I teach at two community colleges. At one of them, the full-time faculty members (10 or 12) have a little cubicle farm at one end of the math office. At the other, the full-timers (tenured or not) each have an actual office, with walls and a lockable door and everything. The first one is where I am most likely to wind up full-time, should I ever decide to go after a position. But I must admit, though I realize it’s petty, that having a cubicle rather than a Real Office would bum me out.
This college is the only one I’ve ever heard of where full-time faculty don’t have Real Offices. At every other college or university I’ve attended, worked for, interviewed at, visited, and so on, full-time faculty had Real Offices. My sample size is small, though, maybe 15 schools, all on the West Coast (except one in Chicago where I interviewed a few years back).
I’m curious if Real Offices for full-time faculty is the norm, or if cubicles are a thing anywhere else?
My limited experience has been that all full time faculty I’ve ever seen or dealt with had their own office with lockable private door. TA’s live in the cube farm.
I would think their is a great need for privacy when dealing with students and being an advisor, or discussing homework and grades. So much so, that I would not be surprised if there would be some legaleze guidelines or regulations that might require such privacy…if push came to shove.
Does the college have 10-12 full-timers altogether, or 10-12 in the department?
I don’t think it’s petty, and I can think of several reasons (including the one Sigene gave) why you’d want an office.
I don’t have wide experience, but I am a bit surprised to hear of a college where full-time faculty don’t have offices. Maybe there just isn’t enough office space available on campus?
I have always had an office. However, at the university where I currently teach, some instructors are consigned to cubicles. This is due to a shortage of office space and also to the university’s hierarchy of priorities (e.g., instructors in the humanities are less likely to have their own offices than those in engineering).
I’ve taught at four different schools (as grad student, VAP, adjunct, and tenure-track professor, in that order), and I’ve always had an office, although at schools #1 and #3, it was shared with other grad students or adjuncts. At my current institution (school #4), adjuncts who work on campus (rather than being online-only) get some office space, although it’s shared.
I imagine cubicles would raise some privacy issues, not to mention that there is nowhere to put a cubicle farm in most of the campus buildings.
My wife has been adjunct at one community college for 20 yrs. The full-time faculty (of which there are fewer and fewer) have offices. Adjunct share a big space w/ (unassigned) cubicles and a couple of offices if you wish to have office hours.
In the private college where I work, all faculty have offices, though some share the space with another faculty member. The offices are generally large enough for two people to use them, especially since faculty are only in their offices for a small portion of the workweek. There are no dividers in the office.
Adjunct faculty, of course, have to share one room.
Remembering back, when I was in grad school, all faculty had their own offices, and most of the TAs did, too. That was a big state institution and the campus was built in the late 60s, so there was a ton of extra space.
In college, I seem to remember faculty had individual offices. This was before cubicles were widespread, though.
I was an assistant professor at two different small, private colleges. In both cases I had my own private office. At UC Berkeley where I went to graduate school all teaching faculty had offices. Even graduate students got a shared office in my department. In fact, I had an office all to myself, because the person I shared it with had already taken a job before she finished her dissertation.
Space should not have been an issue. The hallways are gigantic, there is a lot of empty space inside the building. Here is the inside of the building:
That’s the only picture I could find, but you can kind of see how much empty space there is. We could probably have several more classrooms in the building, let alone faculty offices…
I’ve been full-time faculty at two different universities (one public, one private), and have always had a private office. We even let our emeritus faculty keep their offices, which seems pretty extravagant to me.
I’ve taught at, taken classes at, or visited a huge number of colleges (universities actually). I don’t know of any that don’t have private offices for all full-time faculty. I didn’t do a complete or even extensive survey, of course. And these were mostly research-oriented universities.
I’m a department head in a university library. All my direct and indirect reports are faculty. Only those who supervise others have offices, the rest have cubicles.
I’m trying really hard to change that as we do space modifications.
When I was a TA (but fully in charge of teaching a course) I shared an office with 5 others. When I got my first full-time teaching job (at Columbia) I still shared a large office with five others, four of whom were grad students. My next job, at U. Ill, there were 6 of us crammed into a three office suite, two to an office, but we chose to make a common room and two offices with three each. This continued for four years, even after I was tenured. Then I went to McGill and was put into a shared office. Finally, we were put into a new building where all regular faculty had private offices. After I retired, I kept my private office for three years, but then moved in with another emeritus. When he died, another retired guy whom I liked a lot was asked to vacate his private office and I invited him to move in with me to avoid getting a roommate I didn’t like. This has continued to this day.
