Learning From COVID-19: Unchanging Inequality and Ideology in Higher Education

Articles in this two-issue series have done an excellent job showing how higher education stakeholders responded to a rapidly changing postsecondary context due to COVID-19. In this concluding essay, I reflect on some of that work and take a moment to also focus on what has not changed. As many others have noted, the pandemic amplified already-existing aspects of societal inequality. This was due in part to decisions, policies, and institutional practices grounded in unchanging logics that accept, maintain, or exacerbate inequitable systems and processes. As more people recognize the injustices in our postsecondary system that COVID-19 has helped to reveal, the time is right for a new progressive research agenda. Building on the work authors have contributed to these issues, the agenda must include new ways of thinking and investigating questions that often remain unasked. It must come from a place of seeing a possible transformation for higher education. As part of this agenda, racism, ableism, neoliberalism, and related ideologies must be analyzed, scrutinized, and ultimately transformed if higher education is to address the continuation of the COVID-19 crisis and be ready for the next ones.