothing operational really depended on me. And that was a relief but also anxiety provoking in a way, because I didn’t feel I was hooked into wider systems in a way that would facilitate any agency. But the crisis as a whole completely blindsided me. In the run up to it, it was the third major strike action in a short period of time. And I was so caught up in the routine of going to the picket line, feeling stressed about the disruption, that I wasn’t really reading the news at the time, which is very unlike me. And I remember towards the end of the strike thinking, when this is over, the disruption is finished, this strike will be the most disruptive thing that happens in my life for the next year or two. And then, you know, it’s out of the frying pan into the fire. But when the kind of shutdown began, everything changed, and yet not at the same time. I mean, my teaching moved to Teams, but it was small group teaching that easily made that transition. My research moved to the home, but my research often took place in the home anyway. My defining memory of it was domestic really. You know, kind of squabbles with my then partner about noise in the house, access to internet, the fact that a house that can be comfortable, if you have busy routines cannot be an office for two people that the infrastructure was not sufficient. Suddenly, all the neighbors were home all the time. So, the level of background noise became very different in the neighborhood. And so, you know, it’s kind of that violent hybridization of the public and the private and getting used to everything being mediated through Zoom. That’s what really fascinated me. And so, possibly rationalizing it as a defense mechanism, I very quickly decided that I wanted to study the post-pandemic transition. So, I set up a blogging project with some online conferences a few months later. And that became the genesis of the book that we’re talking about from those initial conferences. And I found that comforting to treat it as an intellectual object. It gave me that sense of agency over it that I think I was lacking in personal and working life prior to that.

Will Brehm  7:07
Mark, I want to ask about that initial moment when you started teaching on Teams because it was so abrupt and so quick. And like you said, it blindsided you. Did you have any experience with Microsoft Teams before the pandemic?

Mark Carrigan  7:21
No, I didn’t, and I think few people did. Team’s, the state of its development at the point of the pandemic, it was fortuitous for Microsoft, to say the least, that they had stumbled into developing the perfect solution to the problem organizations around the world were then facing. But I found that transition relatively seamless. Less because of the technology and more because of the nature of the teaching. So, the Cambridge tutorial system is small groups of three or four students usually, and because I’ve been teaching throughout the year, there was a kind of existing level of connection and trust. And with small groups, that transition was a lot easier. But a few years on, when I’m in a position of coordinating a lot of teaching for quite a large team, I can now see how much more complicated that transition was. And so, in a way, it was quite an easy experience for me, and I can see that it wasn’t for most people in academia.

Will Brehm  8:13
And so, Susan, at your level, you know, at these decision-making levels at the university and these different teams that existed, what was the conversation like in terms of how are we going to manage teaching and the student experience. What was being discussed and decided at that sort of management level?

Susan Robertson  8:30
Well, there were lots of huge decisions. One, at least in our faculty, we’re training teachers, and teachers actually have to be in classrooms with young people who as part of their graduation, they have to actually do that. So, the question of how did you do that? There was some teaching going on in schools to do with workers who were critical workers, or students, for example, whose mental health would be advantaged if they were in some classroom settings, and so on. But we were deeply aware that our students could be super spreaders. So, they could -and it’s not even just a question of, if you could get hold of a test and test yourself. By the time the result came back, that might be 48 hours, in which case, between now and the next few hours, I could have actually been in a situation where I did pick up COVID. And so, even the testing. And then looking at how did you test en mass was problematic. But our students also -certainly the undergraduate students live in colleges, and the colleges, my sense is not all of them, but some of them just completely hit the panic button. And they gave the students more or less 24 hours to be out of the college. Now, this is scattering the students to the wind, you know. How do they actually get on a plane or a train if they could and find their way back home. And students come from all over the world. So, that’s the first issue. The second issue is undergraduate, there’d been a deep level of resistance in Cambridge to doing things like examinations using laptops. But now, here students are going to have to do exams, they’re going to have to do exams fully on laptops, there had been a little bit of trialing of the use of digital examinations and things like that, but not on mass. And this is, of course, going to be a problem once you hit the sciences, and you’re thinking of experiments and things like that. You can also see the level of anxiety, some of the listeners will be a bit surprised but the examination marks that count for our undergraduate students, is the final set of exams, and weighted almost 100%. And now what you can see is young people, not in equal settings, sometimes with better technology, and better bandwidth, but sometimes not. Sometimes in families where they’re not in competition for the space or the technology, but sometimes there is a lot of things going on in that household. So, the question then was, how did they do examinations that absolutely count when it’s your final third year exam results? They are the ones, 100% weighting, that mean that you go on to further work or what kind of employment you get. And so now, these are huge decisions. How do you run a science lab? And actually, science labs, you’d have to get critical workers with pieces of paper coming in, and looking at how they might add distance from each other. What we also did in our faculty is looked at a space that we could create, where people could come in and record lectures, but you had to have a door in and a door out, we had to have mechanisms where everything was cleaned. If you use the space, you have to clean the space as you left. So, cleaning resources, if you could get them were everywhere. Masks and gloves, and so on kind of everywhere. It was a weird, spooky -we’re very social beings. And so, looking at who’s coming down the stairs, or walking up behind someone at two meters. You know, life in the two-meter society was completely odd.

Will Brehm  12:24
It’s like to show your love towards someone is to stay away from that person. Just a very different way of thinking of what social means. I guess, now that we’re three and a half years on from the onset of the pandemic, particularly in the UK in the March of 2020, sort of moment; have institutions of higher education, have universities themselves changed because of the pandemic? And do you think some of these changes might be long lasting? Or I guess the issue is around how much was COVID sort of a blip that just sort of at some point, we’re going to revert back to March of 2019, or how much did it fundamentally change universities and how much the decisions that Susan was sort of talking about at those levels, but also the experiences that Mark, you were explaining. How much of these are now going to be sort of commonplace going forward?

Mark Carrigan  13:15
Yeah, that’s a brilliant question, Will, and I was thinking about that with a conversation I was having yesterday, because part of the answer is about the broader societal context. When I started diving into the history of pandemics, early on in COVID, I was fascinated to realize the kind of general tendency towards cultural amnesia. You know, pandemics have as big an impact on civilization as wars, but we memorialize wars, and we consistently try and downplay pandemics and eliminate them from cultural memory after they’ve passed. And at least in the UK context, it feels to me that has happened quite forcefully since then. And it’s hard not to see the same thing happening in universities, at least in the sector, that I work with it. But I think the cultural outgrowths of it persist, even as the kind of macro history of it fades into the background with things like the enforced digitalization and what that means for digital literacy of staff, the acceleration of governance, and how that changes the kind of imaginary of university managers. We can enforce this change rapidly, dramatically, and thus, we might be able to do it again. So, I think those legacies are there but against this backdrop of cultural amnesia, and that’s a very odd combination where we’ve changed but we’re not discursively aware or acknowledging the fact we’ve changed. And that’s possibly quite dangerous in some ways, I think,

Will Brehm  14:31
Is it about trauma in any way? It feels like we went through this collective trauma and not talking about it is a survival strategy, it seems. But yet, as you’re saying, Mark, things have radically changed. And so, it is this really, really strange moment to be in.

Mark Carrigan  14:48
I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think there’s an individual trauma but a collective trauma as well that possibly operate in slightly different registers. And a lot of the psychotherapeutic literature on trauma will talk about an inability to change, and the inability to innovate, as a response to trauma. You get locked into particular ways of relating to the world. And I don’t think that quite fits with institutions, but I think the capacity to really learn, institutionally, from these experiences is locked down. So, the changes are there but without acknowledging and affirming and reflecting on the possible ameliorative transformations, you know, the kind of possibility that we could transform in more effective, more equitable ways. I think that was a real tendency that we’re at risk of losing because of this kind of institutional trauma that’s lurking in the background.

Susan Robertson  15:37
So, one example, I think that is a positive outcome, in ways you were describing Mark. There would have been a very strong view that while academics could make decisions around days that they worked at home and days they came into the office, that was never something that administrative staff were given the opportunity to do. And in many cases, perhaps their conditions were potentially constrained. But you can see, and certainly for a university, like Cambridge, where a lot of people don’t live in the center, because it’s quite expensive. So, they live in the surrounding villages and neighboring, some distance sometimes. You know, a one- or two-hour train ride. So, administrative staff could function extremely well as long as you digitized fee claims and those kinds of things, which actually hadn’t kind of accelerated that. So, there were lots of things. My sense is that I think those outcomes are actually good for the environment. Why do we have to hop in a car, or on a train and go some considerable distance in order to put your face in at work? It’s interesting in yesterday’s newspaper, Guardian, you can see even, for example, Zoom is insisting its employees come in at least. So, apart from Microsoft Teams, Zoom was everything, you know. The word Zoom actually becomes a verb through this period of time. But as a major provider of digital services, they’re now insisting that their employees actually come in at least a couple of times. There’s quite an interesting kind of struggle actually going on. Government departments mandating that their workers come in. And so that sense that you could trust people to work at home, and they probably did an enormous amount more than they were even paid for? Well, there’s an effort to try and sit that back in again. And I believe that that’s detrimental. I think that we should trust workers to take pride in the work that they do, and deliver on that work, often under compromised conditions because then not always as quiet as they don’t have the kinds of desks and seating and bandwidth that you might have in the university, and so on. So, those kinds of changes, I think there’s a bit of a mighty war going on at the current time across different organizations, that doesn’t exempt the university.

Will Brehm  18:04
In universities, I mean, because I understand the point of that sort of hybrid working and how that can be really beneficial to all types of workers, not only certain classes of workers, especially in universities. But at the same time, there’s also this element of the value of face-to-face. Three and a half years on, what have we learned, what have universities learned about when face-to-face needs to happen and can’t be replicated online? Or have they learned that? Is that even a conversation?

Mark Carrigan  18:34
I don’t think we have learned that. And I was fairly optimistic that we would, that we might move towards a position of symmetry, where rather than getting bogged down in the tedious cultural politics of, “Oh, digital is destroying the authenticity of social interaction”, or “social interaction in person is a retreat from the kind of modern affordances of the digital”, I hoped to get to a point where we recognize that different modes of interaction have different affordances and different constraints. So, we could begin to design for the best way of organizing any particular group activity. But I don’t think we have reached that point. I think we’ve had a kind of chaotic hybridization, which sometimes can feel like the worst of both worlds. I mean, there are huge inclusivity gains that can be achieved through hybrid working, through not having expectations of coming into the office. And like Susan was saying, I mean, this is something that now applies across the university workforce, rather than the kind of traditional scholastic sense of hybrid working that many academics have always enjoyed. But I do think we need to have modes of organizing this and there’s no real kind of normative framework for it. And the kind of gradual reduction of face-to-face contact and serendipitous contact, I think, is what’s really missing. And so, in a situation where you’re trying to develop a new community where one wasn’t there previously, the fact time on campus has to be scheduled in advance because people will come in on particular days and they will often schedule those days in quite a full way. That means that you have to coordinate this interaction in a way that wasn’t true previously. I found the experience of starting a new job in a new institution during this very interesting because initially, it felt like nothing had changed because I was still at home, and I was still in my living room on Zoom. I was just Zooming with different people at a different institution. But then when I did move to the area and started going into the office, it was much harder to meet people in person than was previously the case. So, you can be in a friendly environment but if meeting for a coffee becomes something that has to be arranged two weeks in advance, the social dynamics of the institution change. I really miss about Cambridge, pre-pandemic, corridor conversations. You know, just stopping at lunchtime to go for lunch together, or going for lunch on your own and meeting someone there. My experience is this just doesn’t happen in the same way post-pandemic. In part, this might be that I’ve moved from a campus university to a kind of central city university, but I don’t think it’s just that. I think something subtle, but huge has happened to how social networks form and reform after the pandemic.

Will Brehm  21:13
Do you think that what it means to be an academic has therefore changed, because of the different sort of social environment that we’re in, the different social norms that now the role of an academic has now changed?

Susan Robertson  21:30
The reflection I was going to share on this, which means it’s not about the role changing as much as academic practice; your knowledge production practices. So, it’s not uncommon at all for people to expect that if an event is happening in-person, that there is a Zoom facility available. But what that does is it distorts the over there and in here, relationship. So, you’re not always clear that the camera is picking up who’s in the room, you’re not always clear if someone who’s on Zoom is actually there and listening behind the closed off camera, that kind of thing. And what that creates is this rather awkward dance that also gets in the way of the use of the time and the exchange of the ideas, and so on. And while it’s wonderful that feels like it’s engaged in being inclusive, it takes up a lot of time to get it right, it’s rather distorting, often the camera isn’t on the person speaking or on the people in the room, or on Zoom, you can’t quite see who’s in the room because it doesn’t have that level of depth and things like that. So, my sense is that our knowledge producing practices and our knowledge sharing practices are rather awkward now. And I feel that what we’ve got to do is think through ways in which we can have both inclusion but also a much freer flowing set of exchanges. We’re able to understand body languages and things like that. We are a long way from getting that right.

Mark Carrigan  23:07
I couldn’t agree more with that. Yeah, I think that is spot on, Susan. And I remember a conversation we had years ago now early on in the pandemic, where we hit upon the metaphor of choreography for online events. And that stayed with me, because my experience as someone who hadn’t organized online events before the pandemic and has since organized a lot of them is that they do have to be choreographed in a much more restricted way. Because you don’t have the cues, you don’t have the kind of tacit knowledge of important interaction, you have to have a clear structure to it. And if you do that, they can work really effectively. But it’s a very different kind of event. And the huge advantage is inclusivity. But conversely, there’s something that is lost from face-to-face events. And increasingly, I’m reticent to organize hybrid events. I rather organize online events when that’s correct for the purpose and face-to-face events when we need something more discursive, immediate, and functioning says as a workshop. Because I think hybrid can be done effectively but it’s hugely resource intensive. You need someone to tech, you need the proper equipment, and you need to plan for it. And often hybrid events in academia are just putting Zoom on over the computing infrastructure in an existing teaching room. And so, I think if we do hybrid events, we need to do them properly, and that needs the resources for them. And if we don’t have those resources, we should choose between on site or done remotely.

Will Brehm  24:28
One of the things in my job that I think has changed dramatically is the amount of time I spend on Moodle or Canvas. And it’s just this huge amount of work to try and think not only about the content and the reading list and how I want to structure the sort of in person teaching but then I have this whole online learning space that has to be designed and curated and pulled together and it takes so much time to do it, much more than the preparation for teaching ever took before. So, for me, that’s something that is new and is continuing on. So, even though I teach in person now 100%, I still have these online learning spaces that continue. And I guess this raises a question that I’d like to ask about is; so, we’ve discussed the ways in which academics operate has changed, what about students? Have the experiences of students changed? Has the meaning of what a student is, has that changed? What has happened three and a half years on in relation to the student?

Susan Robertson  25:33
I think it’s going to be different in different places, but certainly the thing that we saw, at the time when students were quite harshly, almost quarantined. Placards in windows, as if they were in prison, those kinds of issues. And we did see significant mental health issues, and in fact, we can see that it also spiked. That is a major concern. Young people who were caught up in a series of maelstroms. Also, if they’re in school, how did they do exams in order to get onto university and feel that the whole process was fair. So, there’s that part. If you were already at university, and you were literally kind of asked to go away, or if you were to stay, you were in small pods and had to maybe in small groups look after each other, if someone came down with COVID. You were stuck in your room. They are not groomed, they were never designed to be learning spaces. And again, that would have generated quite significant, poor health. But what we can see at the moment, these cases are just kicking off right this week being reported in the major newspapers, class actions now. So, we’ve got the legal profession actually reaching out and suggesting -so, these are international legal firms- that they would for a 30% cut of the final amount that might be settled, that they would actually make a case that the student didn’t get what they bought. And you can only have that kind of language when you’ve got a market-oriented way of organizing higher education. Here in England, its oversighted of by the Competition and Markets Authority and the Office of Students. And what that means, essentially, is what product that you sell, like baked beans on a shelf has got to do what it says on the tin. And the students are actually saying, we bought a student experience, and we bought in-person learning, and that isn’t what we got. Now, the issue at the moment for the lawyers is how do you assess the value financially, in monetary terms, of the loss of a certain kind of education when it only takes a particular form; virtual learning. And these cases are also going on in the United States. So, these are two big countries that do operate a much more consumer-driven, higher education system. And my sense about that is that that is potentially devastating for how we think about knowledge production in the university, its circulation, and so on. Because if at the end of the day, a student understands is now enrolled themselves committed themselves because there’s a financial return from the class action that this is consumer, this is what they bought and it’s not what they got- that that actually really, I think undermines everything that we feel is important about the university. Knowledge production, its circulation, its engagement, its curation, all of these kinds of activities are fundamentally important for the health of a society and to almost stitch it into, let’s say, precedents around cases and things like that, and it’s going to harden the difficulties of pulling it back from that, I’d say, very unhealthy brink. So, I see some big dangers and issues ahead.

Mark Carrigan  29:12
Yeah, and I’m really worried about what that might mean for how universities relate to digital education. The kind of emergency delivery during the pandemic was a huge achievement brought about at great cost. But it was an incredibly limited model of what digital pedagogy can be. Much of it was focused on the delivery of content. That was a situational necessity. But my worry is these court cases, as they play out, could contribute to a stronger desire to flip back to the old normal and the capacity of online education to facilitate more participatory, more creative, more equitable forms of engagement could be lost and that’s really worrying. And those court cases -I was shocked to see outside our graduation ceremonies, there was actually a van that had been driven outside with a huge advert on the side, inviting people to take part in the action.

Will Brehm  30:01
It’s almost like what Zoom did in the beginning, right? Where all these edtech companies coming to the rescue, right when all these institutions shifted online. Now we’re at the stage of the pandemic, when it’s the lawyers who are sort of taking advantage of this opportunity. I mean, it’s really quite sort of shocking. And I mean, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. And I guess, as a final question, we’re sort of, of course, still in the pandemic. But we’re also sort of far enough away where some of these big tensions and issues that are reshaping the university are taking hold and becoming manifest. And so, what are some of the tensions that you would point to that we need to keep an eye on going forward in terms of the post-pandemic university? What are the big ones in your mind?

Susan Robertson  30:50
Let me just share with our viewers, the venture capital moved into the education world in a serious way. And if you look at the kinds of figures, there’s an organization, which in itself is a venture capital organization, Holland IQ that some of the listeners might either know or want to look out for. What it’s doing is it’s tracking edtech investments into sectors like higher education. And I mean, it’s an astonishing amount of edtech money that actually went into the higher education world. I mean, it’s trading off a little bit, but it’s in the billions and billions and major transactions taking place that are also being monitored. But what I’ve logged on essentially is now all kinds of different platforms to do with workforce training to do with helping schools and teachers potentially to connect if they need to, workforce learning platforms, another one to do with mental health and so on. So, I would say that the infrastructure of the university has been rapidly potentially kind of platformed, and this does require in very significant ways, our attention and our research energies to try and understand what these -because platforms, structure possibilities and knock out others. So, what are the new structural and strategic selectivity’s that get put into place when our knowledge exchange activities, or our knowledge creation activities, or our knowledge sharing activities, or curation, etcetera, etcetera, is now underpinned by a platform. And Mark, share with us your thoughts on Chat GPT, which is a platform, but what a feast it’s been given. Look at all those data traces that it’s got, look at all those conversations that were taking place.

Mark Carrigan  32:47
They are all elements of the pandemic digital response that really worry me looking back, particularly the kind of easy embrace of surveillance pedagogy. So, online proctoring is the most notorious example of this. But there was a broader tendency to embrace the idea that you could find digital solutions to problems of assessment Integrity. There was also kind of naivety, sometimes in digital procurement within universities, where the stories of edtech providers were accepted wholesale, and often acted upon in a way that was disconnected from academic governance. And as we’re kind of entering a situation where generative AI saturates the university landscape, those tendencies really worry me if we see a resurgence of them because we now have an enormous socio-technical challenge about how we pivot assessment towards approaches that are adequate to generative AI. And I don’t think this is the case of the assessment system working fine previously than a technological disruption has impeded it. I think cracks in the assessment system have been showing for years. I mean, contract cheating, essay mills have been seen as a specific issue of student misconduct whereas it seems clear to me this was a systematic weakness in the assessment system facilitated by digitalization. You didn’t have mass essay mills until you had mass access to the internet. The business model depends on digital technology. And now we’re seeing those cracks become ever wider. And there’s a real possibility that trusts that a degree means what it is said to mean; that a student assessment can be assumed to reflect something of that student’s learning. There’s a risk this is all going to break down and we need to redesign assessment on this basis. But I worry firstly, as I’ve said that these kinds of digital pathologies will creep in as this starts to happen, but also the cultural politics of the pandemic that we talked about earlier, the kind of institutional trauma, this will impede responses. We have shown that we can move fast when we need to, and I think we need to move fast now, but we need to move fast in a reflective, joined up, purposeful way, and I’m worried that isn’t going to happen. I find generative AI absolutely fascinating and engrossing at the level of individual practice, but I’m worried this is going to be a disaster institutionally. And it’s a disaster that we could address competently. But that these legacies of digital disruption, and digital change over the last five years are gonna get in the way, unfortunately.

Will Brehm  35:23
Well, Mark Carrigan and Susan Robertson, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. Congratulations on your new co-edited book. It sounds like, Mark, you just laid out the next volume of such a collection and to think about the post-pandemic from that generative AI perspective. So, thanks so much for joining once again, and congratulations.

Mark Carrigan  35:41
Thanks, Will. That was a great conversation.

Susan Robertson  35:42
You’re very welcome. Thanks, Will.

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