Teaching, learning, and caring in a neoliberal institution: Lessons from a global pandemic


Momo Tanaka, University of Toronto

The taken-for-granted practices of academic teaching and learning were unexpectedly disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. University campuses across the globe suddenly implemented social distancing practices such as work-from-home and virtual course delivery. Faculty and students had to find strategies to integrate their academic practices into their home, adapt to an unfamiliar method of teaching and learning, and adjust to isolation during a period of intense uncertainty and unease. Drawing from a larger scoping literature review on the sociological research published on the work-life nexus between March 2020 and March 2023, I argue that the COVID-19 pandemic revealed the inadequacy of the neoliberal academic institution to give care and accommodate care responsibilities of its faculty and students. I specifically highlight the profound impact of neoliberal policies on the experience of the pandemic on women faculty, parents, early-career academics. (While these were not the only groups affected by the neoliberal nature of the academic institution, these were the groups that were most frequently discussed in the literature captured by this review). The pandemic underscored that the neoliberal academic institution’s proclivities towards productivity, top-down decision-making, and focus on maintaining income are often contradictory to the needs and desires of academics. Academics (particularly young, early-career academics) felt threatened by the pressure to maintain pre-pandemic productivity with the loss of childcare and the workload of transitioning to remote instruction. They found themselves at odds with the spectre of the “ideal academic worker.” Faculty frequently expressed a desire to extend care to their students, making use of personal resources to fill the gaps where the institution failed to provide proper support for both students and faculty. This gap-filling was a gendered phenomenon; female academics were more prone to recognizing the gaps and to take on additional care responsibilities. However, there was also a discussion about the ways academics resisted the neoliberal expectations of academia, including self-care practices as a form of resistance. This included simply identifying the needs of carers and taking time and space to address those needs. By “unmasking” their parenthood and revealing the limits of the “ideal academic,” academics offered each other a space to be vulnerable and acknowledge the reality of the obligations and relationships to others instead of insisting on the individualized and disembodied narrative of the neoliberal institution. In making care responsibilities visible, there was an opportunity to foster connectedness between academics and create a more compassionate environment for students and faculty. Ultimately, the neoliberal institutions inherent emphasis on productivity is contradictory and incompatible with care needs and care responsibilities. The unexpected rearrangement of teaching, learning, and research during the pandemic resulted in a heightened manifestation of pre-existing failings of the academic institution. However, although the academic institution failed to prioritize care and relationality, some saw the pandemic as an opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct academic structures rooted in principles of equity, solidarity, and inclusivity. 

This paper will be presented at the following session: