Abstract:
Campus crisis management remains an understudied topic in the context of COVID-affected higher
education. In this paper, we contrasted the ability to tame the wicked problems brought by the
pandemic of COVID-19 in private and public universities in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Colombia, India,
Kazakhstan, Uganda, and Ukraine. The cross-country analysis and diversity of institutional types allowed
us to consider a wide range of challenges faced by academic leaders and their institutions during the
global pandemic. By drawing on institutional policy reviews and interviews with university
administrators, we have examined tensions between the human and institutional agencies on these
crisis-stricken campuses given differing institutional coupling, sizes, resources, and missions. The focus
on agential co-dependencies and institutional coupling lays the ground for conceptualizing campus crisis
management as a culturally specific construct in the context of higher education affected by the global
pandemic.
KEYWORDS: COVID-19, crisis management, global higher education, human agency, institutional agency
