The rapid expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic throughout the world including in Israel had unprecedented consequences for all life domains, including the higher education system. The crisis triggered by this pandemic challenged academic institutions, because within a few days they were forced to continue to operate during a physical lockdown of their campuses and transit to digital learning, with all the implications involved. (Donitsa-Schmidt & Ramot, 2021; Draxler-Weber, Packmohr & Brink,2022).

Program and department heads (PDHs), the academic leaders of these institutions, coped with the crisis trying to conduct regular activity as well as possible. Their work environment changed, and they had to deal with their own personal hardships and the students' difficulties and cope with the teaching staff's needs in the programs they managed. This confrontation exposed them to complexities they had not encountered previously.

PDHs perform one of the most essential and challenging posts in the higher education system (Tietjen-Smith, Hersman & Block, 2020). They develop social networks and manage relationships and resources connected to the program/department under their management. In this way they enable their subordinates to function in a competitive arena of academic institutions under conditions that have been described as quasi-market, to attract students and obtain research budgets (Bobe & Kober, 2015; Deem, 1998)

Heavy workloads impair the necessary match between the individual's characteristics and workplace demands and negatively affects the employee's satisfaction and effectiveness (Kirmeyer & Dougherty, 1988). A study examining how academic leaders coped with work in European universities found that faculty members and holders of senior academic positions have an administrative burden stemming from tasks unrelated to teaching or research. This engenders feelings of harm to the academic leaders' family and social life (Pace et al, 2021). However, overload of academic work also causes stress and decreases academic productivity (Janib et al, 2021).

The research questions examined how PDHs viewed various aspects of the influence of the pandemic on: distance learning, internal organizational processes, and departmental interactions with their environment, how their research was affected, and the characteristics of their planning processes during this period. The main question was: How did the PDHs of higher education institutions in Israel perceive the challenges facing them as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic?

The research used mixed methods. A qualitative-interpretive study was followed by a quantitative survey and finally another qualitative part to hone the themes that arose from the findings. The qualitative part utilized semi-structured interviews, on the Zoom platform: performed with 27 interviewees – PDHs in higher education institutions in Israel (from 22 different colleges and universities). 59.2% of the PDHs were from the social sciences, 14.8% from the humanities, 14.8% from the natural sciences and medicine, and 11.1% from the exact sciences and engineering. The interview protocol included more than 25questions about components of their role, implications during the Covid-19 period and how it differed from the pre-crisis period; how the department was managed during the pandemic period; characteristics of the transition to distance learning in their academic institution during Covid-19, including challenges and difficulties; how the interviewee perceived the institution's preparedness for the crisis, the processes and steps that helped to cope with the crisis; the organizational processes and administrative tasks that made coping more difficult then; characteristics of PDH ties with their subordinate lecturers/students before and during the crisis. The quantitative part comprised a survey constructed and validated after the interviews, based on aspects that emerged in those interviews. The sample included 113 program and department heads from academic institutions in Israel, 46% women and 54% men, ages 30-80. In terms of their rank, 5.3% were lecturers, 45.1% were senior lecturers, 23.9% associate professors, 25.7% full professors. Each PDH was responsible, academically, for three to 200 faculty members. Most of the PDHs (51.3%) worked in the social sciences 14.2% in exact sciences and engineering, 12.4% in humanities, 8.8% in life sciences and medicine and 13.3% in other disciplines (not including law). The survey included 37 questions that examined how in their opinions, the PDHs had coped with the crisis, focusing on frequencies of activities, the connection of demographic variables, characteristics of the disciplinary departments, the type of response given by the department and the effectiveness of the response. The survey data were analyzed statistically in a prolonged process including sharpening aspects that arose from the initial qualitative analysis and issues that required further depth from among the emergent themes.

The lecturers found it difficult to perform optimal transition to distance learning and the PDHs who were partly familiar with the concept of distance learning were forced to try to find personal and systemic solutions for difficulties that arose. Students experienced many difficulties due to the need to adapt to the intensiveness of distance learning, and find access to the infrastructure and digital equipment, experiencing financial and mental hardship and also distress which they communicated to the PDHs. In the uncertain economic situation prevailing in the country, the PDHs felt they had to support the students. PDHs with the rank of senior lecturer invested more time and effort in this aspect than their colleagues with the rank of full professor. A few more aspects of the PDHs workload increased: dealing with lecturers' hardships, increased administrative tasks, and family or personal problems. PDHs were obliged to cope with pedagogic issues involved in the transition to distance teaching, Zoom fatigue that the students underwent sometimes leading to students' closing the camera, that greatly frustrated the lecturers. The PDHs feared that "conventional academic norms were disintegrating", they worried about overt and covert dropout. Therefore, they invested time in the students and lecturers. The crisis period experience challenged and was often stressful for the PHDs, when the boundary between work and their private and personal space at home was violated. Dealing with the Covid-19 crisis and especially with many aspects of the transition to distance teaching, entailed dealings with students, lecturers, and exhausting administration. Despite the PDHs` efforts, most lacked the training to deal with these administrative situations, especially in crisis situations. The academic system did not prepare them with an organized plan to deal with a crisis such as the Covid-19 epidemic.

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