Faculty Culture Is Fractured

Juan Uriagereka spent most of spring break hunched over a table in his living room here, working with one of his closest collaborators, a linguist from Japan’s Yokohama National University.

The two scholars have been publishing together for a decade but hadn’t met in person in a year. Their weeklong meeting at the University of Maryland here, where Mr. Uriagereka is a linguistics professor and an associate provost, was a rare occasion to work face to face on their forthcoming book about using probability models to analyze sentence structure.

Like many professors, Mr. Uriagereka is more likely to collaborate with researchers in his scholarly specialty from universities across the world than with people down the hall. Much of modern-day scholarly conversation takes place via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype, shifting the center of faculty culture away from campuses and toward electronic congregations of professors. The trend has been prompted not only by technology but also by budget cuts that have led many universities to merge or eliminate academic departments and hire more contingent faculty, weakening a sense of shared identity and common mission among professors on the same campus. Ramped-up standards for achieving tenure, as well as a rise in two-career couples, have also cut into the time professors spend socializing and informally exploring intellectual ideas with their campus colleagues.

“People are so busy, laboring after money constantly,” says Pamela Lanford, coordinator of a federal grant program at Maryland that supports women in science. “They don’t have time and energy to bring themselves together.”

The shift has weakened the fabric of faculty life on research-university campuses. Serendipitous connections over a beer or coffee at the faculty club are a thing of the past for many. It’s hard to know exactly what is lost when such connections are missing. But some university administrators are concerned that the climate of impersonality is leading to a less vibrant campus culture, and to a sense of isolation that makes it harder to hold on to professors, many of whom feel no deep ties or loyalty to a particular place.

In response to such changes on his campus, Mr. Uriagereka has drawn up elaborate plans to revive Maryland’s faculty club, which closed a decade ago. It would be an informal place, where professors could catch a quick beer and a bite to eat with colleagues, listen to a talk, or bring an out-of-town visitor. The proposal is one of many that Maryland is considering to try to create a more cohesive faculty atmosphere on this suburban campus outside Washington.

“We need a big university ‘living room’ for people to come to if we want to attract and retain the highest caliber of faculty and staff,” says Robert M. Specter, who was hired as vice president for administrative affairs at Maryland and just became an internal consultant to the university president. He was hired two years ago to help make the sprawling campus feel more like home to its close to 3,400 full-time faculty members. “We want to create opportunities for community across the campus,” he says.

The decline of clubs at universities like Maryland illustrates how faculty life has frayed over the past few decades. The Association of College and University Clubs has 87 members worldwide, down from a high of about 140 in the late 1990s. Most of the 64 member clubs in the United States are at large research universities. Professors over age 50 remember a time when clubs were the center of faculty social life on campuses, places where experienced scholars held court over lunch and young hires came to pick up gossip, talk politics, and learn the ways of departmental and academic life.

Clubs still thrive on some campuses. The ones at Harvard and the Johns Hopkins Universities are popular, but even on those campuses, junior professors can be scarce. “You don’t see a lot of young people hanging out there,” says Cathy A. Trower, research director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. “People would rather go to Starbucks.”

At faculty clubs that remain vital, professors are a shrinking constituency. Many of the clubs are now open to alumni, parents, staff members, and in some cases, even undergraduates.

Richard E. Friedman began working at the University of Cincinnati in 1972 as a philosophy professor and later became dean of arts and sciences. He is now an adjunct professor there and president of the faculty club. In decades past, he recalls seeing the “curmudgeons” table at lunch crowded with 20 people, including professors from fields as diverse as sociology, business, and nursing. Sometimes the university’s president would walk over and have a seat. “In days gone by, the club had a full bar, and people would stop on the way home,” he says. “There were bridge committees, book clubs, people stopping for dinner before going to musicals.”

Besides providing a social life, the club gave faculty members a sense of connection, says Mr. Friedman, and opened up communication lines to the administration. That came in handy for accomplishing departmental business, laying the groundwork for cross-disciplinary alliances, and easing the way for universitywide projects that required administrators and faculty members to work together.

“After lunch, when you were walking back to your office, people used to say, ‘I accomplished more there than I did in that committee meeting that lasted three hours last week,’” says Mr. Friedman. “There might be someone at the next table over who you’d been trying to get ahold of for a week, and you’d just slip over and before you knew it, you had decided something in three minutes.”

A few years ago, the faculty club at Cincinnati moved from its home in a historic building in the middle of campus to the top two floors of a new athletics center. The club’s membership has plummeted to 370 from 800 when Mr. Friedman arrived.

“New professors are in their offices now, facing their computer screens and communicating over their electronics during lunch,” he says. Many people work alone in their offices or labs until well into the evening.

Indeed, assistant professors these days must be more productive than ever, required by universities to churn out more books and articles to get tenure than did their predecessors just 20 years ago. That has created a kind of single-mindedness, which often means young scholars don’t feel they have time for the frills of faculty life.

Slide Show

Concept sketches for the proposed Pintxos Lounge

A committee of faculty and staff members at the University of Maryland at College Park has proposed reviving a modern version of the faculty club after a traditional club was closed a decade ago. The committee’s plans include drawings of how the club could be used, with detailed suggestions for activities and even a proposed menu. It is still unclear whether the university will approve the plan.

A committee of faculty and staff members at the University of Maryland at College Park has proposed reviving a modern version of the faculty club after a traditional club was closed a decade ago. The committee’s plans include drawings of how the club could be used, with detailed suggestions for activities and even a proposed menu. It is still unclear whether the university will approve the plan.

Many faculty members also have complicated personal schedules. They rush out at 5 o’clock to pick up kids from school or day care, spend the early evening with their children over dinner and homework, and then go back to work late at night from home, connecting online with students and colleagues. Professors also must frequently consider a spouse’s job when deciding where to live. As a result, many have long commutes and spend little time on campus after class.

Years ago, when most professors were men with stay-at-home wives, many more lived with their families in neighborhoods just a few blocks from campus and socialized with other academic families. William Rakowski, a professor of behavioral and social sciences who has been at Brown University for 25 years and serves as president of the faculty club, says three-quarters of the faculty once lived within walking distance, in Providence’s East Side neighborhood. Only about a quarter do now, he says.

“I’ve been told that years ago there were academic departments that kept alcoholic beverages in their own locker space at the faculty club, so they could just walk over and convene there whenever it was convenient,” says Mr. Rakowski. “The club doesn’t have that kind of social group-bonding purpose anymore.”

Instead, it is a place where professors can stop in for a quick lunch with a student advisee, and where you’re more likely than in years past to see parents, alumni, and staff members.

Across higher education, the influx of adjunct professors—who might stop in to teach a class twice a week and then leave—has also led to less cohesion.

“In a lot of places with lots of contingent faculty, the default position on the part of tenured faculty is, ‘I don’t know you,’” says William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich., who regularly writes about the professoriate, including for The Chronicle. “Why say, ‘Hello, who are you?’ Because you may not be here next semester.”

Many colleges also have fewer formal occasions when professors might run into one another. The University of Southern California eliminated all academic departments within the Rossier School of Education about 10 years ago, wiping out many faculty meetings that served as touch points among colleagues, says Adrianna Kezar, a professor of higher education there. “It used to be you could map out the course of the year, with welcome-back meetings, meetings that marked the end of the semester, or year-end events,” she says. “These are all going by the wayside. There isn’t that same collective rhythm.”

Networks and institutes around which professors with certain interests congregate have filled part of the gap in social and collegial interaction among campus colleagues, says Ms. Kezar, who studies higher-education reform. One of the networks she cites is Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning, which connects thousands of American professors interested in overhauling how the sciences, mathematics, and engineering are taught in college. The network holds meetings where professors come together face to face. Later, back on their own campuses, they continue to work remotely.

“This is giving them a sense of community they’ve never had in their careers,” says Ms. Kezar.

Frank J. Donoghue didn’t have to go looking for friends and colleagues when he started at Ohio State University in 1989 as an assistant professor of English. He was one of three young English professors hired that year, and the small group frequently ate dinner and watched movies at one another’s homes. They played pick-up basketball on campus twice a week.

Ohio State’s English department typically hires just one new assistant professor a year now, he says, leaving young scholars without a natural cohort of incoming colleagues. The departmental basketball games are history, he adds, as hiring has slowed and the average age of English professors has crept up to around 50. “I can’t jump over a piece of paper anymore,” says Mr. Donoghue, who can go months without seeing some colleagues in his department who teach on days when he doesn’t. “There’s no real glue anymore.”

Mr. Donoghue figures he’s been to the faculty club at Ohio State just eight times over the past decade. When he first arrived at the university, he says, the department’s more-established professors ate lunch every day at a table presided over by a much-admired former chairman, John Gabel, who died last year. “There were rumors that you couldn’t get tenure if you didn’t go to the Gabel table,” recalls Mr. Donoghue.

The faculty club at Ohio State has been around since 1923, but it is rebranding itself now to de-emphasize faculty and increase its appeal to parents and alumni, who have been its most faithful customers lately. On its Web site, it calls itself simply the Club at the Ohio State University. Two decades ago, its membership numbered about 2,100 and was almost exclusively faculty members. Now membership has dipped to just 1,614, only 335 of whom are professors.

Young professors are not interested in long lunches where they order from a menu, says Jeffrey White, the club’s executive director. But that doesn’t mean they don’t like to socialize. They just don’t want to do it in the same ways their older colleagues did.

When Mr. White invited a group of young professors to come to the club and talk about their interests, he says, he learned they still yearn for the same deep connections that faculty clubs once fostered. But they told him they’d rather gather spontaneously at a coffee shop or for happy hour. To draw them in, Mr. White created a new dining area, where they can grab something from a buffet line and be out the door in 20 minutes.

Roman Holowinsky is a mathematician at Ohio State who just earned tenure. He didn’t know anyone when he joined the university, three years ago, so he joined a new online “meetup” group called Columbus Junior Faculty. The group, which started in 2011, now has 110 members and arranges happy hours, Saturday-morning runs, wine tastings, and occasional lunches at the Ohio State club.

“It’s like you’re going from place to place during your graduate school and postdoc years, in three- to five-year intervals, and finally you’re trying to settle down and call someplace home. And you want to establish roots, meet some people,” he says. “That’s how all of this happened.”

The meetup group has also helped start something more intellectual: the “Steam” Factory, which was started in January to showcase faculty research to the public and promote interdisciplinary collaboration among Ohio State professors in the sciences, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. Two of its 30 members just received a grant for a joint experiment linking economics and hydrology.

Through the meetup group, Mr. Holowinsky, who studies analytic number theory, has made several friends, including his girlfriend, a music professor.

But for him, it is not an either-or situation. While he has developed strong connections to his campus colleagues, he also continues to collaborate with some of the best researchers in his field worldwide. Among his most frequent collaborators are a scholar from India and two from France, one of whom just came for a visit this spring.

“You are in a specialized field, and there are 100 people you see all the time at conferences,” he says. “You end up working with them, mostly over Skype.”

Jennifer Jacquet, a clinical assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University, does much of her scholarly work with people she either rarely sees or has never met. She has published 17 papers with 38 co-authors and has never met a third of them. Of those she has met, she published with about 70 percent of them first before meeting them in person later. While it would be impossible for Ms. Jacquet to do the work she does without electronic communication, that doesn’t mean she is satisfied.

Skyping with someone on a computer screen up close in your living room, for example, can seem too intimate, she says. “I would hate for anyone to have the impression that real life is still not the most glamorous aspect of collaboration,” she says. “The best part of collaborating is getting to spend time thinking with people whose thinking you really admire. It’s just not the same online.”

Mr. Uriagereka, the associate provost at Maryland, feels strongly that a lot is lost when scholars communicate with one another almost entirely online. “There is this mentality that we don’t live anymore in a community of face to face,” he says. “But just because we can communicate at the speed of light doesn’t mean when we sit down in a restaurant with good friends you don’t appreciate it.”

Since the faculty club closed at Maryland, there’s no real place to do that on campus or nearby with colleagues and visitors, says Mr. Uriagereka, who grew up in Spain, where almost every day before lunch he and his friends would gather to talk over a glass of wine.

The pizza and sandwich joints just off the campus here in College Park attract primarily undergraduates. When Mr. Uriagereka meets with colleagues, they either bring lunch to a conference room, an option he considers “stiff, cold, and impersonal,” or cram into his office in the main administration building. The only social lubricants there are tiny blue cups of espresso from a machine he has on hand.

Mr. Uriagereka has drawn up elaborate plans for a new faculty club, complete with a proposed menu of small, toothpick-skewered Spanish snacks called pintxos. The plan includes space for professors not only to socialize at happy hour but also to listen to music, debate, deliver talks, and meet with job candidates and students. A committee of professors and staff members issued a report a year ago endorsing the concept, and Mr. Uriagereka has been walking the campus identifying possible locations.

There is the patio garden off the Rossborough Inn, which he would like to enclose in glass and turn into a faculty club. The inn, which sits near the entrance to campus and is the university’s oldest building, was home to the faculty club until it closed, in 2003. The admissions office moved in.

There is also a subterranean garden off Hornbake Library, which could be covered to create a club. And there is the grand Tawes Theater, which has been closed since 2007. “I wanted to put a kitchen on the stage,” says Mr. Uriagereka. “People thought this was a little too extreme.”

Like the campuses of many large research universities, Maryland’s is a miniature city, with 270 buildings on about 1,000 acres. Many professors are attracted to work here by the university’s proximity to Washington, both for research connections and for the social life and other activities the city provides. Instead of living, working, and socializing near the campus, professors tend to blend into the crowd of nearly six million in the metropolitan area around the nation’s capital. Only 4 percent of the university’s 8,631 full-time employees live in College Park, says Mr. Specter, the internal consultant.

Mr. Specter isn’t sure that a faculty club is the only answer to bringing professors together. First, he says, the university is trying to spur the development of more high-end restaurants that faculty could frequent along Route 1, the major thoroughfare that borders the campus. If that works, he says, the campus may not need a club.

Maryland is also working with a private developer that is opening a complex of 256 apartments on the edge of campus, aimed at faculty and staff members. The university also sold land to a construction company that is developing a neighborhood of 20 single-family houses near College Park Academy, a new charter school that the university and the City of College Park are opening for middle- and high-school students this fall.

“We want to have people live, work, and play around the university, so we have to provide the kinds of things that attract them,” says Mr. Specter. “We’d rather have our faculty enjoying their lives and being productive during the time they’d otherwise spend sitting out on the Beltway trapped in traffic.”

But the logistics of life for young professors are often so complicated, and the research demands so high, that the prospect of a rich social and professional life on campus with colleagues is slim. “Sometimes I feel a little isolated,” says Lisa A. Taneyhill, an assistant professor of animal and avian sciences who lives about a half-hour drive away, where she says the public schools are better and where her husband is also about a half-hour from his job. The couple have two young children, so to find time for herself, Ms. Taneyhill is up each day by 4 a.m. She recently received a university grant, designed to link female science professors, which has put her in contact with a Maryland physicist. So far their work together hasn’t yielded a research project with a grant of its own.

While a faculty club, or even a nice restaurant on Route 1, theoretically sounds good, Ms. Taneyhill isn’t sure she could ever find the time to go.

She usually just eats lunch at her desk.

The Club’s Sample Menu

Cold Pintxos $1 each

Espárragos y queso envueltos en masa de hojaldre — fresh asparagus spear and cheese, wrapped in pastry

Banderilla — pickled onions, cucumbers, and peppers

Carne, queso, y aceitunas — selections of meats, cheeses, and marinated olives

Ensalada palmito — hearts-of-palm salad

Nueces de árbol con sabor — pecans, pine nuts, pepitas and pistachios toasted with chipotle powder and sea salt

Hot Pintxos $2 each

Tosta de queso de cabra — goat cheese, fresh thyme, and wildflower honey on rustic bread

Bacon-wrapped dates — medjool dates stuffed with goat cheese and wrapped in bacon

Mint shrimp skewer — grilled shrimp with a citrus, mint, and honey reduction

Chorizo and pesto — chorizo atop a toasted baguette and garnished with pesto

Tosta de queso, salmón ahumado y rúcula — salmon, cheese, and arugula atop rustic bread

Albóndigas con salsa de tomate — beef-and-pork meatballs in a spicy tomato-and-piquillo sauce

Sweet Pintxos $2 each

Flão — cream-cheese-and- mint tart

Flan de fresas — strawberry flan

Gato d’ametlla — traditional Majorcan cake

Source: U. of Maryland Committee on Introducing a Plan for a Faculty Club