This issue is one that will be relevant for postgraduates, lecturers and retired academics too: the thorny question of who gets the best office space, or indeed any office space at all! Although it might sound rather insignificant in the scheme of things, your office space allocation can have serious ramifications on your teaching and research life.
I am lucky at my institution because I have (in my humble opinion) one of the best offices in the building, great views but more importantly strategically located near colleagues and easy for students to find. We don’t have our own offices, but instead share with one other person. I rarely see my office-mate, our schedules just happen not to clash. However, I often see his students; my day is punctuated by heads coming round the door looking for my colleague. This can be disruptive, especially if I am seeing students myself, but for the most part it’s a great arrangement. It’s as though I have the privacy and space of my own office really.
This is a long way from the experience of many of you, I know. Tiny rooms being crammed full of many postgraduates, or being forced to share computers and not having the freedom to be in the office when you want. Some universities want to encourage staff to work from home as much as possible, which may be great for the lecturers concerned but this has implications for office space. Rumours abound that hot-desking will be introduced to prevent offices being used only two or three days out of the week.
For lecturers who are responsible for the academic and pastoral care of students it is vital to have some sort of private space in which they can talk to students without the fear of being overheard or removed from their desks. Also with increasing amounts of admin work to do, academics need the space to store their records in a secure environment that they have access to at all times, not an area that’s being shared with many other members of staff.
For temporary tutors the issue is also important as without office space tutors can feel dislocated and without any sort of institutional identity. Students can’t find you and nor can colleagues. The lack of office space or its temporary nature can seem like just one in a long line of insults from an uncaring institution. So, far from being a trivial matter, your office space is vital to your identity but also to doing your job to the best of your abilities.
