Note: and resemblance to real persons live or dead may be a coincidence
I survived the past two years with its burden of Zoom classes. All tests were administered online and, by golly, almost everyone scored an A on the tests, even for my toughest lecture class: “The Many Perversions of Lord Byron”. I was fortunate that I attracted the brightest-of-the-bright for that class. The bible thumpers made NO objections to course content. The title of the course spells out what the course is about, but there’s always a couple of them who are mortally offended. This time, it didn’t happen. It just goes to show that if they can come to class with an open mind, they too can be excellent students.
Okay. Maybe there was some cheating, but the remote classes presented a much-needed respite from the burden of preparing for class and dealing with troublesome and lazy students. Rather than sitting before my desktop computer and trying to lecture before the tops of kids’ heads, I directed my class to You Tube (rather than to Zoom) to view lectures that I recorded years ago when the university outfitted classrooms with state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment. Some of the recorded lectures were mandated by a past department chair. (Why I’ll never know). Others classes were recorded for posterity and for the unforeseeable disasters such as the Covid crisis. With the help of Anonymous Son, everything proceeded seamlessly, not just for me, but a lot of others as well.
Perhaps too seamlessly.
Since the Zoom classes were such a success, universities across the nation have been questioning the value and “unnecessary financial burden” of maintaining offices for professors. The argument is that since Zoom classes are such a success, on-campus offices for professors are unnecessary. The Chronicle of Higher Education even presented an online Zoom discussion about this. The discussion is just one more argument for universities to cut costs to the bone. No one is willing to admit to the many downsides of eliminating offices for professors and the many hardships that a move to another location (i.e. home) would impose.
I agreed to a full-time position at this university so that I could spend less time with my family. If my office is vacated, I’d not only have to work from home but I’d also have to drag my couch back with me. I paid a princely sum to get two of those I-wanna-be-a-cop-someday-Criminal Justice majors to help me haul it up to the third floor of the Lytton Strachey Building. Working from home is a non-starter. Taking a nap anywhere but in my office is impossible.
There was an informal discussion about it in the faculty lounge last year when Covid was at its worst. The women of child-bearing age were all for it for obvious reasons. The slacker faculty loved the idea (again, for obvious reasons). The rest of us had different reasons for wanting an office on campus. Some love the sort-of-pastoral setting of the campus. (They haven’t looked out my office window lately). Others said that they like being able to socialize with “like-minded people”. (Um… What?! The nonstop political posturing and frequent hissy fits keep me away from the faculty lounge. I go there only when I run out of coffee in my office).
And one professor who shall remain nameless said nothing because everyone knows that he has been boinking one of the the Kiddie Literature profs in her office for years.
Others commented that if the entire department were to vacate the floor for a semester, the university could bring in a budding decorator from the art department to give the place a makeover. When somebody referred to my office as "a pig sty adorned with Grateful Dead posters", I turned and left. I don’t engage people lacking in awareness and appreciation of cultural diversity. I love my office. It’s not a pig sty. They just don’t like the way that I have most of my books stacked on the floor. If the university could give me some more shelves, my office would look like the Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript library at Yale.
But just a bit smaller.
The whole idea of doing away with professors’ offices is asinine. If we do away with offices, let’s do away with dormitories. Let the students stay home and take classes remotely. They spend most of their time online fooling with their iphones anyway. It doesn’t matter where they are.
Get rid of the food court, the cafeteria, the football stadium, and the library. The university should do away with the library no matter what because students don’t use it for its vast resources. The building is just a very large climate controlled rest center. Most of the students in the library sit down in a carrel, pitch forward, and pass out. You never have to stand in line to check out a book because no one ever checks out a book.
We survived Covid. Let the Academic PooBahs level the whole damned campus to save money.
Just let me keep my office.
And give me a raise. I'm having difficulty making it on just $125,000 per year.
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