Coping with COVID changes

Dr Lynda Chapple La Trobe University

Having worked for over twelve years at Monash University in a variety of sessional and fixed-term contract roles, I moved to La Trobe University in November 2019. I work as an Academic and Language Skills Advisor and the new position offered me the exciting chance to extend my work with graduate and higher degree research (HDR) students, within a very different institutional context. There was also the benefit of a (slightly) more secure position that was closer to home.

It started well, then COVID-19 came.

Trying to establish myself in a new position in the shadow of a pandemic has certainly had its challenges, although there have been benefits as well. Fortunately, I had some time to get to know some of my colleagues and tentatively start to plan for how my new position would function.

However, the academic year had only just started when the chaos of COVID-19 descended, and we were forced into crisis management and the whole online, workingfrom-home adventure.

Since March, we have made rapid shifts in the ways we work. Gone is the belief that working from home means lower productivity – indeed, many of us feel guilty moving away from the screen, and others work early in the morning or late at night to accommodate the juggle of home-schooling and childcare.

Interesting word, ‘flexibility’. I now run workshops and consultations exclusively on Zoom, but to be online constantly is exhausting. At the end of each day my eyes sting, my back aches and I simply want nothing to do with screens.

There’s also a great deal that I miss about being on campus: the chance encounters, the energy of students, campus events, corridor conversations and productive collaborations that arise when we are physically proximate; the lemon-scented gums, the ducks, even the grungy old moat. I work in a wonderful and supportive team and feel it would be so restorative just to meet them for a coffee.

The process of structural reorganisation in the wake of COVID-19 has been a little less brutal at La Trobe than at other universities, but has been swift and painful, nonetheless. My team will have lost four out of ten members to voluntary redundancy packages by the end of the process – experienced and highly-valued educators who simply could not face yet another re-structure. At least they had the choice – there will be many others who don’t.

We have been shifted into a different portfolio, had staffing reduced and lost another colleague to a different team. The disruption and uncertainty have been dispiriting at best. The upshot, of course, will be far fewer secure jobs across the university.

On top of this, there’s the shocking, although not unexpected, antipathy of the Government for the entire sector. I was privileged to have access to free tertiary education and am appalled that our younger people today do not have the same opportunity.

That MPs and Senators who have benefitted in this way (many of whom studied arts and humanities) see fit to deny the next generation is the ultimate hypocrisy.

As I sit down to write this, we are slowly, hopefully, longingly moving out of lockdown. COVID-19 has taught us many things over the past six months or so, but by now, at least here in Victoria, we are simply drained. What is clear though, is the importance of fighting to defend education in a world that needs it more than ever. •