This year I marked my 25th year of teaching by losing my campus office. Not literally, of course: The room is where it has always been. But the door has shed my children’s drawings and fading New Yorker cartoons (some having aged better than others), the shelves swept of uncollected student papers and multiple desk copies of Voltaire’s Candide (have I taught the book that many times?), and the desk drawers emptied of handwritten lecture notes and thank-you cards from students (not always remembering who the student was, much less why I was thanked).
Those were the remains of my academic days. What was once my office is now a common space for faculty members: a tastefully decorated room with soft lighting, comfortable chairs, and a potted plant. Rather like my dentist’s waiting room. Suddenly, what I once thought I could never live without now seemed as essential to my professional well-being as typewriter ribbon.
It is no secret that American universities have long wrestled with a common problem: too many faculty and staff members, with too few offices and rooms. The demographic pressures at my own college have been especially intense as the number of students continues to soar. As surely as day follows night, the number of administrators to manage the students has also grown, as has the number of adjuncts to teach them.
What is something of a secret, however, is that this phenomenon has sparked the academic equivalent of NIMBY. Where to put those adjuncts and staffers? Anywhere but in one’s own office—a reflex, I confess, I knew only too well. A few years ago, as a pre-emptive move, I opened my office door to a good colleague who was seeking a refuge from his own department. Better to choose a friend to share my university digs, I thought, than have the dean’s office choose for me. Of course, as food stains on the computer keyboard thickened, piles of shoes and clothing in the corners mounted, and stacks of library books spread across the floor, my early enthusiasm waned. Still, I told myself, better this than surrendering my office.
Why was that? The relationship between academics and their offices has, curiously enough, gone largely unstudied by our guild. It is the passion that dares not speak its name. Yet it is the passion that explains why a colleague in another department has measured, quite literally, the size of his neighbors’ offices. As a good friend recently confided to me: “You are where you sit.” This is certainly true for Jason Fitger, the alienated and acerbic narrator of Julie Schumacher’s brilliant Dear Committee Members. When not praising in one letter of recommendation a law-school applicant he has known “for all of eleven minutes,” Fitger is cursing his situation in another, banished to a drab office “conveniently adjacent to the [men’s room], so that my writing and research are invariably conducted to the flushing of waste.”
Similarly, in his early novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down, David Lodge has his narrator, the graduate student Adam Appleby, depict a confrontation over office allocation. “I felt a certain thrill at being witness to one of those classic struggles for power and prestige which characterize the lives of ambitious men and which, in truth, exhaust most of their time and energy. To the casual observer, it might seem that nothing important was at stake here, but it might well be that the future course of English studies in the university hung upon this conversation.”
Pierre Bourdieu, I imagine, would have considered the office a form of symbolic capital for professors. (As I was packing up my office, I discovered a copy of Homo Academicus—mostly unread—squirreled among the Candides.) In a profession where pecuniary forms of capital are paltry, other forms of capital, like office space, grow in importance. Yet, truth be told, I rarely used my office. Student meetings had trickled and finally evaporated with the growth of email; phone conversations were easier with my mobile; research and writing had long ago shifted to the kitchen table in our house or the local Starbucks. I stored library books and lecture notes in my office, and when they were out of school, I’d store my children there as well. Sitting them at my desk with a pile of paper and stack of pencils in front of them, I’d say: “This is where I work.” But did I? A shortstop can point to a baseball diamond, a surgeon to an operating room, an actor to a stage and say, “This is where I work.” But what, in fact, did I do in my office?
The word “office” comes from the Latin officium, or “performance of a task.” What tasks did I perform in that space? I pushed Kleenex into the hands of students who broke into tears about examinations never passed, papers never turned in, classes never attended. I pushed Kleenex against my eyes when other students told me about the loss of a loved one or abuse at the hands of a parent. But I rarely pushed papers in my office, preferring to read and grade my students’ work, as well as to write my own work, where there was a window to look through when I looked up. The performance of my task as a professor took place in the classroom, during walks to and from classes, in cafes and cafeterias.
As for my office, it had become a relic of the age of academic imperialism, when the writ of professors radiated from offices replete with the baubles and symbols of their ranking. With the invasion of online courses, MOOCs, and distance learning, we have witnessed less the deconstruction of the academy than its decolonization. But that didn’t mean I was ready to surrender my office. That I used it so little did not lesson its symbolic value—on the contrary. In a way, my office had become my Falkland Islands. Just as that far-flung and sheep-dappled stretch of rocks in the South Atlantic entered the consciousness of John Bull only when Argentina launched its opéra bouffe invasion, so too did my office occupy my thoughts only when the administration set its eyes on it.
Unlike Margaret Thatcher, though, I soon came to recognize the meaning of the word “defeat.” Clearly, I had no real claim to the office—it was, after all, never “mine"—but no less important, I could no longer claim ignorance of injustices to others. Adjuncts may not be the wretched of the earth, but they are the gypsies of the academy. My department was right to give them a place to hang their packs, plug in their laptops, and meet their students. Given the flux of their professional lives, adjuncts need a space they can call their own.
As for my space, it is elsewhere. It seems historians of ancient philosophy are uncertain whether Aristotle really did walk across the grounds of the Lyceum as he taught. But I would bet bottom dollar that the founder of the peripatetic tradition did not have an office wedged between the columns or in the grove.
