CU #4: Eulogy for my Office

Conscious uncoupling from the ivory tower, Part 4

Note: We are back to series of essays using the book “Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to a Happily Even After” by Katherine Woodward Thomas to stimulate conversation about academic careers. Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here.

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According to Katherine Woodward Thomas, the first step to conscious uncoupling is “finding emotional freedom”. She argues that the strong emotions, like anger and sadness, that come from a breakup can not only be dealt with peacefully, but also productively—in a way that leads to growth and new insights.

Transform your difficult emotions into constructive drivers of positive change.
—KWT, Conscious Uncoupling

The first step is putting a name to what you are feeling, and she outlines a process for accessing your emotions through meditation. I don’t need any help accessing my emotions right now, as I’m feeling a very specific sadness. It’s sadness over losing my office. An academic office is both a physical space where work is done, but also a place where our academic selves are continuously created, both for the better and for the maybe-not-so-great.

Anticipating an office

I remember visiting my father, an English professor, at his office when I was young. You reached it via an elevator, which smelled like the pipe tobacco that his colleagues apparently felt free to smoke in public spaces. It was cozy and dark, the walls paved with books and small framed art pieces. There was a reading chair, and a lamp, and a big desk. It seemed a sophisticated, aspirational space, something I knew I wanted but was too young for, like coffee or whiskey.

Looking into his office was like getting a glimpse into a private part of my dad—an extension of his self in the way that people’s fancy houses or expensive cars can be.

Before I started my faculty position, I’d never had an office, even a shared one. In the labs where I was a graduate student and postdoc, our research benches had a desk built in at one end, so writing and thinking were done in the same space as experiments. Both laboratories were in large open-plan spaces, and both were almost always occupied by other people, even after normal working hours and on the weekends. When I started my faculty position, I couldn’t wait to have a place to sit and think, to work in quiet, a place that wasn’t also my apartment.

An office of my own

In the end, my office wasn’t much like Dad’s. It was a tall box, set with commercial grade furniture made of laminate wood and a hard upholstered couch. It wasn’t particularly cozy—in fact it was usually cold (the university controlled room temperatures, making the wall-mounted temperature dials purely decorative). It had very little of my personality in it. I wasn’t brave enough to bring much into it.

But I still loved it. The desk curved around the chair, flanked by two big filing cabinets full of papers, purchase orders, and monthly grant fund reports that I transferred directly to a file folder from my campus mailbox. Bookshelves held books on plant genetic engineering and leadership and teaching, all above that unpleasantly solid couch that I used for naps when I was pregnant and for pumping afterwards. Framed images from our journal covers and knickknacks that lab members had given me from their travels were on display. There was a rug on the floor, a lamp in the corner, plants on the shelves. It was corporate design but it was mine, all mine!

But now, I could dig into reading and writing for hours and hours, no one around but me, my thoughts, and a Word file. I planned my lectures there. I tracked our manuscripts and grant proposals from initial idea through data collection, writing, submission, revision, and final rejection or acceptance on a big whiteboard Kanban board.

It was, to employ an admittedly tired reference, a Room of One’s Own. (Alice Munro wrote another incredible meditation on the life of a woman writer called The Office). It was my professional space, but also a personal space. I moved in with my husband-to-be right before graduating from college, and a room that only I occupied wasn’t within our means for many years. Having a space away from home to do work and be my academic self was key, especially after I had a child.

It was also, of course, a space for meeting with others. I’d seen, for the first time, some of the most exciting data collected by my lab members in there. I‘d had hard meetings with postdocs and students. I’d looked up from my computer to see a head poking in, “Want to see something cool on the microscope?”

The dark side of having an office

And it’s in the meeting with others that the dark side of having an office may appear.

An office provides space for reflection and focus. But it also can isolate and close off. It can be a physical representation of privilege and authority, protection and an elevation that might be more expected than earned. Students come to meet you there, not the other way around.

I’m surely not the first to think of the ways in which an office (and I suppose also a laboratory and classroom and campus) shape our understanding of the roles of faculty and students. (Please drop any recommendations for reading into the comments!).

Thomas encourages the reader of Conscious Uncoupling to think of sadness as a useful emotion during divorce, slowing you down, and keeping one from moving too far away from the events. She encourages the reader to spend time alone, to let yourself feel the sadness. If only I had an office where I could go to do just that.

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Discussion section

• What do you love about your office? Or what do you remember about offices of your teachers or professors?

• How do you think the faculty office shapes our understanding of what it is to be a professor?

• What other spaces shape our experience of academia?

• What did we lose during the pandemic when we lost working spaces that were separate from our homes? How does this vary, depending on gender, family status, and other identities?