Rethinking the traditional academic office

During my time as a professor, I've had a series of offices with a series of big, solid, 1970s oak desks.

I have never worked at these desks. They're useless for computing, as they're the wrong height. They're useless for explaining things to students, because they aren't designed for two or more people to sit side-by-side. All they're useful for is looking imposing, serving as a place to dump stuff, and creating a barrier between myself and any visitors to the office.

So this summer I decided to replace my wooden desk with a meeting table. (I bought the table a few years ago, back when I had a really large office; the chairs are rejects from the economics department's computing lab). To make room for the table, I'm using a minimalist computer desk. 

I love my table.  It's a friendly but professional place to meet with colleagues and students. There is enough room for students to get out their papers and laptops. I can sit beside a student and explain a diagram, or a group of students can sit down and have a mini-seminar. And I've got a big, clear space for writing, working on my laptop.

Now that I've got this new office arrangement, I've been thinking, "Why doesn't everyone do this?"

One reason might be that some professors wouldn't have enough room in their offices for a meeting table, even if they get rid of almost all the other furniture. I'm in a 1970s building, so our offices are larger than is allowed under current Ontario guidelines.

Or perhaps some professors have offices fitted out with new large L-shaped workstations. They may not have as much latitude to change up their furnishings as do those of us who inhabit the anarchic world of the un-refurbished university building. 

Another possibility is that professors see their offices as research spaces, not as places to meet students. They need places to write, not meeting tables. They want office furnishings that reflect their research focus. The desire for research-oriented office space is heightened by a yearning for status. In academia, as has been discussed on this blog before, research confers status; teaching does not. 

However if an academic is engaged in individual research, why does he or she need a large office, or even an office at all? Journalists, policy analysts, programmers and people in all sorts of other thinking jobs have desks in shared work spaces. Individual-thinking-writing doesn't require privacy; it can as easily be done in a library. We have offices to meet with students; surely it makes sense to make the offices as welcoming as possible.

Yet there is a danger in turning offices into student-friendly meeting spaces. Some administrator could look at my office and say, "That's a great space. But it's hardly used, because Professor Woolley works at home half the time. Why not convert it into a bookable meeting room, so students and professors can use it all day every day?"

Unfortunately that's a question I don't have a good answer for.

 

Comments

[AlexUsherHESA]

In Australia, several universities have done exactly this - replace offices shared workspaces plus bookable meeting rooms - to no obvious ill-effect.

[Frances Woolley]

Alex - interesting. Do you know which ones?

Most academics, (myself included) feel like we get more work done in a totally private office. But at the same time, I know that I'd spend way less time checking facebook/twitter/the stock market/making personal phone calls during work hours if I was in a shared space.

Given that the overwhelming majority of for-profit enterprises have shared workspaces, I'm thinking "either for-profit enterprises are really dumb, and are doing something that systematically lowers the productivity of their employees, or there are serious advantages in terms of cost savings/increased productivity/other benefits to having shared work spaces."

[Kelly Foley]

This layout would also work well when groups of students come for consultation. My office hours almost always spill over into our seminar room. But I need absolute silence to work or read, so without a private office I would stay home. We have a real 'come to work' culture at Usask, which probably worth the space. Of course, we are also just 12 people.

[Jim Sentance]

The main issue for me with moving to shared space would be what to do with books, etc. One person I know in Australia is being moved to the new model Alex mentioned and they've essentially been told to keep their books at home and just bring what they need for the day. I know if I tried I could throw out half of what I have in my office but that's still way too much to take home and store there.

[Frances Woolley]

Jim: "The main issue for me with moving to shared space would be what to do with books, etc"

I hear you - book storage is a big issue in my life, too. This is a generational thing, however - the bookshelves in most of my junior colleagues' offices are empty. And if you were trying to explain to someone why you needed an office to yourself when students were desperately short of study and meeting space, would "I need someplace to put my books" pass the Globe and Mail test (i.e., how would you feel about that appearing on the front page of the Globe and Mail)?

[Frances Woolley]

Kelly: "But I need absolute silence to work or read"

So do I. So perhaps we could share an office?

[Lord]

A drop leaf table anyone?

Doesn't anyone sleep in theirs?

[Frances Woolley]

Lord - "Doesn't anyone sleep in theirs?"

I do have one colleague who has a couch in his office, and I do wonder if he sleeps in his office - it's certainly tempting to do so if you have a super-sized office and live out of town, as some faculty members do. But if you're asking me to check my privilege - that's fair. I hesitated before publishing this, but figured that, on balance, faculty offices are a subject worth talking about - whether, like Kelly, you figure they're essential for research, or whether you take Alex's view that they could be replaced with shared offices and the world would not end.

[Jim Sentance]

I think in some disciplines and some fields even today a personal library of books is not an unreasonable thing to need, like research labs in some of the sciences. Not everything is available online or in digital format. I wouldn't be worried about explaining to the Globe why I need them.

[Frances Woolley]

Jim - sure, I've got some old government documents in my office that would be really hard to find anywhere else. Plus a good-sized library of books that I regularly lend out to students. But how much space, and what kind of space, do your books need?

[Nathan W]

They're good for talking. You could use a small whiteboard. Or maybe there's a better way ...

[Frances Woolley]

Nathan - I've got a chalk board - you can't see it, it's to the left of the camera. Another indispensable piece of furniture scrounged from someone else's office!

[Jim Sentance]

I could maybe get by with a solid wall of books, and a couple of filing cabinets. I have that and more now, so as I said I could pitch a fair bit. Areas I teach in regularly like Thought and Economic History tend to lend themselves to books, and I like to have a variety of texts around in other areas I teach, and I teach a lot of different courses (maybe 20 in the past decade). I've also found that most of the areas I've been working up for research lately, even now have a fair bit of the relevant literature in books or reports. So books are definitely something central to what I do.
I can't keep them all at home - aside from the inconvenience that would involve I don't currently and have never had enough space for that - maybe at some mythical point in the future when not only all my kids and grandkids and all their stuff is gone. Housing them in shared space at work would to me mean unacceptable security conditions. I worked in shared space as a grad student and I'm still pissed off at some of the things that got stolen.
My objections would go beyond concerns about books though.

[Jason McLaren]

Speaking as a programmer, shared workspaces are terrible for individual productivity, especially if you need to think. However they do save money on office space. Programmer productivity is notoriously hard to measure, and rent is easy to measure, so guess what usually gets optimized. A detailed discussion of this trade-off can be found in Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister.

Lately I've heard people make the argument that shared workspaces increase collaboration and thus improve team productivity, which is more important than individual productivity. It's not clear whether this is works out to be a net benefit, but it is certainly an argument worth considering.

Open floor plans have recently become more popular (among employers, at least). However, the software industry has a tradition of forgetting or ignoring, and then painfully rediscovering, what older generations learned, so I would be careful about viewing current practice as necessarily being best practice.

[Frances Woolley]

Jason: "Programmer productivity is notoriously hard to measure, and rent is easy to measure" Nice point! Though wouldn't you think profit maximization/competition would lead to lower productivity firms falling off in the long run, at least?

Jim: As an aside - the econ department at Carleton is in the process of getting rid of all of the old books that were in the reading room, including older editions of, I think, Wicksell, Mill, Robinson, etc - books that look like they once belonged to West or Rymes. So if you'll be in Ottawa at any point in the next little while and are interested in history of thought stuff, left me know. I'm giving some shelter in a bookshelf in my office. I can't accommodate them all, however - yet it pains me to see beautiful old books going into the recycling bin.

[Jim Sentance]

Might be up some time this fall, but could be flying. I have a pretty good collection, so the more obscure people are more likely ones I'm missing. Secondary but classic books are also good. Anything by Irving Fisher is really hard to get.

[Majromax]

@Jason McLaren:
> Lately I've heard people make the argument that shared workspaces increase collaboration and thus improve team productivity, which is more important than individual productivity. It's not clear whether this is works out to be a net benefit, but it is certainly an argument worth considering.

That would require that teams sit together. Any benefits on team productivity won't be realized for an individual programmer/researcher or one who's team is in another shared space somewhere else.