The COVID-19 pandemic created a profound challenge for universities and colleges. In the USA, the response to the viral outbreak within institutions of higher education was largely driven by individual decision-makers, including professors, department chairs, and deans. As a professor of geography, the author undertook auto-ethnography as both process and product, a way to learn about his competencies and coping strategies, his social interactions and responses, and his engagements with social power relations from a particular positionality. As a scholar with longstanding interest in communication media, the author focused on a trajectory from the campus to the home office, from place-based scholarship to the online contexts of «distance learning», from in-place communications to dependence on digital technologies. The study reveals resilience and adaptation but also incompleteness and fragility.