LAUSR

In the spring semester of 2020, at the peak of campus closures, more than 1,300 universities in the United States shifted from a traditional campus environment to an online delivery system or canceled classes entirely for the rest of the term (Smalley, 2021). More than 14 million students were immediately impacted by colleges that decided to transition from the on-campus environment to remote learning. Final exams were conducted online, and many students were even removed from on-campus housing, being forced to live somewhere else temporarily. On Zoom, classes with more than 100 students created chaotic situations when microphones were not muted during these live sessions (Hess, 2020). Thousands of employees, faculty members, and staff suddenly worked from home while colleges closed for several months. The delivery of online classes, as a shortterm solution, was meant to protect the health of all stakeholders involved in higher education. Thus, with new virtual learning environments affecting many colleges, the communicative reactions varied greatly, specifically among university administration and faculty. Many campuses turned into ghost towns where only facilities management employees might have stayed in person to care for the empty buildings. Even today, many college leaders aim to err on the side of caution, empathy, and compassion. Students and faculty alike have been shown kindness and flexibility in a myriad of different ways. For example, some new faculty members were given an extra year to attain tenure with suggested research and teaching milestones that had not yet been reached due to delays and interruptions caused by COVID-19 (Butler, 2021). Students were also provided extensions on assignments and possibly even an incomplete to finish the classwork at a later date after the semester finished (Johnson et al., 2020). Multiple faculty members changed assignment parameters or the structure of exams, reducing the overall workload of a course or even shifting to a pass-or-fail model. Among students and faculty, the worst levels of severe anxiety, clinical depression, suicidal ideation, and other mental health hardships emerged when college campuses across the country closed without indications of when they might reopen (Lee et al., 2021). Virtual platforms were sometimes the only available options if a student desired to progress toward graduation (White & Ruth-Sahd, 2020). These sudden changes increased stress levels and diminished attention spans, negatively influencing overall academic results with students struggling to concentrate and retain information. Communication between faculty and students necessitated flexibility and patience on all sides.