Global Crisis Management and Higher Education: Agency and Coupling in the Context of Wicked COVID-19 Problems

• In Event: Exploration of virtual space & lessons learned from COVID-19 disruptions

Proposal

Campus crisis management remains an understudied topic in the context of COVID-affected higher education. Particularly, knowledge on the experiences of universities in the Global South has been scarce, as most literature discusses Anglo-Saxon models. This paper amplifies voices from higher education institutions on the periphery by contrasting the ability to tame wicked problems brought by the global pandemic to private and public universities in Bangladesh, Cambogia, Colombia, India, Kazakhstan, Uganda, and Ukraine.

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 (Birnbaum, 1987; Meyer, 2002; Spillane et al., 2011). 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.

In 2020, Mitroff remarked that COVID-19 was the worst wicked mess that he ever observed. Placing his arguments in the context of academic organizations, we would argue that COVID-related crisis management is a messier concept within complex institutions (Weick, 1976). The issue of agency – split between institutional agency and human agency (Marginson & Rhoades 2002) – emerges as central when the crisis is detected, but prevention and control are likely to be unallocated or disorganized. Birnbaum (1987) discusses how on a small private campus, a tightly coupled system with a strong homogenous culture, collegiality is the main form of governance whereas on a loosely coupled larger public campus, politics is the mechanisms by which decisions are made. In crisis, we would argue politics is enhanced by the wickedness of problems and inability to make clearer analysis and decisions.

Mitroff (2005) identified six phases in the process of crisis management: first signals; preparation of a systematic plan to address the crisis; damage containment; recovery; learning through critical reflection on the crisis experience; and redesign of practices and realignment of behaviours based on the crisis experience. His reference to the wickedness of COVID-19 (Mitroff, 2020) urged us to examine how actors tame the problems that are rapidly aggravated by a constellation of socio-political factors, contributed by disparate stakeholders, and accelerate to become wicked problems that are never solved. Wicked problems, as they evolve, are known to become better or worse (Kreuter et al., 2004; Rittel and Webber, 1973). In contrast, tame problems are clearly defined, solved by experts based on technical data and criteria, finite, solvable, and free of subjective interpretations on the part of stakeholders (Batie, 2008; Blackman et al., 2006). Kreuter et al (2004) conceptualized wicked and tame problems at the opposite ends of a continuum, where hybrids or semi-wicked/semi-tame problems emerge.

This study advances understanding of how academic agency emerges in the context of the wicked problem and how loosely and tightly coupled systems of university governance contribute to wickedness. Examining these co-dependencies, we are trying to understand how the problem wickedness and organizational “coupling” contribute to the agency complexity in managing crisis inside and outside our sampled universities (Rowan, 2002, Spillane et al., 2011). Following Birnbaum’s classification of types of higher education institutions (1987), the public institutions in our study (University of Dhaka (UD) in Bangladesh; Makerere University (MU) in Uganda, Royal university of Phnom Penh (RUPP) in Cambodia) are assumed to be loosely coupled due to their size. The Nazarbayev University (NU) is a hybrid public-private “boutique” university, established by the former president of Kazakhstan, and enjoying privileges of autonomy for research and teaching (seemingly a loosely coupled organization), and hierarchical administration (seemingly a tightly coupled organization). The sampled private universities were assumed to be tightly coupled organizations: i.e., AURO University-India is the smallest of all private universities; UNIMINUTO in Colombia (fourth by size in the whole sample); and Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU).

At the sampled universities, we interviewed administrators who were involved in crisis management since February/March 2020 when the pandemic started through October of the same year when institutional responses began to emerge. Transcribed interviews were first coded into the four stages of Mitroff (2005)’s crisis management while carefully considering the priorities, roles, tensions, and responsibilities in the institutional agency and human agency of participants. Then, we re-coded the data into Kreuter et al.’s four dimensions of tamed versus wicked problem.

The findings suggest that the loosely coupled universities (the public in our sample) faced more challenges in developing this balance entangled in governmental regulations and resource deficiencies. University of Dhaka’s faculty members were particularly frustrated, notwithstanding that the government’s rigid approach provided better results in controlling infection and death incidence rates in the long run, compared to other countries. Private universities (AURO, UNIMINUTO, and UCU) felt compelled during the crisis to institute rigid structural controls, which superseded the controls used by the government. These universities were smaller and with access to better overall resources, which greatly facilitated their ability to adapt to new ways of delivering services as well as stay committed to taming the problem which became more wicked. Their determination stemmed from an acute awareness of the high level of accountability to privately paying students or religious communities, who expected that the universities would protect their interests.

Despite differences in their organizational statuses and cultures, public and private universities in low-to-middle income countries appear to have gone through crisis management phases as outlined by Mitroff (1994). Having deciphered the first signals, universities were quick enough in undertaking preventative measures and developing damage containment strategies, while having a better grasp on challenges encountered. Yet, the problem wickedness prevented them from reaching the stage of recovery – this may be taking a longer and more winding road, as new variants of the coronavirus emerge, some members of society resist vaccination, and resources continue to be unevenly distributed across countries and continents. In the midst of these challenges, universities and societies are most likely to achieve more if they learn from each other how to manage the crisis.

Authors

• Ielyzaveta Shchepetylnykova, The University of Hong Kong

• Pilar Mendoza, University of Missouri, Columbia

• Ariful Kabir, University of Dhaka

• Aliya Kuzhabekova, University of Calgary