COVID-19 and Higher Education: “management changes”

Abstract

In the wake of the pandemic, the whole world is in a time of crisis. Since the arrival of COVID-19, we have seen a number of negative effects, although many of them are not specific to the pandemic. But the event has undoubtedly deepened them, showing the magnitude of these problems in the world. But also, this time has been an opportunity for many of us, as it has challenged us about our personal, social and working lives, access to our rights, our fears, routines, mobility, new ways of finding ourselves, the use of time, and so on. In this context, our presentation seeks to bring together the experiences that Higher Education Institutions have been experiencing since the arrival of the pandemic in order to analyse them. We will point out a series of aspects that have been compromised in the management of the institutions and the main problems that will have to be faced in the future. By management practices we understand an interactive experience that contributes to the fulfilment of substantive functions and defines the profile of each organisation. They encompass both the implicit and the explicit, i.e. sanctioned structures and rules, but also concrete actions, ways of resolving everyday contingencies that unfold from different institutional histories, from the way in which they carry out the division of labour and the way in which disciplinary fields are structured. The experiences are gathered from the research practices that the authors develop in the framework of the Iberoamerican Telescopi Network of Strategic University Management. In this sense, this work has pretensions that go beyond the current space and will require us in the future to think about the changes: the scope they had, their objectives and the dimensions on which they were deployed, the strategies and contents on which they were proposed, the actors and sectors that intervened and the functions involved, the time in which they were deployed and the nature of their structuring.