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.