The world has spent the majority of 2020 enduring an unpreceded crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The impact of this crisis has been enormous, and the situation has yet to be resolved. It is still difficult to anticipate when the pandemic will end and how our lives will have changed after the crisis. Higher educational institutions (HEIs) have also had to undergo tremendous transformation, in particular, changing a conventional educational, teaching, and learning system to a digital and online mode and cancelling or postponing important events such as graduation and entrance ceremonies and entrance examinations. In addition, a number of HEIs have been facing financial constraints due to reduced enrolment, particularly from overseas. Students have missed opportunities to meet their family and friends, causing profound psychosocial impact and stress for all concerned. Simultaneously, however, the situation has given HEIs a good opportunity to consider their disaster preparedness, response, and recovery capacity on campus. Some surveys have highlighted a lack of preparedness for pandemic and other hazardous risks beyond natural hazards. Safety issues are a top priority at HEIs because they bring together a number of students, faculty, and staff. This book covers the experiences and lessons learned from HEIs in preparedness, response, and recovery during the COVID-19 pandemic to prepare for such calamities beyond natural disasters in the future. The book consists of 15 chapters divided into three major sections. They highlight the importance of HEIs’ governance issues in disaster risk management, examine the challenges that HEIs have faced during the pandemic and the implementation of new teaching and learning methodologies, and provide innovative responses and preparedness by HEIs based on science and technology, respectively.

This book proposes a new theory of change in American higher education that explains the resilience of colleges and universities, and demonstrates how they adapt to new social and economic conditions. It argues that the demands for new educational missions, new sources of capital to finance innovation, and new organizational and governance models lead to the creation of institutional diversity. Using the theory of “accretive change” to predict future changes, this volume asserts that the rise of artificial intelligence and new investment models within the field of social entrepreneurship will shape the next wave of universities and educational institutions.

Offering insights into the adaptational strategies that were employed by higher education institutions worldwide during the Covid-19 pandemic, this volume considers the lasting effects of adaptation and change, as well as the perception of universities’ role in society and desired ways of operating. Nearly overnight, the pandemic forced university leaders and faculty across the world to switch to remote models, not only of teaching and learning but also of managing an entire institution. This book recognizes how the scale of challenges as well as the range of measures specific universities had to undertake was uneven, with some being better equipped than the others. Using a selection of international case studies, it offers an insight into strategies employed by institutions worldwide to navigate the crisis, and highlights the targets and objectives addressed by them during these processes. In so doing, it offers invaluable lessons for the years to come. An indispensable study into strategies that result in resilience and sustainability for universities, this book is essential reading for scholars of education, pedagogy, and organizational change in the higher education sector, as well as educational leaders around the world.

Education is regarded as a cross-cutting issue for disaster risk reduction (DRR) through reviewing the Sendai Framework for DRR (SFDRR) 2015–2030. Mainstreaming Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) in the education sector is one of the important efforts to enhance resilience in a community. DRR in the education sector not only focuses on provision of disaster education, but also includes securing a safe school environment, developing school disaster management plans, and building the capacity of school teachers and local educational officers. Japan, with its wealth of experience in DRR, has developed a good resilient system in its education sector, which has been tested and revised through experiences of past disasters. This book reviews the evolution of DRR in the education sector in Japan, including some of the recent developments after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, focusing on DRR governance and practices in national policies, curriculum development and teacher training, community linkage, and international cooperation, to enhance resilience in the education sector. The primary target groups for this book are students and researchers in the fields of disaster management and DRR studies. Another target group comprises practitioners and policy makers, who will be able to apply the collective knowledge from this work to policy and decision making. The book provides an overview of the current research trends and furnishes basic knowledge on this important topic.

Colleges and universities have administrative and governance arrangements that can come to terms with change. These can come into play to interpret and modulate change and to allow necessary adjustments through participatory processes. But the capacity of these mechanisms to preserve and protect the institution is not ordinarily all that visible. Gradual and decorous accommodations tend to make the working of these mechanisms largely or even wholly invisible. It is a premise of this collection of essays that we need to look at highly stressful change to understand, or at least get a feel for, the capacity of governance, administration, and faculty to deal with major issues. This is the 151st issue of the Jossey-Bass series; New Directions for Higher Education, published quarterly. Addressed to presidents, vice presidents, deans, and other higher-education decision-makers on all kinds of campuses, New Directions for Higher Education provides timely information and authoritative advice about major issues and administrative problems confronting every institution.

The close proximity of students learning, living, socializing and working on university and college campuses presents a unique setting to understand organization responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This concurrent, mixed methods qualitative study explored how one institution of higher education demonstrated resilience and how its health promotion activities pivoted and adjusted to reduce virus transmission and maintain safety while continuing to promote learning and education. Based on the organizational resilience conceptualization developed by Duchek (2020), data collection methods combined individual interviews with university leaders, self-interview and reflection, and a review of organization documents a connection between health promotion, organization resilience, and critical incident response was found. Data analysis revealed a set of themes unique to this university, but also supports recent literature on organization resilience. Findings suggest that organization preparation, the use of reflection in the response process and the expression of organization values, (care and compassion) provide opportunities for the organization to practice adaptive resilience. In addition, the study findings suggest the importance of health promotion to assist in the critical incident response planning. The analytical process of combining stakeholder interviews, self-interviews, and organization documents provides one path for deeper learning of the connection between health promotion and organization resilience.