Purpose: This study was designed to address the problem of how higher education institutions, as organizations designed to promote learning, responded to the COVID pandemic and the suspension of in-person instruction. The purpose of this paper was specifically to explore how institutions go about learning from the pandemic to better prepare themselves for the future that they will face. Design/methodology/approach: A researcher-developed survey instrument was distributed electronically to 300 faculty leaders at randomly selected universities in the USA. With three follow-up e-mail requests, the survey had a 31% usable response rate. Findings: Survey results indicated that institutional leadership did not make strong use of shared governance in responding to the COVID pandemic in creating operational response strategies. Further, institutions did not alter their policies or make structural changes to be more adept in facing the challenges of a global pandemic and its impact on the financial well-being of the institutions. Although institutions did make changes to their attitudes about students, these were not developmental changes but rather behavioral modification expectations. Originality/value: This study drew upon data collected after the first three months of the global COVID pandemic, providing an important first-look at organizational behavior in response to a largely unplanned global event.