The Foundational Contributions of Staff at Universities

I’ve written recently about the challenges to the roles of students and faculty during the COVID-19. This is a companion post.

In mid-March, 2020, Georgetown students left their dormitories for home or sheltered in place in their apartments in DC. The campus was emptied of student presence. At the same time, faculty went to their homes and began virtual education using Canvas, Zoom, and a variety of other tools to continue their jobs as instructors of students.

At the same time, few of the jobs of the Georgetown staff really stopped but many found themselves doing their jobs differently.

Some staff jobs needed physical presence. The buildings of the university still needed protection. Utilities need to keep operating; the campus needs to be cared for; buildings’ infrastructure, especially in our older spaces, needs to be watched. Students remaining in dormitories and staff need food support. Construction crews, taking advantage of empty buildings, need to do their work on site. Police need to remain vigilant to protect persons and property. Computing infrastructure needs its usual care and feeding. Indeed, the vast increase in Zoom and other computer-assistive communication tools increased the workload on some segments of the University Information Services staff.

It is an eerie feeling working on a university campus when few others are present. Even though you may be performing the same job, you do it without the colleagues who support you. It’s easy to feel removed from those you are serving and, most unfortunately, unthanked.

Many of these staff colleagues who continued to work on campus had home situations similar to others – no day care, schools closed down, support services for household members suspended. Yet they continued their duties out of home to support the university.

Other staff continued to work from home while balancing family care and homeschooling, often requiring modified or extended work hours in challenging environments (working space, technology). They rushed to create and support an infrastructure for remote higher education. They continued to support faculty and students remotely, which included modified or extended work hours to accommodate those in time zones far removed from DC. Staff managed and implemented all of the administrative and operational impacts of COVID-19 including student move-outs, student appeals, refunds and emergency funds, virtual graduation activities, new academic and administrative policies and procedures, research continuity and temporary shut downs.

Later, when the financial situation of the university began clearer, some staff took voluntary furloughs or pay cuts to help the University financially.

The Georgetown community is an interlocking web of talent. It, like all universities, produces graduates of educational programs and knowledge from faculty research. While the faculty and the students are most easily identified as central to these products, each group is crippled in its work without the work of university staff. The commitment displayed by staff over the past weeks has made more evident the dependence of the whole institution on the talents of its staff. We are indeed fortunate.