Michael Cornelius, an associate professor of English at Wilson College here, spends a lot of time in his office — so much time, in fact, that his husband set up a small refrigerator, a microwave, and a Keurig coffeemaker behind his desk. Mr. Cornelius, who is the department chair as well as president of the faculty senate, says he is “usually here till 9 p.m. three nights a week.”
“I’m in a meeting, a webinar, a seminar.” But also, he adds, he’s at his desk so much because “I have to use a crowbar sometimes to get people out of my office — there’s a lot of collegiality here, even though we’re all doing very different things.”
One building away, Steven Schmidt, an assistant professor of psychology at the liberal-arts college, says he comes to his office seven days a week, and even keeps a bed there for his dog, Lucy. Both Mr. Cornelius and Mr. Schmidt say they’ve experienced nothing like the empty hallways and deserted departments reported by Deborah K. Fitzgerald in a widely read Chronicle essay published in March.
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Ms. Fitzgerald, a professor of the history of technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote that on her return to the faculty after 10 years as an administrator, she found that many of her faculty colleagues had all but abandoned coming to their offices. “Entire departments can seem like dead zones,” she wrote, “and whole days can pass with only a glimpse of a faculty member as someone comes to campus to meet a student, attend a meeting, or teach a class. The halls are eerily quiet. Students, having figured this out, are also absent. Only the staff are present.”
The internet, she said, has made this possible, allowing faculty members to work from anywhere and letting them avoid many of the interruptions they might have in their offices. But she also saw a downside to the loss of face-to-face conversation: “What keeps junior faculty engaged? How do we communicate values? Or share readings, provocative conversations, and inspiration? Why should young academics try to build a professional life in a place where there is no one to talk to?”
Ms. Fitzgerald’s essay prompted a number of comments from readers agreeing with her. “Bowling alone has led to working alone,” one wrote, alluding to the 2000 book describing the decline of interpersonal interaction in the United States.
But calls to longtime faculty members at colleges around the country suggest that the corridors are by no means uniformly desolate.
Even at MIT, many departments remain vibrant, says Michael M.J. Fischer, a colleague of Ms. Fitzgerald’s in the history-of-technology department, which he says can indeed feel like “a dead space.” He is also part of the anthropology department, however, which he says is lively. “People like each other, talk to each other, socialize together.” He attributes that in part to personalities and in part to the department’s leadership.
Alex Hall, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, says people in his department regret not socializing together more. “Outside of the workplace we have almost no interaction — getting a pint after work never happens. In our department, people do lament that, and I think the dynamic is the same in other departments,” he says.
But getting everyone together — even in a department that is one of the university’s smallest — would be tricky. “If I don’t have any meetings, I don’t even think about coming to work,” Mr. Hall says. He can easily access all his office files from home, along with everything offered by the UCLA library.
“One reason I work at home is that having people coming into my office and having people emailing me is just too much — I don’t get anything done,” he says. “And I’m in a field that gets a lot of press requests. It has made me feel somewhat besieged.”
Mr. Hall has even dispensed with office hours. “Students weren’t coming. They were getting in touch by email. Now we meet by appointment or I answer questions over email.”
The upshot? This past semester he was on campus Tuesdays and Thursdays to teach and Wednesdays for departmental meetings.
Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, in the far eastern Los Angeles suburb of Claremont, Calif., says research universities have “so ratcheted up the pressure on the faculty in terms of publication and getting grants that I would expect quiet hallways.”
Still, he says, “the notion that somehow corridors are now empty in ways that they were once packed may be a little overdrawn,” although he acknowledges that “you don’t interact on a face-to-face basis as much as you might.”
At Pomona, Mr. Miller says, how crowded a department’s hallways are varies by discipline. “The scientists are in their labs all the time — they’ve got students all the time. But the very fact of research in the humanities and the social sciences has changed because so many documents are digitized and accessible any time of the day. And this being Los Angeles, it depends on where you live. If you live on the west side of LA, you’re not going to be here every day. It’s just impossible.”
“If you are walking down the hall and finding your department is empty, I can imagine it would be particularly dispiriting,” says James Tuten, a professor of history at Juniata College, a Pennsylvania liberal-arts institution some 60 miles northwest of Wilson. “For many people, academe is solitary in many ways. And academe is filled with introverts.” But at Juniata, he says, “we expect to see each other every day,” in departmental offices or the local coffee shop or at a regular gathering where beer lovers on the faculty trade their latest craft-brew finds.
Belle Tuten, who is also a Juniata history professor and who is married to James Tuten, says the college has worked to keep faculty members engaged with one another, such as by holding periodic faculty lunches in the dining hall. “We just go off in a corner, talk about the news of the day,” she says. And because Juniata’s in a city of just 7,100, faculty members run into one another at high-school events and the Thursday farmers’ market. “I know all the soccer moms” on the faculty and staff, Ms. Tuten says. “I don’t know them so much in their professional capacity as by, that’s Ethan’s mom.”
“Community doesn’t just happen with a collection of people,” says Mr. Fischer, of MIT. “You have to create it and support it and build venues for it.” For instance, he goes regularly to colloquia offered by the biology department, which he says often attract several hundred people. “Biology is the big thing at MIT these days,” he says, noting that the history-of-technology department used to offer similar programs, which eventually withered.
He’s also a fan of MIT’s Stata Center, which houses a number of departments and features a lively first-floor corridor with a popular food court at one end. “The Stata Center is a place where you do run into people,” he says. The main corridor, he says, is “a kind of free-floating space, and people use that space very flexibly. They’ll just pull up some chairs and tables.”
But lavish facilities aren’t essential. “Going to lunch with your colleagues is a really critical thing,” says Mr. Miller, at Pomona.
Here at Wilson, Mr. Schmidt agrees. “I have a small, very eclectic cohort of peers that I usually have lunch with. It’s a great way to converse with people from other programs.”
Wilson also offers occasional evening faculty workshops in the library with wine and snacks. The most recent was on publishing, and the one before that was on seeking grant money. “It’s a great opportunity to mix and mingle with colleagues in other departments,” he says, attracting about 20 people out of a faculty with 45 full-time members.
John P. Murry, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Iowa, says the business world is grappling with the same work-from-anywhere phenomenon described in Ms. Fitzgerald’s essay.
“You do lose something,” he says. “I know I benefited greatly from colleagues I had at the University of Wisconsin when I was starting my career. At that time, most people were in their offices all day. But there’s also the benefit now of being able to have colleagues literally around the world. That’s part of what younger faculty members are growing up with.”
He also says the nature of academic work has changed since his career began. “I probably do half of my teaching away from campus — we offer classes across the state of Iowa, as well as in Hong Kong and Italy. And I teach in an executive-M.B.A. program that meets on Saturdays.” Students, he says, “call me up on the weekends, they call me in the evenings, they send me email. There’s an expectation that I respond. It’s a very different kind of job.”
And many younger faculty members, he notes, find academe attractive precisely because it doesn’t require them to be in the office from 9 to 5. “For dual-career households, it gives you the flexibility to be at home with a child during the day, to work at night or on the weekend,” he says. “We’re evaluated on our performance — our research accomplishments, our teaching scores, our service contributions.
“Nobody really cares where you work or how you do it.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
