There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. – Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider, 1984)
In late December 2019 the world became aware of a strange form of acute respiratory distress discovered by hospital physicians in Wuhan, China. Within 90-days this extremely contagious respiratory illness, now known as COVID-19, invaded almost every country on earth and was named by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the first worldwide health pandemic since the peak of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) (MacArthur, 2020). As of June 1, 2020, more than 395,000 people’s deaths were to blame on the virus. Daily life came to a simultaneous grinding halt for everyone around the world. People from all corners of the earth attempted to implement modifications and adaptations for all facets of daily life as the new rule of the world was “sheltering in place.”
Sheltering in place was described as a WHO and Center for Disease Control (CDC) best practice and government enforced method of mandating everyone to remain inside their homes. A few exceptions were made for leaving the house for food and medical/pharmaceutical care. The idea was to limit the amount of person-to-person contact of each individual. Doing so would isolate people to their own personal spaces, but also quarantine those infected with the virus, whether they were symptomatic or asymptomatic carriers. This policy promptly caused problems for those that reside in high density and communal living situations. One such place that is both high density and communal is the thousands of residence halls on college campuses all over the world.
These immediate transformations were disruptive to all “normal” life but posed distinct challenges to higher education. Effective immediately, campuses world-wide were closed to student-residents, face-to-face instruction and all non-essential employees. Instructors, who were in some cases a third of the way through the semester, faced a multitude of obstacles that all needed immediate solutions. And suddenly, a perfect storm of educational and economic chaos formed. These challenges manifested in ways foreseen and unforeseen and catalyzed undeniable hardship for many students, particularly those of low socio-economic status or other marginalized demographics. This kind of institutional change has not been seen since the landmark Supreme court case Brown v. Board in 1954 making racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. That kind of change took decades and the changes induced by COVID-19 were felt overnight. In order to persist and complete the semester, students were asked to “return home and continue their studies from there via remote instruction.” Only later during the pandemic would we come to know the degree of assumptions made in that statement.