I’ve been busy with various school preparation things (and it’s kind of slow news around campus), so haven’t had much of a chance to post much lately here. But as I think about my schedule for Fall 2009 and about the not-so-distant faculty contract talks, I thought I’d bring up something I’d like to see addressed: the need for changing the rules for office hours.
I came across this discussion here in the Confessions of a Community College Dean blog (via Inside Higher Ed), where “Dean Dad” was talking about this post by Dr. Crazy at Reassigned Time (you gotta love the pseudonyms in the blogosphere, right?). The short version is this: the tradition of faculty holding “office hours,” because of contemporary communication technologies, is outmoded and unnecessary.
Here at EMU, faculty are contractually obligated to hold a total of 10 office hours a week, though the way that I’ve always done this (and I’ve always been told this is perfectly acceptable via the contract) is to schedule at least five hours and be available via appointment. The idea, obviously, is to be available to students, both ones in classes the faculty person is teaching and also ones a faculty member might advise. When this format was devised (30 years ago? 40 years ago? more?), requiring faculty to be in some physical place where they could help students out of class made sense. After all, how else were you to get a hold of your professor? At best, you could call the office, but even then, the professor would have to be there to answer the call.
Nowadays, we have email, texting, facebook, twitter, cell phones (I don’t give out my cell phone number to students generally, though I would if EMU was willing to supplement my bill– but that’s another story/post), etc. Every faculty person I know communicates with students outside of class via email, and often at rather odd times of the day. It is not at all uncommon for me to answer student email late at night, early in the morning, and on weekends or holidays; it’s also not at all uncommon for students to expect their professors to do this (“I emailed him last night at 2 am and my professor still hasn’t responded five hours later; he must be lazy”). Unless I require them to come and see me in person, my students almost never just “drop by” to see me.
With online courses, where the entire enterprise is held out of place and out of time, the idea of physical office hours seems even more ludicrous. And yet, faculty teaching online at EMU are supposed to hold on-campus office hours. I was reminded of this again this summer: even though I was teaching online, I was expected to hold office hours on campus. It wasn’t that big of a deal because I always have something to do on campus anyway, but to require it was, well, goofy.
Having said that, I’m not for the idea of eliminating on-campus office hours and/or availability of faculty entirely. Besides the fact that there obviously times in which meeting face-to-face is convenient or necessary, completely doing away with faculty office hours might make it difficult to conduct the other business of the university. After all, if I was teaching entirely online and there was no contractual expectation for me to ever be on campus, then why couldn’t I teach from Europe and just skip all those pesky department and committee meetings?
In any event, I realize this is a comparatively minor issue and it is not exactly a brutal hardship that professors are expected to, well, show up to work once in a while. But in a contract year where we’re not likely to get much, it might be worth revisiting the current out of date rules for office hours. Perhaps, for example, we can acknowledge that being available “via email” is pretty much the same as being available “by appointment.” And perhaps we can acknowledge that if a person is teaching completely online, there isn’t much of a need for physical office hours at all.
