Here’s a stat I’d really like to see: how much time do professors spend in their offices?
There’s been an enormous shift in the way people work over the past thirty years. Digitization of documents and the availability of remote access computing, the growth of email, the explosion of doctoral students available to do the research grunt work, the decreasing importance of collaborating with local colleagues, and increasing importance of collaborating with people around the world – it’s all given professors a lot more flexibility in deciding where to undertake their work.
Now, this flexibility likely hasn’t had an equal effect across disciplines. In sciences – especially the wet ones – many professors have offices tied to their laboratories, and I don’t have the sense that they are spending any less time in their laboratories than they used to. In social sciences and law, on the other hand, where outside consulting work is more common, and the means of academic communication is more journal-based than monograph-based, there’s a lot less reason to be tied to your office.
Other factors are at work, of course. There are personal preferences. Some people like working at home, and take advantage of flexibility to do so; others prefer keeping their home and work spaces quite separate. Junior faculty probably have a greater interest in being seen at work than senior faculty. And of course – this being Canada, and academic life being subject to collective agreements to a degree pretty much unknown anywhere else – some collective agreements will stipulate minimum office hours.
All of this is to say that it’s difficult to make generalizations about use of office space/time. And I admit that I have no data on this at all, but I would guess that outside the sciences, there is a very significant portion of the faculty whose time in the office is fifteen hours per week or less. And this makes me wonder: to the extent that this is true, why the hell do universities spend so much on office space? If you think about a typical non-science faculty – Arts, Business, Education, etc. – and you divide up their total usable space (excluding things like washrooms, and hallways, and the like), offices probably take up about two-thirds of it. And while many profs make copious use of their offices, in many cases these offices get used less than half the time. Why?
It’s difficult to know what to do about this: taking away office space – even the little-unused type – would set off riots. But if I were designing a university from scratch, I think I’d do everything I could to minimize the use of dedicated offices. Provide as much shared office space as possible. Have dedicated shared spaces for meetings with students. Use modular walls to reconfigure spaces as necessary, and offer bonuses to those who use less space. Pretty much anything to reduce the use of space and the associated utilities costs that go with them.
Profs are becoming more mobile, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But the legacy costs of the days when most work was done in offices are quite significant. Finding a way to reduce them over time – sans riots, of course – is worth a try.
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One should take a look at the way space is organized in other large organizations. One of my children has good position in a bank and there is no office for her; even the VPs have to scramble for a meeting room. Things are slow to change in the North American university. The sad truth is that you still need designated space on a North American university campus or you do not exist. There is also the problem of how to manage your work, because there is still a lot of paper in our world — books, student work, reports, etc. In that we are like lawyers. We do need an office for storage, as a clearing house, for a place to meet students, and now and then to do certain kinds of work. But things are certainly changing. I work in an Arts and Social Science faculty and the offices are generally empty. A bit of the earlier era still survives — some people regularly use their offices for marking, reading, research, and might stay late into the night or through weekends hard at work, etc. Yet during the day I can work in coffee shops on campus, over in the library, meet in various buildings, etc. I could be anywhere. Your article raises an interesting issue: what is the best working-space arrangement for an engaged faculty member on a busy campus?
Professor Baker makes a great point. Where is the best place for an engaged faculty to work? I struggle with this every week.
Being in the office allows the graduate student and colleague drop in where ideas are batted around, minor problems solved and sometimes help provided. However, being in the office often means that you can’t do your quality work like grant or paper writing.
Being at home or the library removes you from your colleagues and graduate students, but typically allows one to get writing goals accomplished.
I read somewhere that office work should be for creativity and home work for productivity. So, I don’t need my office all the time.
However, if I didn’t have an office, I’m not sure if I’d have a University identity. I think sometimes we use our offices as placeholders and we see our colleagues offices as placeholders. For example, here is so and so’s office, they are still part of the department but are currently working at the Deans/Provosts/Research office. Once your office is gone… then you’re no longer paper, I think.
A tough question posed by Alex, to which I don’t think there is an answer. In the Sciences, our major space issues revolve around labs, not offices.
Two thoughts come to mind: 1) Agreed that use of space requires a serious rethink. My department is a ghost town. There may be bodies in some offices and we’d never know it. On the other hand, it’s not like there is any money to retrofit these spaces. Nor is there much incentive to change the status quo.
The other issue this raises for me is more interesting: What is the role of being physically together in the same space now that mobile work has — at least in this sector — taken over? Generally there are calls for greater collaboration and interdisciplinary work within the academy, but it seems there are fewer and fewer times and opportunities for the kinds of serendipitous conversations that spark creativity, and just generally make work more pleasant and rewarding. Further, when we are not in the same physical spaces, we are less and less pressed to work with people unlike ourselves with different ideas and perspectives: sort of promotes the antithesis of what unis are supposed to be about, IMHO.
But where would people put all their books? I do think offices (especially in non-science areas) are huge storehouses of books, files, etc. There should be a better answer to this.
I didn’t realize there were mandatory office occupancy rules at some Canadian universities. Could you name some of them? I’d be interested in seeing their contract language.
I ask because this would certainly be a way to insure that departments are more frequently populated by faculty, and in turn service work (and in particular, dealing with day-to-day emergencies) gets dealt with more quickly and spread out more evenly amongst the faculty complement. I find that in my department, it is the same handful of people who get stuck doing a lion’s share of the service work because they are physically around (and feel a sense of obligation to their peers), whereas it isn’t always clear that those who are away lots are actually doing much service work (whether this be factually true or not: one certainly doesn’t need to be in one’s office to blind review a manuscript or grant).
Returning to the importance of faculty offices. There has long been a debate in economic geography about the role of proximity as a transaction-cost minimizing solution for monitoring the labor market, competitors, suppliers and consumers. Having this information, in turn, is alleged to enable a more rapid response to complicated problems relevant to these co-located firms. This proximity also creates sufficient local demand to enable specialization (and hence higher efficiencies), leading to economies of scale and scope. For some things, spontaneous face-to-face contact enabled by co-location can’t be beat…at least until we have costless teleportation.
However, thanks to the improvement of distance-shrinking technologies (e.g., combinations of artifacts and practices such as reliable post, the phone, email, FTP, teleconferencing), I would _suspect_ that faculty offices are used less now than they have been in the past, though I have no actual evidence to support my supposition. Do you know if this this is empirically the case (i.e., is there systematically collected data that reveals this trend), and if so, is it a more general secular trend? Or has a stable share of the professoriate always spent little time in their office since, for instance, the late 1940s?
While many people speak of the death of distance, “being there” still matters for higher education, especially in departments where many of us (even tenured old codgers such as myself) have open office policies (i.e., on days we are just dealing with normal day-to-day functions, we keep the door open so students and colleagues can find us). For students, I think being in one’s office helps put a human face on our program. And frankly, explaining complicated concepts to students or research assistants who need help is much easier in person where you can just turn to the whiteboard or pull out a sheet of paper and draw a diagram, and then watch their facial expressions to see if they actually “get it.” With that said, over the last decade I feel like the number of students visiting me in my office has declined — and many of them don’t bother to use Course Web Forums or email much anymore, either, perhaps pointing to the use of social media sites enabling their own collaboration?
Furthermore, for those of us with young children, the workplace office is often the only place we can get anything done, as we can spread things out without worrying about them being marked up with crayons, “re-sorted” or unplugged (!) by a helpful youngster or being interrupted by a curious child.
Still, I know there have been times when my office has been empty for a month at a time while I am travelling in the summer. I suppose one solution would be to have shared offices for meeting with students, and also shared research offices, but then you have to deal with the threat of gabby colleagues in your research office.
Thanks for another interesting post. You’ve made me wonder to what degree my attachment to my office is just habituation, to what degree it is a necessary condition for doing my job well, and if there might be more efficient solutions than don’t reduce the benefits of co-location.
Hi Jeff. My understanding is Concordia has such rules. There may be others.
Hi Alex,
Thank you kindly.
“The explosion of doctoral students available to do the research grunt work.”
Wow. Not in my world.
This might be worth a blog post sometime, Alex — we know there has been an expansion of doctoral students, and they perform academic labor. What labor are they performing, for whom, and how does it relate to that of faculty members within and outside of laboratory-based disciplines?
Interesting question. I have no data on this of course, but there is as you point out a difference between how doctoral students are used in arts disciplines ad science one. In arts, they tend to get used as cheap instructional labour; in science their value as researcher assistants is high enough that using them as teaching assistants is often seen as a waste of money and talent.
I think that this is one of those areas where people in different disciplines (and different personalities, family situations, and financial situations) have such different needs that its hard to satisfy everyone. In my own field I have noticed faculty and graduate students with very different habits, and references on paper are still very important. I would be interested to see data on square feet devoted to faculty and graduate student offices vs. lecture halls, food courts, libraries, presidential suites, computer labs, etc.
One aspect which nobody seems to have brought up is the role of offices as guaranteeing that graduate students have some sort of half-adequate workspace. Many can’t afford to rent one within a short journey of the university, and while working from coffee shops or the library can be good for a break, having that as one’s only option has serious disadvantages (noise, lack of ability to leave things overnight or unattended, uncertainty of finding a spot, separation from colleagues). Some graduate students have a decent office at home, and some can pay for one out of their research budget, but not all do, and department libraries and reading rooms and other shared but private spaces are also under pressure.