Dr Laifa Hendarmin



Laifa Hendarmin

Impact of the Pandemic on Islamic Higher Education

Laifa is the Head of the Medical Research Unit (MRU) in the Faculty of Medicine, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) Jakarta, and a researcher at Center for the Study of Islam and Society (PPIM) UIN Jakarta since 2014. She is a dentist who graduated from University of Indonesia (2002) and obtained her doctoral degree from Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan (2008). Since the beginning of the pandemic, she has worked at UIN Jakarta’s Covid-19 testing laboratory. Laifa has also been working as an interdisciplinary scholar with a particular emphasis on the interactions of religious institutions and health issues.

Impact of the Pandemic on Islamic Higher Education

The Covid-19 global pandemic has led Indonesia’s Islamic higher education sector to move to remote learning in accordance with government rules and policies. Consequently, we undertook a survey of 980 academic staff, professional staff and students from three state Islamic universities (UIN Jakarta, UIN Jogjakarta, and UIN Bandung) to measure their knowledge, attitudes and behaviours regarding these rules. The findings indicated that Covid-19 preventive behaviours were most closely related to the religious attitudes and beliefs, and additionally, we found that institutional leadership played a key role in the resilience of their institutions during this pandemic.