Officious

Faculty everywhere sighed in exasperation at the suggestion in the recent Chronicle that perhaps we don't need offices.  There is nothing very avant garde about having faculty share offices--I don't think that my father had his own office until he became department chair--but many of the set-ups that I saw in the CoHE article (wide-open "lounge" spaces, etc.) seem rife for potential unhappiness.  Certainly, at one point in its past, my own department had an office in this building--

--prior to its current, prettily-restored state.  (It's now owned by the alumni association.)  As a Victorianist, I admit that I think having an office in a Victorian house would be kind of neat, but my now-emeritus colleagues were all pretty insistent that co-existing in mostly shared spaces did not necessarily make for what you'd call a fully collegial experience.  Adjuncts have been pointing out for decades now that no office space = considerable frustration, inconvenience, and sometimes downright humiliation, including no place to prepare for classes or meet privately with students.  (I know that it used to be The Thing to meet students in casual public areas [and did it myself during my year as a lecturer], but experience--not to mention more stringent regulations about maintaining student privacy--has led me to conclude that it's frequently not at all a good idea.) 

And then there was this excuse, which predictably caused me to look Very Stern: "'The other thing people would always say was, "I have to have all these journals and books." Now all this stuff is digital.'"   Here is one wall of my office:

There are two more full bookcases and an additional four shelves, in case you're wondering.

Just about everything on these shelves falls into one of three categories: not available in digital form; available somewhere in the universe, but not to me; or available and priced completely out of my range.  Electronic academic books are not cheap! So not cheap! The very opposite of being cheap! Our university has access to many e-books but no access to many others! There's a reason that nearly every monograph I purchase is secondhand! (I may have just used up my monthly allotment of exclamation points.)  If you're in the humanities, then yes, you still need bookshelves, and books to put on the bookshelves, and therefore offices in which to put the books which are on the bookshelves.