Who would want to work in a cell? Surely anyone would prefer a hive. Cells are cold, lonely and isolating, whereas hives are lively, energetic and buzzing. If you hadn’t guessed, this is university estates department speak for: “I’m afraid we don’t have enough individual offices for your new members of staff, so they are going to have to share.”
University office space is currently a battlefield. Many universities are increasing student numbers. Finding enough lecture theatres and classrooms for the extra students is an urgent and highly visible problem. Yet what do you do about housing the new staff to teach them? Once you have repurposed the photocopying rooms and broom cupboards, all that is left is to try to persuade staff they are better off sharing offices. Welcome to the hive! Few are convinced.
In many universities the practice has always been that each member of staff has their own office. A nest rather than a cell. With due respect to my near namesake Virginia Woolf, it isn’t only female novelists who need a room of their own. Academics need, or at least say we need, private space to see students, and somewhere quiet to prepare classes and to research and write. This, after all, is what we are used to. And however radical academics are in our suggestions about how others should live their lives, we are remarkably conservative about our own.
The argument that encourages the metaphor of the “hive” is that academic research is increasingly the product of teams of researchers who will do even better if they sit in the same room. This is true for some, but there are many researchers who don’t work in teams, or, if they do, in teams composed of people from all over the world rather from those who happen to work in the same department. With members of more than one team in the same room, it is less hive and more Tower of Babel.
Yet it is easy to understand the estates departments’ position. Walking through the corridors of any academic department you will find many empty offices. Those who are teaching will normally be in a classroom or lecture theatre elsewhere. And those who are not teaching may be working at home or in a library, free from the possibility of interruption. So why give people expensive offices if they barely use them? Of course there are people who come in all day, every day, but many offices are now places where academics keep their books and have a few meetings. Can this really be an efficient use of space?
Oddly, maybe it is. Often when two academics share an office, they treat it is a mini timeshare, each having exclusive use for two and a half days a week. In one way this sounds efficient, but it isn’t good for departmental culture. We want to encourage academics to be around the place, making themselves available to students and colleagues, not deliberately staying away.
Some universities have put academics in large open-plan spaces. Again, it seems efficient, but it creates its own difficulties, especially for students who want to see their tutors. To minimise theft, access to the open plan has to be controlled. Students can’t hang around in the corridors in the hope of bumping into their tutors for a quick word, so all meetings have to be by appointment, and become a big deal. The American urban theorist Jane Jacobs argued that parts of cities become lively and safe through the possibility of chance interactions. Open-plan offices get this wrong in both directions: academics are forced to interact too much and students are kept out altogether. Yet an individual office for everyone may not be possible. What to do?
Back to the drawing board. But this time, let’s keep in mind that universities are communities in which solitary work is built around formal and informal interactions of many kinds. We might save money by housing academics in what look like banking call centres, but we will find ourselves paying the price in other ways.
•Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy and dean of arts and humanities at University College London
