Let it Be Your Dread

The fabric of academic life in higher education during the pandemic has been colored by dread. It is a form of dread wherein the dangers that are provoking it are widely known. At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century, these dangers involve widespread sickness and the specter of death across higher education in America. Most everyone in academe knows of students and colleagues who became severely ill or have died because of the spread of COVID-19. Whether it was the transmission of the virus to a healthy host or one with pre-existing health conditions, the fear of death or long-term disability is a danger that higher education has and still faces. The dark shadow alone of COVID-19 over academe for three years and running is enough to provoke dread in even otherwise stable academic psychic lives.