Does the Faculty Office Have a Future?

You can picture the traditional faculty office easily enough: A wall of shelves cluttered with books, journals, and mementos. A filing cabinet or two. A desk in front of a tall window. Maybe a rug or an armchair brought from home.

But is the faculty member actually in the office you’re picturing? Increasingly, no. Perhaps she’s team-teaching several buildings away with a colleague from another discipline, or in a committee meeting on the downtown campus. Or she’s grading essays and answering student messages at home, or Skyping in the library with an overseas research collaborator, or reading a journal article on her iPad at a Starbucks near her 11-year-old’s soccer practice. In fact, she may not be back in her office till Tuesday at 2:30, for office hours.

On many campuses, offices of all kinds take up 25 to 35 percent of nonresidential space. Faculty offices are typically occupied less than those for administrators — often less than half of the workweek. They are expensive to build (think $350 per gross square foot, one architect says) and costly to maintain, heat, air-condition, and clean. But whether professors could manage without offices of their own is a question most college leaders avoid asking in public.

“A lot of institutions are struggling with this,” says Graham Wyatt, a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which does a lot of work in higher education. “There is clearly pressure to economize on facility costs and to make sure that institutions are getting highest value for the dollar. We hear repeatedly that in the private sector the private office is going away — shouldn’t we be doing that in academia?”

But college administrators “continue to think of it as the third rail,” he says. Indeed, they joke that faculty members care about only two things more than tenure: “One is a private parking space and the other is a private office.”

So far, comparatively few colleges have changed their approach to private faculty offices, other than to make new ones more compact. But a handful of institutions are experimenting with other options — open-plan workspaces with small conference and “focus” rooms nearby, for instance, or offices shared by two or more faculty members. It’s not clear whether the next generation of professors will need, want, or get offices like those of their predecessors.

“The traditional things that people cited as a reason to have private offices are evaporating,” says Gregory R. Mottola, a principal at the architecture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. “Mobile computing is a huge benefit — you can work anywhere.” And conference rooms can offer privacy for confidential conversations with students. “The other thing people would always say was, ‘I have to have all these journals and books.’ Now all this stuff is digital.” The remaining issues, he says, are status, recruiting, and retention. “You have a lot of faculty who really push back and say, I assess my value and worth to the university based on the size office I get, and on whether or not it’s got a good view.”

“It’s still a conversation,” he says.

In Baltimore, that conversation is playing out on North Avenue, where film-studies professors from the Johns Hopkins University share quarters with the Maryland Institute College of Art’s filmmaking faculty. Daniel Gilbert, MICA’s manager of space planning and renovation services, says that when the two institutions decided to renovate space in a former movie theater, their cultures collided.

“MICA has traditionally been very parsimonious with offices. A department chair usually gets a private office, but there are shared offices for full-time faculty members and adjuncts,” Gilbert says. Hopkins, meanwhile, gives every faculty member an office with a window. The solution was a hybrid design in which Hopkins professors got offices off a tight corridor, while MICA faculty members were given workstations in a bright, big room with sofas and an oversized video monitor at one end, where the space connects to a generous kitchen.

Gilbert says the design offered space for a dozen MICA professors, adjuncts, and others in an area that would have accommodated only four or five individual offices.

“The MICA side is the more utilized side,” says Nadia Hironaka, chair of MICA’s filmmaking department. Hopkins and MICA folks alike are “all hanging out in the coffee area or at the couches.” But that has made noise an issue, she says. Hironaka had a workstation in the communal space at first, but she found it too distracting, so she moved to a private office. Then another MICA person moved to an office, and another. Now all five of the full-time MICA faculty members are in private spaces, including extra Hopkins offices and a former equipment room, leaving the communal area to part-time instructors.

The University of California at San Francisco is in the midst of a similar conversation four years after opening a large new building, Mission Hall, for global-health and clinical-sciences programs. It initially featured open-plan workspaces along with plenty of “focus” and “huddle” rooms, 241 of which are now being converted to private offices. The renovation will provide about one office for every five workstations, with departments deciding themselves how the offices are allocated.

Cristina Morrison, change manager in the university’s facilities office, said at a recent town-hall meeting that the university’s goal was still to offer “a variety of flexible working spaces for occupants to use as their activities shift throughout the day.” But two buildings currently under construction for other departments will include some private offices from the get-go, she said. Other lessons learned in Mission Hall are also being incorporated into the new structures, among them that kitchens need to be isolated acoustically from spaces where people work.

UCSF’s activity-based approach is becoming more common, says Chris Lambert, who heads a team focused on workplace strategy at the architecture firm CannonDesign. “It suggests that I have the right kind of space to do the things that I need to do at the time that I need to do them,” he says.

It’s the approach CannonDesign took at the University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center, Lambert says, acknowledging that peoples’ work styles vary. Some people would be assigned to private offices, but others who move frequently among buildings, such as physicians going on their rounds, would be better served by mobile-work tools and spaces, he says. “You have very nice spaces, but they’re shared spaces — think of a really nice first-class lounge in a European airport.”

“There is a percentage of their population for whom that was really appealing,” he says. “The idea was, I already work in this way, and now you’re providing me with the ideal tools to do it effectively.”

Lambert says CannonDesign has also designed facilities for a two-year institution in the Midwest that saw open-plan workspaces as a lure for hiring part-time instructors rather than as a risk for retaining its full-time faculty members. “It was an equity move,” he says. “It was about saying, We’re all in this together. Full-time faculty are frankly very scarce at this institution. They thought it was important to make sure that adjunct faculty had the same kind of accommodations.”

The University of Michigan at Dearborn is among institutions taking a more cautious approach to the faculty-office question — chiefly by limiting office size, says Kathleen Pepin, director of facilities planning. Many older private offices, she says, were designed so that faculty members could have their personal research libraries on hand, and some offices were as large as 200 square feet. “We’ve got it down to a point where we can use approximately 110 to 118 square feet for an office that works very well,” she says. “In 200 square feet, you can fit five lecturers.” The university is also creating smaller spaces, such as pods or conference rooms, where faculty and students can interact, she says.

Carnegie Mellon University is opting for smaller offices in new computer-science facilities, as well as for offices shared by two faculty members, says Mottola, of Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. “Some of the people who are leading these schools are coming from the high-tech world,” he says. “Those who have spent time at technology companies are saying, Why do we need these giant private offices when it seems to be more about status and recruitment than it is about actual space need?” He says his firm is proposing 135-square-foot offices for CMU. “We’re trying to squeeze them to make sure we have space for other things they say they really want, like student collaboration space and other kinds of amenities.”

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At Wake Forest University, a recent business-school building offers faculty members a choice, says Wyatt, of Robert A.M. Stern Architects. The building, Farrell Hall, has both traditional 120-square-foot offices lined up along hallways and glass-fronted, 90-square-foot offices clustered around communal spaces with tables and video screens for collaboration. The latter have been popular, he says, although the communal tables are getting somewhat less use than anticipated.

Meanwhile, his firm recently completed a Philadelphia building designed as the North American headquarters of GlaxoSmithKline, the pharmaceutical company. No one there, not even the North American CEO, has a private office, he says. He also mentions Michael Bloomberg, the financial-media titan and former New York City mayor, well known for working in “bullpen” open-plan offices. And Wyatt’s own boss, Robert A.M. Stern, runs a 250-person architecture practice without an enclosed office, Wyatt says.

Given those examples, Wyatt says arguments that academics need private offices may be “intellectually suspect.” But such offices may not disappear soon, he says. “Younger faculty members who are looking to build their careers, even though their generation might be the open-office generation, are going to be loath to accept an open office when they see the senior faculty members not accepting that same standard.”

The counterargument is, in the end, economic. “Building is expensive, institutions have pretty tight budgets, and they have all these goals for high-performing buildings, for improved classrooms, for maker spaces,” Mottola says. “When you add all that up, something’s got to give. We’ve done plans where we say, Here’s what you’ve asked for with giant private offices, here’s a version where they’re smaller, and here’s a version with some zones of open office areas.

“I think it’s something that will play out over the next generation or so. There’s just so much pressure to squeeze more value out of new projects.”

Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.