Office Doors: a cultural commentary
The hall is starting to ring with voices as a few classes let out just in advance of the 11:20 end of period. I look up from my desk to see students striding by. Some are talking on their cell-phones, some are talking with friends, others hurrying with purpose either toward the classroom building or, more leisurely, toward the cafeteria.
What I don’t see or hear much of are doors opening and closing. Even though we have a few heavy doors at the end of the hallway, this corridor is literally lined with office doors (each painted a deep, disturbing crimson — this is how you differentiate the second floor from the ground floor’s deep blue and the third floor’s fiery orange). Almost every door is closed. As I walked to my office an hour ago, I passed by one open office door. The rest were closed, although if I strained my neck, I could see one more office door open in the range belonging to the next department down.
My door is almost always open when I’m in the office even outside of office hours. I’ll close my door occasionally during lunch, for complicated phone calls or when I’m embroiled in a tricky bit of rewriting. But I’m an exception to a growing rule and I’m not saying this in curmudgeonly “I’m such a better prof than others are” fashion, but more in bemusement as I watch trends emerge.
Flashback to 1991 when I started here and, on a weekday when classes were in term, half the doors were open. We had a few more doors that led to classrooms (now subdivided into faculty offices), true. But the fact that many more doors are closed these days than open speaks to changes in the university.
Are we less student-oriented? I don’t really think so, although I’m sure that’s the first explanation that some people want to put forward. You know, “those professors don’t really care about students and just slam the doors in their faces.”
Having worked here for almost twenty years, I can say that isn’t at all true, but maybe the difference is in the way that students reach out to professors. I see far fewer students dropping by my office, whether or not it’s office hours. Contacts via email have risen astronomically in the past few years. I used to field the majority of course-related questions with students who trailed in my wake toward my office at the end of class or dropped by my open door as they passed through the hallway. Now they drop me a line by email, sometime at the same exact time they’ve wrapped up in the classroom or during my office hours.
As our student numbers have risen, so has the traffic in the hallway. It’s more distracting to have the office door sit wide open now as compared to the early nineties. Then, class breaks and a veritable herd goes thundering by. And those in-between-classes cell-phone conversations are pretty loud and distracting for me to overhear as students walk by or loiter outside my door. But that’s mostly during the ten minute periods between classes. Traffic isn’t that noisy, otherwise.
We won’t even get into last year’s doorless bathroom scenario. *shudders* There are office doors that are never standing opening again near those third-floor restrooms.
Some of it is the professors, I will admit. A new generation of hires, brought in under an increasing mandate to publish, publish, publish (as our teaching load has declined in number of courses we offer each year but risen in the number of students we teach) are, well, closing the door outside of office hours so that they can focus. Or, if not closing entirely, mostly closing (my office door never manages that careful balancing act — I can either latch it closed or leave it wide open). That’s spread to some of the other profs who’ve been here longer.
End result: more doors are closed. But I wonder if we’re less accessible or moreso? Probably less accessible to the casual visitor coming to campus (not a good thing, especially during the week when prospective students and their parents come to view the campus) while we’re even more accessible (thanks to email, Twitter, Facebook and the like) to current students and colleagues.
I could close the door more and I might as I have a couple of writing and administrative deadlines waving scary appendages in my direction. But there’s a part of me that’s deeply reluctant to become one more closed door in a hallway of the same.
What are your feelings about doors? What’s your institutional culture attitude to the same?
My office is on a kind of out of the way hallway. I leave my door open when I’m in because otherwise I feel quite isolated. But I don’t go to campus when I don’t teach or have meetings, so…
My sense on my campus is that most of us leave our doors open when we’re there.
Mine is open most of the time I’m in the office but might not be if I was on a main hallway. I tend to do creative work at home. Got in that habit when I was only employed part time, once at two institutions in three locations.
That is a big difference that I noticed after switching here because profs’ doors are almost always open.
However, the layout of the building means that there is less traffic in the department. It is really nice to see the open doors, but it is also hard to concentrate with the noise.
I’m told our hallway has gone from almost always open doors to mostly closed doors. I’m glad you talked about the contacts in terms of emails and such, because I’m guessing that makes a big difference, and also the loudness of cell phone conversations.
We also have fewer faculty eating in the lunch room and chatting, though that used to be lively during lunch. Why, I wonder?
Bardiac, we used to have a highly-trafficked faculty lunch room. Then they took it away and gave it to the student association (who mostly use it as a cloakroom). We now have a fancy faculty room with comfy sofas that’s hardly ever used because it’s far from the cafeterias and other places that faculty frequent. Catch-22?
I’m envious of buildings designed in other than long-corridor fashion so that you can be in a cluster or pod or cul-de-sac of offices with some sociability and quiet. When we had about 4k students in the U, the hall noise was far less than today with 8k on campus and, yes, the cells are ever-present. But since my department is literally situated on a highly trafficked corridor (classrooms/library at one end, cafeteria on the other), it’s almost never quiet.
As a student, I find the closed door rather intimidating. I like it when profs have a really obvious note on it that says ‘Knock and enter’ or something similarly inviting (unless, of course, they can’t be disturbed, which is perfectly understandable). But I know if I’m trying to read/write in a high traffic space, I have to shut the door to get anything done.
Bardiac - “We also have fewer faculty eating in the lunch room and chatting, though that used to be lively during lunch. Why, I wonder?” Maybe they’re all busy on Facebook? :)