‘Pandemia’: a reckoning of UK universities’ corporate response to COVID-19 and its academic fallout

Universities in the UK, and in other countries like Australia and the USA, have responded to the operational and financial challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic by prioritising institutional solvency and enforcing changes to the work-practices and profiles of their staff. For academics, an adjustment to institutional life under COVID-19 has been dramatic and resulted in the overwhelming majority making a transition to prolonged remote-working. Many have endured significant work-intensification; others have lost — or may soon lose — their jobs. The impact of the pandemic appears transformational and for the most part negative. This article reports the experiences of n=1,099 UK academics specific to the corporate response of institutional leadership to the COVID-19 crisis. We find articulated a story of universities in the grip of ‘pandemia’ and COVID-19 emboldening processes and protagonists of neoliberal governmentality and market-reform that pay little heed to considerations of human health and wellbeing.