Purpose

Higher education institutions (HEIs) can better know how to act when COVID-19 pandemic further evolves, by learning how other higher education institutions handle this pandemic. Facing global pandemic outbreak, what prevention planning modes for crisis management were taken by HEIs? Did they take the reactive and short-term emergency planning or a proactive planning mode? This study aims to systematically review the anti-COVID-19 plans of colleges and universities in Taiwan to identify a planning gap and provide a comprehensive campus anti-pandemic framework for future reference.

Design/methodology/approach

The documentary analysis was adopted to study the anti- COVID-19 plans of colleges and universities in Taiwan. The samples include 160 colleges and universities. Variety forms of documents were collected for systematic evaluation in this study, including institutional information on the COVID-19 websites (Chinese/ English), and their anti-COVID-19 plans.

Findings/results

(1)98% of the samples set up anti-COVID-19 websites for communicating with internal and external stakeholders. 34% of HEIs publicized their presidential letters, releasing peak time being in February and March, 2020. Only 25% of the samples issued their anti-COVID-19 meeting minutes, and only 17.5% of them issued both Chinese and English versions. The websites showed that internal and external communication decreased as the pandemic got eased.

(2)Regardless of their institutional characteristics and size, all the anti-COVID-19 plans followed the same roadmaps issued by the Central Epidemic Control Center (CECC) and by the Ministry of Education. The common version of planning mode, only 2 main categories and 5 types of planning, was identified. Despite of the differences in the length of the plans, not many differences existed among institutions.

(3)The anti-COVID-19 plans remained incomplete since they all had ‘emergency plan’ (EP) and most of them also had ‘academic continuity planning’ (ACP), but a planning gap showed up in ‘business continuity management’ (BCM).

(4)Insufficient data collection for the anti-COVID-19 plans constituted a problem. The risk assessment was made on school gathering, student societies, and admission affairs but not comprehensively on the core affairs at the institutional level, teaching, research, and services, and followed by planning institutional risk management for anti-COVID-19 plan.

Based on the findings, this study argues that anti-COVID-19 prevention planning mode tends to be reactive rather than proactive because the frequency of communication and discussion within institutions declined as COVID-19 eased, and regardless of institutional characteristics and size, the presence of the ‘common version’ of anti-COVID-19 plans and lack of risk assessment and crisis management planning remain unchanged, especially the lack in the sector of ‘business continuity management’ (BCM). When HEIs do not conduct risk assessment of the core activities (institutional, teaching and learning, research, and services) caused by the COVID-19, the planning mindset of the risk management taken by HEIs and its justification will be weakened.

Since this study collected the published information from institutional websites for documentary analysis, the findings must be limited by the extent of how HEIs revealed their anti-COVID-19 measures. It implies that the planning mode revealed in the anti- COVID-19 websites and plans might represent part of, instead of the whole, institutional responses. Therefore, the interpretation of the findings drawn from institutional open data should pay attention to data limitation and to avoid overgeneralization.

Originality/value

This is the first empirical study to systematically review the anti- COVID-19 plans of 160 colleges and universities in Taiwan. Based on the empirical data, the ‘common version’ of planning mode reveals a reactive rather than a proactive mode, to global pandemic outbreak. Thus, this study proposes a comprehensive campus anti-pandemic framework as reference for HEIs to go beyond the current emergency reactive model in order to better cope with the future.

Suggestions/implications

‘Never let a crisis go to waste’ said Sir Winston Churchill. For higher education institutions, planning for anti-COVID-19 pandemic not only requires a well-thought crisis management, but also using this knowledge to inform and prepare for the likely future pandemic. Pandemic outbreak offers HEIs an opportunity to assess institutional risk assessment and based on it to refine their crisis management. It can strengthen institutional proactive planning mindset to enhance their resilience and agility when dealing with other or similar crisis and unforeseen challenges in the future.