{"id":1,"date":"2023-02-14T19:36:06","date_gmt":"2023-02-14T19:36:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ascjcapstone.com\/spring-2023\/atharvat\/?p=1"},"modified":"2023-05-05T03:06:53","modified_gmt":"2023-05-05T03:06:53","slug":"hello-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ascjcapstone.com\/spring-2023\/atharvat\/index.php\/2023\/02\/14\/hello-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind-The-Scenes, Underground and Front Facing: University Support Staff’s Lives and Struggles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LOS ANGELES \u2014 Donation checks, Amazon orders, and bundles of The Wall Street Journal. Weeks of campus lockdown had meant heaps of packages had collected at the University of Southern California\u2019s central mailing facility. Patricia Carvajal had been tasked with collecting the hundreds of pieces of mail for faculty, staff, and students of the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and mailing them out to their respective homes. Normally students and staff would come to pick up packages at the mail room but COVID-19 had prompted a closure of campus that left crucial packages stranded inside empty buildings. From April 2020 till the summer of 2021, Carvajal drove out to campus twice a week for the same purpose. Even at the height of the pandemic when people doused their groceries in sanitizer and wore rubber gloves to avoid contamination, Carvajal sorted and forwarded hundreds of letters, packages, and cheques by hand to make sure people got what they needed to keep going. <\/p>\n\n\n

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The luggage of an international student being mailed out from USC in April 2020 (Photo\/Patricia Caravajal)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Jim Yoder, the events coordinator at USC Annenberg,  described having to shift his whole production strategy for events to suit an online format. He suddenly found himself in charge of producing events through new software like Zoom which was unfamiliar to him and most of the world. Annenberg alone puts on an average of 500 events per year, and Yoder had to shift them to an online platform with a week\u2019s notice. Yoder and the whole events team had to deal with everything from connection issues to Zoom bombers and really had to go the extra mile to make the Zoom meetings seem like legitimate productions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The experiences that Yoder and Carvajal detail do not stand alone or are uniquely situated, instead they align well with the experiences of university support staff across the country. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the inequalities that characterize the higher education sector in the United States, and academic studies are now being done <\/a>to understand the extent of the inequities and disparities. Support staff across the country reported<\/a> additional workloads, labor inequities, and increased stress, and reported concerns about being asked to put their well-being and health aside for occupational and institutional needs.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Patricia Carvajal loaded up her SUV with packages from USC’s central mailing facility in April 2020. (Photo\/Patricia Carvajal)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIn a lot of ways, I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic just further showed us who and what higher education institutions care about and prioritize,\u201d Jordan Harper, a Ph.D. candidate at USC\u2019s Rossier School for Education researching organizational change in higher education, explained in an email. \u201cAnd the staff is often not in that number.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Technical Services and Operations office, or TechOps, is the all-encompassing department that houses the facilities, operations, classroom support, and Information Technology employees for USC Annenberg. Its scope of duties resembles those of support staff across universities. Even as students and faculty dispersed off college campuses to their homes across the country in March 2020,  it was TechOps staff like Yoder and Carvajal who kept the show running. Ever since March 2020, the office has had to continuously recalibrate its efforts to be in sync with the changing local, state, and university guidelines for social distancing, masking, and sanitization. During the first summer under the siege of the pandemic, Carvajal met with designers and faculty to reimagine the layout of two buildings that house Annenberg to fit the demands of social distancing. Those plans, which took the TechOps team months to finalize and execute, bit the dust when the university announced that the campus would not be reopening for Fall 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Wallis Annenberg Hall was restructured to adhere to social distancing protocols during the summer months of 2020. (Photo\/Patricia Carvajal)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

This back and forth between universities\u2019 plans for online, hybrid, and in-person instruction modalities brought forth a significant increase in responsibilities for support staff across college campuses, as these decisions were being taken by senior leadership but the burden of quick materialization and implementation was laid<\/a> upon mid-level management and employees in the universities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe had to restructure the whole facility, and find how we could fit all the classes in here while doing social distancing,\u201d Christina Bellantoni, the director of the Media Center, the school\u2019s cutting-edge newsroom facility, and a professor of Professional Practice at USC Annenberg, said while recalling the tenuous summer months of 2020. \u201cWhen we eventually did not come back in the fall, we had staff going to students\u2019 houses to give them equipment or shipping things out so we could keep producing our news shows.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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