Has COVID Killed Our Last Two Brain Cells?

For all the shit that we get, Gen Z has had to deal with a lot in the last three years.

‘Once in a lifetime’ weather events turned frequent, a recession on top of a cost of living crisis, global riots over racial injustice, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, the US Supreme Court being fuckwits, Sam Levinson’s perverted fantasies featuring The Weeknd, and a bunch of billionaires being drowned at sea in a submarine (actually, that last one is pretty funny). This generation has had to suffer a lifetime of crises in the span of an election cycle. 

Oh, oops, there was also a whole-ass pandemic in between.

Toga parties, late night study seshes, and finally having your first (legal) sip of alcohol were all promises of a fruitful life for the new academic. Times are tough when you’re a fresher, shedding tears in a university bathroom becomes a Pavlovian response before you realise you don’t actually need to attend every class. Through the growing pains you know, at least, that a shiny new degree, lifelong skills, and the magnificently messy experiences of being a university student are part and parcel with the torture. 

In 2020, when the whole shabang took off, some of us were only months removed from the sweet suffocation of high school. The few weeks of being on campus in 2020 likely would have created an unfulfilled appetite for the quintessential university experience. “We got O-Week, which was cool,” says Annie, a first-year Art History student in 2020. “But that was pretty much it.”

As the entire nation crowded around our screens in March of 2020 watching Aunty Cindy warn us that we were about to face “unprecedented economic and social disruption”, I think we all could feel the world of academia would never quite be the same again. 

As a Gen Z who graduated in 2019, I watched the chaos from outside. It later intensified for me when I started working at the Tertiary Education Commission. My mind was constantly occupied by the students. I knew that there was no way in hell I could have found the morsels of motivation to go back to study postgraduate. I don’t know how 2020 students did it, dealing with both the pandemic and the university’s inconsistent bullshit. But I also felt mournful for all the freshers’ ‘stupid things you do when you’re 18’ being left unchecked off behind empty camera rolls, cancelled festival tickets, and prolonged Zoom calls. For Gil, a first-year English and History student in 2020, the pandemic threw a wrench into his YA fantasies of “finding an academic community and talking to people really seriously about Marxism in the corridors.”

Most of all, I wondered exactly how this would change the academic experience. Through the course of my government job amidst the pandemic, I read hundreds of reports detailing students’ mental health struggles caused by prolonged isolation and uncertainty, skyrocketing food costs and housing shortages. Having returned to postgraduate study this year, I completely bypassed the worst of the shit show (although the $33 million deficit might have something to say about that), but it got me thinking... what exactly are the repercussions of a global health crisis on young students in the long-term? What does academia look like in a post-pandemic world? 

Firstly, the term ‘post-pandemic’ is still a little contentious. ‘Post’ seems to indicate that there’s a nice, neat line between an era of mass illness and deaths, economic uncertainty and political divisiveness, and now; it paints the crisis-heavy era we’re living in as paradise. We’re out of the thick of it, but why does it feel like we’re stuck in an ongoing nightmare of instability and crisis?

Well, it’s like the world went through a shitty breakup and we’re still in the rocky healing period pre glow up.

Poet Octavio Paz believed that living in the modern world meant “continually hurtling forward at such a dizzy pace that it cannot take root, that it merely survives from one day to the next”. Critic Perry Anderson similarly described this as living in an “interminably recurrent present”.  So, those jokes that we all tell about feeling like we’re still stuck in March 2020 do actually have some sociological backing. In the Information Age, with one scroll forcing one crisis after the next continually into our tiny coconut brains, it’s pretty much impossible to distance ourselves from it all. New sociological consequences surface daily, and the trauma of a global pandemic has become ingrained into our never-ending present. 

Unsurprisingly, the trauma for many students began when the university experience quickly took a turn. The whirlwind of packed-out lecture and half-built tutorial friendships became a simmering of socially distanced dining halls and collective camera-off-mic-off-black-screen breakout rooms. The promised awkwardness of icebreakers and group projects now had another painful layer added to it. Frequent technological mishaps and the repetitive ‘sorry, you go’ cycle seemed like a divine sign to forgo making any social connections and instead fully embrace your desolation. 

For Sam, a third-year Law student in 2020, the isolation of studying from home made university feel more intensely individualistic rather than the collective social experience he was expecting it to be. “A lot of the time it felt like you were the only one in the class, and you slowly started to lose perspective of other people floundering along with you. Even now, it’s hard to remember that you’re probably not the only one that’s struggling.” Similarly, as Gil describes, the lack of natural opportunities for students to interact with lecturers may be a reason why students still struggle to reach out for help. “There weren’t really chances to build rapport with lecturers unless you specifically reached out. If you didn’t have the confidence to do so online, you’d probably feel even more reluctant to start that relationship now that we’re back in-person,” he says. 

However, not all was doom and gloom. 

The necessity of flexible dual delivery during the pandemic (which VUW took their sweet, sweet time getting up and running) meant students could choose to learn in the way that worked best for them. Sure, you’d think a lack of structure and mandatory classes would be a potent recipe to doom-scroll TikTok for weeks on end before panic writing all your assignments in a day, which I’m sure was the case for some people. But for others, having a breather from the day-to-day hamster wheel of in-person classes, being able to watch lectures in their own time, and having more flexibility with submitting assignments helped their mental health in the midst of a constantly chaotic world.

But alas, as the ancient proverb goes: when Victoria University doth get something right, thence they must endeavour to fuck it back up. The decision to take away the mandated lecture recordings felt like a back step for the university. Many students argued that it was discriminatory because it neglected students with diverse learning needs. With much of the university’s student deficit in 2023 being credited to the extremely high cost of living in Pōneke, it seems a little ridiculous not to make academia more appealing through universal accessibility to online material. 

On top of that, even though the university boasted the “robust correlation” between in-person attendance and student success, returning to campus doesn’t automatically provide the panacea for success that the university hoped for. As Matthew, a first-year Art History and English Literature student in 2020, found, “[although] it’s nice to be around people again, it’s still an adjustment to go from having everything online to suddenly having everything in-person. It’s been difficult to make that transition and find the motivation to be present for all of it.”

While the university seems desperate to claw themselves back to the ‘good ol’ days’ of pre-pandemic normalcy without post-pandemic considerations, one of the better hangovers of the Covid era has undoubtedly been the take-home test. My jaw dropped when I discovered this was a thing. Not only can you sit a formal exam at home and have all your notes with you, but you also get multiple days to do it! The days of shuffling into a cold lecture hall at 9 a.m, propped up only by caffeine and nerves, and regurgitating 12 weeks of information into a two hour exam paper were finally given a second thought. Gil’s experience of traditional exams in high school being “massively stressful” seemed to echo amongst other first-year Covid students.

But in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help wondering whether these inclusive approaches to academia were suggestive of a greater phenomenon. The term ‘digital amnesia’, coined by Kaspersky Lab, refers to the idea that with greater reliance on technology to store information for you, our generation in particular has become more prone to forgetting knowledge. The cognitive maps in our brain no longer need to remember which year a certain war happened, or what the exact definition of the mitochondria is, because it’s all stored compactly in our back pockets should we need it. 

Dr. Louise Starkey, an Education professor at Te Herenga Waka with expertise in teaching and learning in the digital age, believes that our reliance on digital tools can be “a cause of digital distraction, which limits cognitive engagement and focus and can influence what people choose to memorise or remember. There is evidence that this is changing neural networks.” 

If everything we need to know is so easily accessible, does that mean that our ability to retain important information through academia is slowly being chipped away? Will our brains become too fried to remember anything more than obscure childhood memories and what we ate for breakfast?

Dr Starkey doesn’t think so. “Digital amnesia is a catchy term. It focuses on concerns and outrage about what is happening in society that creates assumptions beyond the evidence. But there is no evidence that digital tools cause ‘amnesia’. It’s similar to students studying last century, where they may buy textbooks and turn up to lectures without cognitive engagement of the learning. It’s more important that lecturers design courses and teach in ways, as most already do, with an awareness of how students use digital tools for learning that enables cognitive engagement,” she says.  

Many students seem to be on a similar page. As Sam believes, your memory is dependent on the circumstances you’re in. “Whether you have all your notes with you during an online test or just a one-pager in-person—if you know the stuff, you know the stuff. You’re likely just going to mentally prepare for whatever the circumstance is, and since you’ve already done the course work, having that information with you physically ends up being more of a comfort thing than anything else.” For Maia, a first-year Environmental Studies and Development studies student in 2020, the changes to academic testing in an age of technology seem more reflective of the real world. “You’re pretty much always going to be working on long-term projects, rather than things that require short-term memory. It just doesn’t seem practical anymore to use traditional exams as a way of testing your academic skills.”

While the academic world may continue to feel like it’s reeling from one crisis after the other, it seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. We’ll always be fighting for better recognition of the tertiary system as it is and adapting to the shit that inevitably gets hurled at us from all angles. 

If anything is evident from the resilience that Gen Z students have shown over the past three years, it’s that the kids will (hopefully) be alright.