Chapter 1: Invisible on the Front Lines: A Post-Intentional Phenomenological Investigation of COVID-19 Trauma in College Student Affairs Professionals

Trauma may be defined as “any disturbing experience that results in significant fear, helplessness, dissociation, confusion, or other disruptive feelings intense enough to have a long-lasting negative effect on a person’s attitudes, behavior, and other aspects of functioning” (American Psychological Association, 2020, para. 1). As the COVID-19 pandemic upended the operations of college student affairs divisions across the United States, many practitioners found themselves navigating both direct and indirect experiences of trauma and stress. This study sought to better understand how student affairs practitioners described their experiences of trauma and stress during the pandemic, as well as how they made meaning of these experiences. Using a post-intentional phenomenological approach, 36 student affairs practitioners served as co-researchers, and each completed a one-hour virtual interview. Phenomenological reduction and imaginative variation analytical techniques were used to create a composite narrative of practitioner experiences, revealing four key themes, including: (1) Chronic stress, anger, and fear related to opaque and callous leadership, (2) Reconceptualizations of self and community care, and (3) Insidious neoliberal logics driving environmental stressors in student affairs, and (4) Social identity and positionality as drivers of stress and trauma. Implications for policy, practice, and future scholarship are discussed.

College student affairs professionals (SAPs) are helping professionals who are on the front lines of college and university student support services (Reynolds, 2010). The importance of their roles was heightened as a result of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, when the lives of college students across the United States were upended as institutions rapidly shifted to remote curricular and co-curricular learning and engagement (Burke, 2020b). The mental health challenges faced by students in the months that followed skyrocketed (Copeland et al., 2021), and were further exacerbated for many minoritized students by continued incidences of anti-Black and anti-Asian racial violence (Choo & Diaz, 2021; Philimon, 2020). Meanwhile, the professionals supporting these students faced growing uncertainty regarding their own job security, safety, and well-being (Douglas-Gabriel & Flowers, 2020; Smith, 2020). Over time, this uncertainty, coupled with the emotional weight of supporting others, can manifest itself as trauma (Knight, 2013; Silver, 2020). To date, much of the research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on college student affairs professionals has centered on issues of burnout (Chessman, 2021; Connor, 2021; Kunk-Czaplicki, 2023; Vega & Coon, 2022). While this is a useful and appropriate lens through which to view SAP experiences, it does not provide a holistic view of the experiences of these professionals, the potential long-term impacts of surviving such trauma, and may lead senior student affairs leaders to treating the wrong symptoms. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the experiences of trauma as described by college student affairs professionals during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, our research questions asked: (1) how do college student affairs professionals describe the trauma and stress they experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic? (2) how did college student affairs professionals come to their experiences of trauma and stress during the COVID-19 pandemic?, and (3) How did the co-researchers’ social and environmental context shape their experiences of trauma and stress?