Trading Spaces: The Faculty Office in Cross-Cultural Perspective

The faculty office is our most familiar institutional workplace. How it's organized says much about who we are and what we do.

By Terry Caesar

My next-door neighbor, Mr. Sato, contentedly puffs away on one of many morning cigarettes, while tilting back the chair behind his desk. In front of him sit five female students, very erect, around a bare rectangular table. They're listening intently to whatever Mr. Sato chooses to say. They're listening so intently they're not even taking notes. Perhaps it would be considered impolite. Questions certainly would be. I fear it might be similarly impolite if I ventured to ask Mr. Sato exactly who these students are or what subject they are studying. I certainly can't ask him how he thinks the setting might be shaping this study. How can you teach in your office?

But, then again, for professors, what exactly is an "office"? I've taught in five countries besides the United States. In China, I never had an office. Nobody did. There were no offices for faculty. In Saudi Arabia, I was among a handful of foreign teachers consigned to one large room. We had no room dividers, so we could not design cubicles. We had just a few small desks, which offered each of us at least a bit of private space. A single collective room was also all that was available for most of the arts and letters department in Brazil. Just before I left, a new building was completed at the university, which enabled individual office spaces for most faculty. Only deans had offices in Egypt, where I recall one faculty member's graciously receiving a chair set down especially for him by a student in the middle of the arts courtyard.

In Japan, however, my office is twice the size of the last one I had in the United States. This seems to me only just, since my apartment is half the size of my present one in the United States. But can I explain the size of my office as simply symbolic of the fact that the workplace is more important in Japan than the home? Indeed, the workplace is so important, at least from the vantage of professors, that it incorporates certain features of the home. Hence, inside the offices of colleagues can be found such things as floor-to-ceiling plants, personal televisions, small refrigerators, microwaves, and sofas. These items can be charged to the "supplies" portion of the annual budget accorded each professor. At the end of my first year here, I ordered a refrigerator.

To repeat: for professors, what constitutes an office? Before Japan, I would have defined an office in two ways. First, its definition depends upon how much private space a nation accords to professors. In many nations, there is none. An individual teaches as he or she is situated in the rest of life: as part of a collective whole, or "unit," as the Chinese say. Private space has to be won, if at all, from the public realm.

In some cultures, it's hard to understand, though, why anybody would want to "win" it in the first place. Before we foreign teachers were presented with our large room (in a brand-new building) in Saudi Arabia, some of us shared smaller offices of—to us—an indeterminate kind. Saudis kept coming in to ask how we were. No privacy. At first, we were annoyed. It took a while to realize they feared we might be lonely.

Before Japan, I would have tried to define the office of a professor in negative terms. It is not, to begin with, a classroom. Offices are for individual work, while classrooms are for student or group-sanctioned activity. Moreover, an office is only for certain kinds of work, having to do with one's own projects, granted, but always provided that these projects are comprehended in some way by larger and more embracing professional terms. Occasionally, you may sleep in your office. You may sleep with others (but not students) in your office. Yet your office has not been accorded to you in order to engage in such possibilities, and you pursue them at some peril. However large or small its size, what you are supposed to be doing in your office is either preparing for class or in some way doing research.

To develop this second emphasis a bit more: officially, the "moment" of the office is the moment of the Office Hour. Every faculty member is supposed to, as we say, not only "have" but "keep" this time, like a trust. Office hours testify to the crucial, not to say constitutive, intersection of private space with public space, as defined by the imperatives of either a teaching schedule (students can complain to the chair if they show up to see their professor and the lights are out) or an institution's day-to-day business (the dean will be upset to call a faculty member during office hours and to find that nobody answers the phone). Your office may be yours, and yours alone, to use. But it is not yours to own. The department assigns it, the institution owns it. Each has the right to make you accountable for the time you spend in your office, most obviously in the form of office hours.

But there are office hours and there are office hours. I had to "post" six hours a week in the United States. I have to post one hour in Japan. No one has ever visited during this hour for the past three and a half years. Indeed, this semester I don't even remember when the hour is. "Students don't come then," one colleague assured me. "If they want to see you, they'll ask when after class." Yet even students whom I expect knock on my office door as tentatively as if they are knocking on my apartment door. How could it not be so? I could have a cot in my office; although it doesn't happen at my university, I'm told that professors at some other universities in Japan are accustomed to sleep in their offices.

Granted, my office door, like all others here for faculty, has in the middle a narrow slit of glass window, top to bottom, as if to provide additional testimony to the public character of this space. Yet, in fact, my office is fraught with privacy in ways that give pause even to Japanese students. I've never had an office like this, because I've never been a professor like this. A Japanese professor is a "sensei," a far more honorific word, redolent of greater cultural and even moral authority than a mere "teacher." A sensei needs, no, commands room.

Is this why he—a pronoun far less unproblematic in Japan than in the United States, since there are far fewer Japanese female professors—cleans his own office? (Garbage, however, is left outside the door in the hall for custodians to dispose of.) Again, the public realm stops at the door, as if out of respect. Indeed, the demarcation is so decisive that the indeterminate or liminal space of the door itself is effectively effaced.

Consider: is the door part of the inside of the office or part of the outside that governs the disposition of the inside? When an American friend's progay poster on her very American door was defaced by someone, she complained to the dean, only to be told that the poster was "public property." But is every dean throughout the country so clear on this point? No need to worry about the question in Japan, where it is unusual for professors to festoon the front of their office doors with posters, cartoons, quotations, or other material so common in the corridors of offices in the United States. From the point of view of Japan, these materials resemble nothing so much as a vast, intricate, muffled cry of individualism, anxious about its own status rather than secure inside it.

Suppose we switch the point of view, and consider once again the difference between office and classroom, one as clear and fixed in the United States as it is blurred in Japan. Once more, I believe, a more confident Japanese command of inner space explains why the difference can be blurred. My Mr. Sato can wave his cigarette like a wand because students have been invited into his office on his terms, not theirs. The space is as indisputably his as the books that line its walls. Students possess no authority to contest this space.

American students may not have such authority either, but they are part of a culture where authority of all kinds is up for negotiation (if not outright dispute) in ways it simply is not in Japan. Here, a professor's office is an office as it might have been decades ago in the United States, back when most professors were men, more buildings were covered with ivy, and few students came to class in jeans. For an American professor today to compare offices in the United States and Japan is, from an exclusively American perspective, to reach for an almost unrecoverable past.

Thirty years ago on American campuses, professors who weren't professors because they didn't have offices at all were rare. No more. How can you either be regarded or regard yourself as a professor if you don't have an office? Yet today, more than 40 percent of the faculty nationwide consist of people who are part time or temporary, and who therefore either do not have individual offices or else have to share office space, often with several others. (In Japan, such an unhappy state of affairs is coming into existence, but more slowly, according to a system whereby professors have long been permitted to teach one or two courses at other institutions, and where institutions commonly provide a "part-time lounge," as mine does, for foreigners and other faculty.) If you have an office today in the United States, you can be grateful—relieved to be on the tenure track; pleased to be spatially separated from custodians, secretaries, and teaching assistants, as well as part-time faculty; and happily ignorant of the joys (if any) of a cubicle, like they have in the bad old business world.

Do cubicles represent the future in American academic life? They seem to me to have been unknown, anywhere, when I began teaching thirty years ago. My office was part of a larger suite that included the department chair and his secretary. Could it have really been just some sort of curious space, utterly taken for granted, without any vocational status or cultural clout?

I shared the office with an older professor, who arrived the previous year and had had the room to himself. We quickly came to be friends. The office became such an agreeable conversational site that we even included students—his or mine, it didn't matter, whoever showed up. All that seemed to be expected of us was that we wouldn't tell them to go away.

It would never have occurred to either of us, though, to teach them there. I don't believe it would have occurred to the students, either. A friend of ours liked to tell the story of a German professor who beat a student who showed up at his office door and addressed him as "Herr Professor." The correct title was "Herr Doktor Professor." We laughed. We weren't "professors" like that! Our doors were always open. Some of us didn't mind being called by our first names.

Times changed, as they usually do. So did my office. I remained alone for some ten years once my office mate moved into an office of his own after our second year. How to characterize those subsequent years? Once alone, I didn't even move my desk. It's as if my office mate took the whole social world with him; his students (older than mine) were more fun, and his friends (older than me) more interesting than most of the students and friends who arrived at my door. Although it still was always open, it was as if I had already begun to repudiate anyone who might appear by continuing to have my back to the door-my more gregarious mate had formerly faced all visitors directly. Or is it just that I had become more enthralled by the latest literary theories emanating from France than by last year's proposals of the curriculum committee voted on by the department or this year's proposal on something or other passed by the Faculty Senate?

Times changed, and eventually my own official space shrunk by half, when one fateful year another office became available. It had two immediate advantages: it was away from the detestable department secretary and it had a window! But perhaps the real lure was that this tiny office—down the hall, in a corner, on a ledge—was away from almost everybody. I moved in and remained inside for the next twenty years, with the door always open, as if as a sop to a public character that in fact the office never imaginatively or emotionally acquired for me.

What is an office? An office is finally the central material site where your professional life, for better or worse, is bounded. Setting aside the question of the degree to which the institution acts to constrain you (it can be measured in inches), or the degree to which your culture acts to shape you (it may not be finally measurable at all), or how much private space you will be granted, or how little public space you will be imperiled to allow—no matter all these factors and more, an office exists to be inhabited in very private ways. This is why we academics have them, and not (yet) cubicles, which are far less decisively separated from the organizational whole.

"O God," exclaims Hamlet, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space." Who has not felt so in his or her office, at least a few furtive times? As academics, we are not only literally bounded by the distance from our homes to the school parking lot or from the nearest airport to the farthest conferences. We are also bounded by our offices, and, once inside, a more sovereign realm exists for us, especially after office hours, than anywhere else in our professional lives.

Do we take this realm for granted? If so, we shouldn't. Offices are the site of our freedom, and, again, we need only compare the world of business to see how precious this freedom is. In Mike Daisey's account of "doing time" at Amazon.com, 21 Dog Years, the author eventually works his way up to corporate headquarters, where he gets, not an office (something reserved only for his supervisor and others occupying greater, almost unimaginable heights), but a cube. A cube is enough. Indeed, a cube is almost too much: "My own cube with walls that went up high, lots of room, and a chair for visitors. . . . No one to bunk with me—all mine! I sat in my cube for hours with my arms outstretched, enjoying the silence and the space." This is the note. In our offices, we need do nothing. Walls go all the way to the ceiling. There are doors! Arms outstretched, we can dream away, about the students who will come, or the students who will never come, or the ideas we can try to write, or the ideas somebody else has already written. At least we're academics. At least we don't have cubes.

Perhaps this is why Mr. Sato continually amazes me. No more than Hamlet, he doesn't need anybody else in order to command his realm. The conviction that Hamlet salutes is paradoxical. You only feel it alone. Granted, the personal space of the office is not necessarily private; Japan provides a salutary example for anybody (like me) who ever disdained the distinction. But not even all-glass doors or double the number of office hours can prevent the space from being lived in wayward ways or imagined in fantastical ones. Why do academics have offices rather than cubicles or cubes? The office of each of us, especially when we compare it to the work space of other countries or even that of other professions, marks the moment of our separateness. It is a constitutive one. It is by our offices that we will be known just as much as in our classrooms. Especially because one day soon our most private spaces could well become as accountable as our most public ones already are, we should be grateful for both.

Terry Caesar is an instructor at Palo Alto College and the University of Texas at San Antonio. His latest book, published in 2003 by JPGS Press in Tokyo and edited with Eva Bueno, is I Wouldn't Want Anybody to Know: Native English Teaching in Japan. He wrote this article during his latest year as senior professor of American literature in Japan.

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