The Faculty Club: Not Dead Yet

Ohio State University’s faculty club is housed in a 78-year-old building outfitted with chandeliers, dark carpets, and heavy drapes. It’s a space that evokes tradition and exclusivity. Once upon a time, that was precisely the idea. But now, at a time when gaining new, younger members is crucial to the club’s future, the old-fashioned décor strikes professors as stodgy.

So the club’s executive director is trying to retool the building for the modern era. By slowly changing the interior space to create areas for small groups to work together or have a beer, he hopes to draw younger members from the faculty.

The executive director, Jeffrey White, said the reason for the renovations is simple: “We’re at a crossroads.”

In the last two decades, membership has dropped from more than 2,000 to 1,600, only 250 of whom are on the faculty. Those figures don’t make Ohio State’s club an outlier. Private dining clubs were once nexuses of faculty interaction around academe, where colleagues across departments bonded over meals, drinks, card games, or book groups. But many have shrunk or closed as they have struggled to attract new members. Some have attempted to plug the gap by inviting students’ parents and alumni to join.

But Mr. White hopes that by modernizing the institution, he will be able to return it to its traditional role as a place for academic colleagues to congregate. He says faculty members want a place to collaborate and converse in person.

His changes include one counterintuitive tactic that already seems to be working: New members can no longer join free.

Ohio State used to offer newly hired faculty members one year of free membership to encourage them to take advantage of the 11-room building. But Mr. White said few of those newcomers actually used the club; only about 18 percent typically paid the $39-per-month dues to continue their memberships the following year. So he eliminated the complimentary membership for new hires and took a page from the gym-membership playbook, temporarily offering any nonmember a discounted first year at the club.

The Ohio State club gained 126 new paying members from August to February, well over twice the number of new members who joined free during that period a year earlier. Almost all of the more recent crop of new members have visited the club at least twice since joining; half have used it an average of six times a month.

Mr. White thinks that when people pay for something, they are simply more inclined to use it. But charging new members is only one of several changes the club has adopted to entice younger members.

“The club,” he said, “is really trying to reintroduce itself to campus.”

Collaboration and Comfort

That’s where the renovations come in. Over the last 18 months, Mr. White has held focus groups of members and nonmembers to discuss how the club could be made more appealing to the younger faculty. As a result, some rooms are being outfitted with computer monitors, Wi-Fi, and comfortable seating so faculty members can meet in small groups to work. A dining room that serves lunch will extend its service to include a happy hour.

Elizabeth M. Fitzgerald, an associate professor of clinical nursing who joined the club in 2014, said recent changes in the furnishings have already made it seem like a place where one could plug in a laptop and work. She joined as a new faculty member to meet people, and has enjoyed eating somewhere that’s calmer than the hospital cafeteria.

“There’s a room that always has coffee and couches,” she said. It used to have old chairs, but “now there’s high-top tables, contemporary art, refreshing colors.”

Ms. Fitzgerald had been a member of the faculty club at the University of Louisville, where she worked before moving to Ohio State. At 62, she was surprised to find that many members of the Ohio State club are older than she is. She said younger members tend to come to events like an art auction and a wine tasting, and she approves of the club’s efforts to draw them in.

But in the search for new members, the club risks alienating those who have been there for years. Mr. White has been cornered in his office, he said, by longtime members demanding to know what he’s doing to their club.

“Retired faculty would come to use it as their family room for an entire day,” according to Mr. White. Now, he said, “they don’t think it’s as comfortable. Now what we’re seeing is four or five people sitting in that room around the table.”

That’s the goal, Mr. White said. He and his board want the club to be a place for academics to “get together and discuss the issues of campus and the world,” he said.

Chasing a Younger Clientele

Faculty members on other campuses say those kinds of interactions are harder to come by than in the faculty club’s heyday. Technology has made it easy for professors to work from home, and Twitter and Facebook have, to some extent, supplanted in-person exchanges of ideas and opinions.

Deborah K. Fitzgerald, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who returned to the faculty after 10 years as an administrator, wrote in a Chronicle essay in March that faculty members now spend much less time in their offices, meaning days can go by with hardly any collegial interaction.

At some institutions, that has given struggling faculty clubs an opening, at least in theory. At the University of Maryland at College Park, Juan Uriagereka, a linguistics professor, pursued plans to revive a defunct faculty club in 2013, while he was serving as an associate provost. He wanted to counteract time spent on Twitter by building a space “where you get someone to listen to what you’re saying and respond.”

The plans did not materialize right away, but they have recently been revived by other faculty members, Mr. Uriagereka said. He thinks a successful club would have to include and appeal to graduate students and postdocs as well as faculty members.

Robert Lindgren, general manager of the Quadrangle Club at the University of Chicago, said that, by looking for ways to draw younger members, the Ohio State club is chasing a clientele all of its peers want, too. Mr. Lindgren serves as president of the Association of College and University Clubs, which has 75 members.

At the University of Chicago’s club, the bet is that younger professors will include a healthy proportion of foodies and locavores. So the Quadrangle Club incorporates something from its garden in almost every item on the menu. A recent salmon dish, for example, was garnished with both whole flowers and flower petals. Mr. Lindgren said in an email that good food is the key “to pull the younger generation out of their kitchens and compete with the world of delivery.”

His club has grown from 900 to 1,200 members in the last eight years. Mr. White said the real test for the Ohio State club will come in September, when it’s time for the 126 new members to renew their memberships at nondiscounted rates.

He’s aiming for a 33-percent renewal rate. If he succeeds, he’ll know that the club’s transition from the old world to the new is on the right track.

Nell Gluckman writes about faculty issues and other topics in higher education. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.