Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia
Have you gotten the feeling that we’ve been experiencing crises on top of crises lately? If you have, you’re not alone. We’ve endured the pandemic crisis, the energy crisis, the cost-of-living crisis, and multiple record-breaking flood crises (in both Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand), in addition to the ongoing climate crisis, to name just a few. Higher education has been affected, of course, by its own crises over the past three turbulent years.
The label that’s now being used to capture this stream of calamities around the world is ‘polycrisis’. One of its leading proponents, Adam Tooze (a professor of history at Columbia University), recently explained in a Financial Times piece that the idea refers to crises being interconnected and worsening each other, meaning that “the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more than the sum of the parts”. It’s a disconcerting, but pretty accurate, label.
The polycrisis means that we need poly-support for the mental health of both students and staff. That is, we need more and different approaches for looking after everyone’s mental health. These approaches will need to be combined together in innovative ways to counter the impacts of today’s overlapping catastrophes. The challenges will continue to be numerous, but the benefits of ensuring peace of mind will also be numerous: more effective learning by students, steadier if not stronger teaching by staff, and more adroit guidance by leaders. At the very least, we can try to avoid polycrisis in our own academic communities; the global ones are painful enough.
Photo: Marcus Woodbridge on Unsplash
The HERDSA Connect Blog offers comment and discussion on higher education issues; provides information about relevant publications, programs and research and celebrates the achievements of our HERDSA members.
HERDSA Connect links members of the HERDSA community in Australasia and beyond by sharing branch activities, member perspectives and achievements, book reviews, comments on contemporary issues in higher education, and conference reflections.
Members are encouraged to respond to articles and engage in ongoing discussion relevant to higher education and aligned to HERDSA’s values and mission. Contact Daniel Andrews Daniel.Andrews@herdsa.org.au to propose a blog post for the HERDSA Connect blog.
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