A few years ago I taught a course at Sciences Po in Paris. The classes were fine, the students were fine, but there was almost no academic community. I had an office in some weird building where they stuck visitors. The place was mostly pretty empty. Sometimes I’d go over to the department of economics, which was hosting me (but had no office space)—it was in a fancy building on, I think it was the 4th floor but maybe it was the 2nd floor and they were just very long flights of stairs—and most of the faculty were never there. So I didn’t bother to come by very often: what’s the point if there’s no office for you and no colleagues to talk with. I don’t know what it was like for the students who wanted intellectual experiences outside of class: maybe there were places where the grad students hung out? I don’t know.
Anyway, the American universities that I’ve attended and taught at have been nothing like that. Buzzing with faculty and grad students, lots of opportunities for spontaneous conversations.
Then came covid. Classes were moved online, then we weren’t allowed to come into the office or teach in person. At some point they started allowing in-person teaching but they were still discouraging us from showing up to the office or having in-person meetings outside of class. Eventually all become allowed, but then there became the new norm of zoom meetings, faculty who didn’t want to come into work if they didn’t have to, students who wanted to avoid the commute to school, etc. And then, as with Sciences Po those many years ago, I was less motivated to show up to work myself, which resulted in fewer spontaneous interactions with students and colleagues. Online can be convenient—hey, look at this blog!—but I still think something is missing.
So here’s the question: Will universities ever recover?
Sadly, I suspect the answer is no. It’s just too easy not so show up, also this is just the continuation of a decades-long trend of fewer weeks in the semester, fewer days of class in the week, much less need for the physical library, etc. Also, the people at Sciences Po back in 2009 seemed just fine with closed doors and empty corridors. So that arid academic environment seems like a stable equilibrium. It makes me sad. Obv it’s the least of our problems in the world today, but still.
Time in physical department spaces, like leisure time, is a network good: some, but not all, of its value can only be realized if you share it with others.
My sense is that the benefits of in-person interaction will bring some people back into the office, particularly in small-town universities where (a) off-campus internet access still isn’t all that reliable for people who live further out of town, and (b) most faculty and students live close enough that the commute isn’t a big time sink. But, it probably won’t return to pre-pandemic levels.
Universities will, of course, shrink the size of offices, force sharing of offices, and take other steps that will save money in the short term but also exacerbate the self-fulfilling dynamic (of people not going in to the office because no one else is going in to the office).
Andrew – you (and many others on this blog) live a sheltered existence. I don’t claim to speak for a majority, but I do know that many people’s teaching experiences resemble mine – teaching institutions where the teaching load (and advising and committee work and….) is sufficient to make the pre-COVID casual conversations more the exception than the rule. I’ve been at teaching institutions where a casual exchange of ideas rarely happened – at best, the hallway conversations were like meeting your neighbors taking their garbage out.
So, where you blame COVID, I maintain that much of the demise of spontaneous interaction has been going on for a long time and the result of more systemic change in higher education. Similarly with collaborative research – your experiences (shared by many at elite institutions) don’t quite match what happens at many (perhaps a majority) of institutions. To cite but one example: years ago I was at a school that was considering establishing a graduate student cohort to provide technological assistance to needy places. We met with a former administrator from an elite school that had helped create “Engineers without borders.” When we explained the difficulties of creating such an effort with our other academic duties, he responded that his faculty just did this with their spare time. Their teaching load was 1-2 courses per year – ours was 24 credits per year. Different worlds.
From my experience, higher education has increasingly bifurcated and the two worlds hardly resemble each other. In one world, the loss of in-person spontaneous interaction will hardly be missed. COVID may be a contributing factor, but it didn’t start the demise nor does it bear the primary responsibility. I do believe the experience is different in some places, but there are approximately 2384 BA+ institutions of higher learning in the US (and 1088 AA degree institutions as well), and many of these have inhabited a different world for quite a few years before COVID arrived.
I recall most of those opportunities for “spontaneous conversation” happened at the bar around happy hour.
+1 and then some.
“Andrew – you (and many others on this blog) live a sheltered existence.”
And, note that this blog is posted while Andrew is on Sabbatical in Paris.
Dale:
Yes, good points.
I have a friend who works for a non-profit where some of the younger employees are lobbying to basically eliminate any requirements to work together in shared physical space in a particular office location. Old line employees (who tend to be more fully established in the community where the office is located, with mortgages and stuff) tend to want to continue with a hybrid model of working sometimes remotely and sometimes having the benefits that come from working in the same space. Since it’s a left-leaning non-profit, elevating employee satisfaction is ostensibly an organizational goal. But as many left-leaning organizations are grappling with, realizing that mission can get complicated when its not just aspirational (that general issue is explored in this article, which is really long and I think somewhat slanted, but also sheds light on the issue and has received a lot of focus: https://theintercept.com/2022/06/13/progressive-organizing-infighting-callout-culture/).
Anyway, an interesting question (IMO) is how change should be looked at with an open eye towards trade-offs. What are the benefits of employees feeling free to work as they travel the world? There seem clear costs to many organizations from such a policy, but what about the benefits if employees feel much more liberated to live their lives the way they want to live them? Personally, I think a critical issue is to what extent (particularly in non-profits) members of an organization feel that sacrifice of personal benefits for the sake of the organizational health is something that brings them life satisfaction.
Change happens. It often seems problematic, but it also amounts to mostly just a trade-off of costs and benefits. There seem to me to be clear costs deriving from a lack of collegial interaction among professionals, and a lack of person-to-person interactions among students and between students and instructors. I never liked teaching on-line courses because I felt they severely limited my strengths as a teacher (and perhaps exacerbated my weaknesses).
The costs seem clear and rather easily assessed. I wonder about the benefits and how to measure them. I think that a temptation is to see the costs and benefits as distinct from one-another when actually they’re part of a unified whole.
I think that the lack of in-person interaction has been around for a long time. I’ve been a faculty member for 17 years now and I don’t think that I have ever had a face-to-face conversation with a fellow faculty member about my research. At a prior institution I was very often the only faculty member in my office on a given day. For unis in urban settings all this may be partly driven by the cost of housing and the relatively low salaries paid to universities i.e., many faculty members have to live a long way from campus in order to be able to afford something and who wants to commute 1 hour each way if no one else is around?
“I’ve been a faculty member for 17 years now and I don’t think that I have ever had a face-to-face conversation with a fellow faculty member about my research.” — That is shocking! For me it’s around once a week, though if you cross out the usual few people I talk to this frequency would drop, but still not anywhere close to 1/17 years! If it were the case that I never talked to other faculty about research, I would flee the university.
This is across four different universities. The professional loneliness is soul crushing but it’s not easy to simply “flee” a university.
Govt of India is trying to replace all classroom teaching with online NPTEL MOOCs courses. This benefits many who have simply no access to any other form of resources and also ensures uniform high quality. Only labs cannot be taught this way.
A professor told me two things:
1. The university spends far less on an online class than an in-person class.
2. Many/most professors get higher ratings on their online classes than on their in-person classes!
Number 2 is going to be a big problem going forward.
I’m surprised at #2—exactly the opposite is the case for me and my colleagues at my institution. (I’m at a large public research university in the US that also has a comparatively high teaching load.)
But of course that’s just my anecdote vs. your anecdote. Both are surely true in different places for different folks, and I have no sense of what the broader landscape might be.
Like Andrew, I really missed the collegial environment we lost during covid and I’m happy that that environment beginning to re-form.
It’s an old problem, now made worse by covid. As the post says, it’s a coordination game. You need to develop an expectation that other people will be there. I’ve started several weekly lunch groups, and you need to commit to two people always being there, and nobody else having any expectation of having to be there or work to do before lunch, and they always must be int he same place and time.
Also, you need to construct a culture of open doors and Dropping By. Or, whiteboards in the hallways, so passersby can see what two people are discussing (cf. the Harvard Govt. building). This is tougher. It demands maintnenace by senior faculty— who are the people who least benefit from it.
It would be nice if there were two sets of equal status universities where one emphasized in-person collaborative spaces and the other emphasized remote/hybrid flexible arrangements. For various reasons I don’t think this is likely to happen but I think it should. Instead, I think individual universities will try to offer both at the same time but that would just lead to the remote/hybrid format winning.
I’m curious if this post has the usual 6 month (or 3?) delay, both because I think you’re in France now, and because, at least at my university, things have changed a lot in the last month or two. A few months ago I was much more worried about exactly this — a lifeless atmosphere, which is especially demoralizing for students. Now it’s considerably livelier, though with a lot of variation. My floor has a lot of activity, in part because several of us made a conscious effort to encourage people’s presence. Other floors (in the same department / building) less so. Some other buildings on campus are still pretty dead; on the other hand, a molecular biology institute retreat I attended two weeks ago had over 90% of the people in person, and just a few on Zoom. We’ll see what happens, but it has been encouraging that I see more people *and* have more unplanned, stimulating conversations than was the case not long ago.
Raghu:
Yes, I wrote this post several months ago. Here on sabbatical my experience is not so relevant because I’m not going into an office regularly. Or maybe my experience is relevant because I’ve reached a point where it doesn’t seem weird to not be going to an office regularly. In previous sabbaticals it would’ve seemed weird to just hang around the apartment most of the time, but now this just seems normal! I do have some in-person meetings but not every day. I’ve also been teaching a small class (in-person) and that’s been fun, but it’s not in an environment where I’d run into colleagues in the hallway or anything like that.
Andrew, the economics department at Sciences Po was set up only in 2009, and had at that point maybe 4-5 faculty members. Before it was mostly external teachers (remember Dominique Strauss-Kahn?). You can hardly expect a department to have a vibrant academic environment at that stage. Believe me, it’s different now (though space is still a constraint).
If there are any computational statistics researchers who miss meeting more in person and would like to live in New York City, we’re fully back to the office at Flatiron Institute and hiring at all levels (interns, postdocs, junior faculty, senior faculty) in the Center for Computational Mathematics (my department, which includes ML and comp stats and numerical analysis and scientific computing). Flatiron Institute, which is part of Simons Foundation, is an academic institution with no students, no grant writing, incredible admin support, and plenty of resources. Jim and Marilyn Simons endowed the foundation very generously (we’d rank about 20th if we were a U.S. university) so that it would be able to run in perpetuity. We have lunch in large groups every day. I meet people in the halls all the time, which are floor-to-ceiling whiteboards and blackboards. It’s also super interdisciplinary. I have to watch myself about starting too many interesting projects because everyone wants to collaborate. If you’re interested, please send me email at [email protected].
So yes, I’m very spoiled now. For example, I’m hanging out in Paris for three weeks now as part of a 5 week European tour to work with a bunch of collaborators.
My experience while a postdoc and professor at Carngegie Mellon (1988 to 1996) was that I almost never interacted with my colleagues. CMU is in Pittsburgh, so nobody had a bad commute—I walked to work. Even the other natural language processing researchers were all working on things I didn’t really care about or vice-versa. That even included the one researcher who worked in exactly the sub-area of linguistics where I wound up writing two books. He just thought my take was subtly different enough from his to be wrong and he simply didn’t care about anything I was working on and literally refused to talk about it for that reason (academics!). I would talk to the programming languages and AI researchers in computer science, but none of them had the time to dive into any of my problems and vice-versa. Everyone was really really busy hustling for money to run their empires or head-down working on their own work so they could get tenure (like me).
Then I moved to Bell Labs in 1996. It was a different world. Without students or having to write grants, the researchers had much much more time to interact. Everyone went to lunch together. The main problem is that a lot of us lived in New York City and didn’t like the 1.5 hour commute to work, so we’d only come in 2 or 3 times a week (yes, we were very spoiled). After that, I moved to a startup in 2000, and that was the most cooperative place I ever worked until the Flatiron Institute. Everyone was super helpful in mentoring me in professional programming and we were all working on a common product. I met with everybody from UX developers at the top, to systems telephony integrators at the bottom, and all the speech and language rec in between.
Moving back into academia in 2011 after many years in industry, I found Columbia even pre-pandemic (I haven’t been back since) to be even worse than CMU in terms of collegiality. The only people I ever talked to were the Stan team members we were funding. I’m super friendly and tried to engage, but everyone else in the department just gave me the cold shoulder as a nobody [edit: until Dave Blei showed up, but he spent most of his time in CS and was very busy and I see him more now as a visitor at Flatiron than I ever saw of him at Columbia]. Perhaps not surprising for a department that passed on hiring Matt Hoffman after one of the best postdocs ever, during which he invented both the no-U-turn sampler (NUTS) and stochastic variational inference!
Just echoing Bob here: Flatiron Institute has a great working environment. Columbia’s had its ups and downs over the years. I used to love hanging out in the poli sci dept, but last year even after the covid thing was pretty much over and we could go to work, the department was pretty empty; when I was there, I’d walk around to people’s offices to say hi and chat but nobody was ever around.
Just to mention: there’s a debate among organizational theorists as to whether or to what extent chance encounters at an institution between people with different specializations or roles contributes to innovation. The classical example is Bell Labs. I’ve seen studies that try to assess how much such interaction there was at Bell and how much it contributed to patents and so on. AFAIK, this debate is ongoing.
I bring this up because it’s worth considering to what extent a vibrant intellectual culture is a workplace amenity primarily and not also a resource that contributes to institutional or social objectives.
In my personal case, the exchanges I’ve had with natural scientists have enormously contributed to my research work, not only on climate change but also how to think about the relationship between economic and evolutionary theory. For whatever reason, I can’t say the same about my within-discipline interactions, although they have generally been enjoyable.
Peter:
It’s not just chance encounters. I’m also thinking about times that I come by someone’s office to talk with them. I guess we could call those “semi-chance” encounters.
Consider three levels:
1. We have a scheduled meeting.
2. I go to your office to talk with you about something.
3. We meet at random at the proverbial water cooler.
When people are regularly in their offices, we can get more of all three of these things. And this doesn’t even get into the issue that zoom meetings are typically a lot less productive than face-to-face meetings.
I once proposed that offices be located randomly rather than by department. I still like the idea (a lot), but it got no traction. And my colleagues who didn’t like the idea rarely engaged with each other in meaningful conversation.
Chicago b school used to do that and maybe still does.
1) I suspect a lot of this is idiosyncratic to departments and fields. I teach at a large public research university in the South, in a humanities department, and COVID has just reinforced the departmental culture that already existed, which is that most people work at home, not at the office. They come in for office hours and teaching and no more. Which is a shame, since the semi-random in-person interactions are great fun and where lots of good ideas come from. And new junior faculty adapt to the culture of the place they arrive: if the culture is that you work in your office then you’ll get the message. If nobody’s around, you get the other message.
2) What I would love to see is universities take some initiative (if only!) in figuring out how to let faculty who *do* want to congregate congregate, and liberating those who don’t want to bother. The benefits of density aren’t linear, right? You’re more likely to run into people if you are all together. If there’s a department of 40, and 20 want to hang out and 20 don’t, then a building for all 40 will seem extra-empty, but if you put those 20 eager beavers onto one or two floors, it’ll be extra incentivizing. Imagine, for instance, if universities gave $5k a year + the use of shared office space to faculty who gave up their private offices. Then you could take the faculty who do want to interact and put them together.
For what it’s worth, for us teaching track faculty here at Dalhousie in Canada, the university is definitely back to being quite lively! Students are back at attendance rates that are similar to pre covid levels (except they actually stay home when they’re sick now). The other teaching faculty are also around and I bump into them incidentally in the halls to chat sometimes, and we help each other out. The regular yearly talks and receptions are back too.
It is true though that a lot of the research faculty tend to avoid the university altogether, but that is an old trend. We also do virtual faculty meetings now which I’ll admit is more efficient, but means there is no casual chat and definitely more alienating than before.
Some people have definitely checked out and go totally virtual whenever possible, but there’s still a core of teaching faculty here and lots of students.
So it’s not all lost! I just came off sabbatical myself, and felt the same as you while I was on it (it’s awesome, but can feel a little lonely sometimes and I was burnt out from post covid teaching). Returning this year was a real turning point back a lot closer to normalcy.
My limited impression is that, it is not a coincidence that corporate America has learned how to use free/accessible meals/celery-sticks to trick employees to hang around, but such feature is still to be added in many university campuses in the U.S.
I found Facebook to be akin to a virtual water cooler. Sometimes colleagues share to the feed tech articles with clickbait articles that often lead to funny quips and at times lead to interesting discussions. A blog is more similar to an office where someone has to stop in for a discussion.
I know some will roll their eyes, but I have great academic convos over Slack. When we have better immersive tech (maybe like gather.town with better video/audio, or rooms like Google Project Starline) it will get better again for those who need a more natural sensory experience.
Better immersive tech may be harder than you think. Here, my study walls are a (more than slightly excessively yellow) off white and it has very bright (we let the architects do what they wanted with the study and they overdid the lighting*; the acoustic noise problem isn’t their fault, though) LED lighting that looks fine to human eys, but wreaks aesthetic havoc on digital sensors. Long story short: I bought a video camera for my peecee, and could not persuade it to look anywhere near acceptable. Then I started looking closely at the YouTube music guys I watch, and figured out that they all have specially built rooms with specially designed lighting.
*: https://pbase.com/davidjl/image/160763279
I like in person also but I don’t think the watercooler conversation argument is particularly strong unless you add some qualifiers. The internet is practically made of watercooler conversations. My experience with the internet/an active Slack channel is you gotta limit yourself to how many watercoolers you go to.
The drawing boards vs. screenshare difference seems meaningful tho. I program now and I prefer remote meetings to in person ones cuz screenshare (even working in office). But I could see someone writing equations would swing the other direction.
I’ve been a prof. at University of Delhi for 30+ years and also travelled on teaching assignments all over India. My field has been foods, nutrition and its management. Comments from colleagues around the world are interesting and factual, but, no one has pointed out the impact of virtual teaching on health of teachers or importantly our young population. With growing interest in educational research, governments need to realise that, more than focussing on building hospitals, people need open spaces and face to face communication in which body language and gestures play an important part in the learning-teaching process. We need to unite as “learners” and keep minds open to receive signals and vibrations irrespective of age, experience gender, caste, culture or country. I always remind myself even at 84 that when I stop learning i’ll be gone.