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.