The Teaching and Learning Innovation Digest - May 2023

There is value in this perspective but we
must be careful not to romanticize campus
life. University and college campuses were
initially designed to cater to the experiences
of young, white Anglo Saxon, heterosexual
able-bodied, elite men. With the influx of more
diverse bodies since the 1960s (i.e., women,
older, non-white, middle, and working class,
sexual and gender diverse people, etc.)
these spaces have become slightly more
malleable but not porous. For those who have
felt like outsiders and whose histories have
been erased from these sites and who lack
institutional power that comes with economic,
social, and cultural capital (i.e., contract
workers, Indigenous, racialized minorities,
poor, non-binary, disabled people) the campus
is still an exclusionary place (Blaskovits
et al., 2023, Hampton 2020. Merculieff &
Roderick, 2013) where their presence is often
viewed as a disruption to the “normalcy” of
these institutional spaces. Hence, campus
life is fraught with barriers, tension, stress,
anxiety, and feelings of loneliness and not
belonging with many ending up on the fringes
or margins of these establishments. In fact,
the pandemic and the opportunity to work
from “home” was a reprieve from these toxic
environments. Additionally, the return to
campus for many institutions assumes that all
postsecondary students have had a presence
on campus prior to the pandemic. This is not
the case for some of the most marginalized
learners (i.e., Indigenous learners on reserves,
learners who are incarcerated) whose absence
from the campus preceding the pandemic has
not been a matter of great concern and whose
needs as these institutions plan for the return
continue to be ignored or not addressed with
the same level of urgency.
Besides recognizing that not all individuals
and groups have found learning on campus
to be smooth, enjoyable, or even an option,
the return to campus must also factor in that
for many people, particularly those from
marginalized groups, the consequences
associated with the pandemic are still
present, and in some cases have been
further exacerbated, making the return to
campus challenging. For example, many
international students continue to struggle
with crossing borders (i.e., visa backlogs and
navigating immigration systems made more
complicated by the pandemic) (Deshmukh,
2021). Countless people around the world
who struggled economically before and
during the pandemic continue to do so, with
many finding that despite the lifting and/or
easing of pandemic restrictions their socioeconomic
conditions have worsened due not
just to a sluggish economy or high inflation,
but also because of ongoing neoliberal
economic cost cutting measures imposed on
workers (Blaskovits, 2023). This has had a
ripple effect, from poor and middle-income
families in the global South incurring greater
debt to send their children to postsecondary
institutions in the global North, to students
(and contract employees) working multiple
precarious jobs to secure housing, food, and
other basic necessities.
The list of systemic inequities that have
been exacerbated by the pandemic cannot
be ignored when envisioning a return to
campus. Neither must the solutions to these
structural issues be reduced to the level of
individual issues. For example, the state of
student’s mental health was a concern that
preceded the pandemic, but was exponentially
worsened by it. The pandemic exposed the
chronic underfunding of mental health not just
in education but in the wider society (Tremblay
& Brunette, 2022). The link between mental
health and issues like student performance,
retention, engagement, and other indicators of
academic success has been well-established
in the research literature (Shankar & Park,
2016, Storie et al., 2010). However, the
growing stream of research (Checa-Domene
et al., 2022, Vizoso Gómez & Arias-Gundín,
2019) that focus on the relationship between
mental health and individual mindsets, traits,
and competencies like self-esteem, optimism,
emotional intelligence, and resilience fail to
deal with many of the structural root causes
of mental health (i.e., poverty, patriarchy,
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