The beauty in the ecology of the campus community is that it is
the same for all its inhabitants (albeit experienced differently)
In ecosystems, environments are not only made up of organism, but they
also include abiotic factors necessary for survival. In our ecosystem
analysis, we imagine the various services provided by institutions as
these abiotic factors. In our ecosystems of higher education, different
participants, including teachers and learners, share the organizational
context and a network of mutual influence, within which there are
differences of needs, resources, and responsibilities. Due to the
current COVID-19 pandemic, consistent messaging through news and other
media outlets is that, “We’re in this together.” These words, can
sound like empty rhetoric unless actions affirm the value of community.
In the pre-pandemic world, it was possible – if but barely – to
imagine that all, or most, members of the campus community had access to
adequate resources, but under our current circumstances we must
acknowledge not only are resources distributed unequally, but societal
determinants and health disparities are a burden many of our students
endure. Instructors must empathize with the situations our students find
themselves in and realize that life is not as neat as it was on the
well-manicured lawns of our campuses.
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing us as educators to confront the fact
that there are stark disparities of access to resources. When campuses
were shuttered in response to the pandemic, many students lost access to
food, housing, healthcare, tutorial services, libraries, computer labs,
wet-labs, support groups, study space, high speed internet, specialized
software, and like-minded thinkers. Our students come from every corner
of the world and represent every coast here in the U.S. Their location
is just as different as the types of circumstances from which they
originate. Education is for all; and the university is a community of
teaching and learning in which we all belong. Making the presumption
that students have access to the same research rich environment and
tools for remote instruction is an example of a false assumption.