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Deconstructing Faculty Doors
The humor-pedagogy index reveals more about your colleagues than you need to know.
By Karl M. Petruso
The semiotics of the stuff faculty stick to their office doors has recently attracted great scholarly interest: a number of papers (okay, one) have been published on the topic in otherwise respectable scholarly journals.1 In December 2003, higher education scholar Marybeth Gasman and artist Edward Epstein observed in the International Journal of Education and the Arts that, at a functional level, faculty doors are a key element in the academic environment and should be carefully considered by anyone wishing to understand the culture and dynamics of an academic department.2Their finding echoed that of Harvey Kaye and Anthony Galt, professors of social change and development at the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, who had noted in the February 8, 2002, issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that much like a blank canvas, the door is an empty space that a professor can fill with images and texts that furnish clues to his or her beliefs, interests, and philosophy of learning.
We would prefer to express it a bit less turgidly: the ephemera university faculty tape to their office doors are the bumper stickers of the academic profession. The present study was inspired by many years of casual observation of materials festooning faculty doors in dozens of colleges and universities (indeed, reading faculty doors is one of the author’s favorite activities when visiting colleagues at other campuses, second only to rifling through their medicine cabinets). The American professoriate appears to gravitate toward two major classes of portal ornamentation: humorous items (cartoons, witty essays, and ironic or sarcastic screeds printed from Web sites or made at the department’s photocopy machine) and pedagogical items (serious essays, announcements of conferences, and other discipline- or profession-oriented notices intended to give students and colleagues something to ponder while they are loitering in the halls outside the office). There are, of course, other modes of expression as well, including provocative political commentary (protected by the venerable tradition of academic freedom), reproductions of famous works hanging in museums, finger paintings by professorial spawn, and other precious and smarmy visuals that Gasman and Epstein relegate to the lumpen category, “art.” But if we were to consider all that stuff as well, this would get really complicated. Methodology The primary objective of this study is to determine the relative levels of zaniness and seriousness of faculty in various liberal arts disciplines, using college departments as proxies for the academic disciplines. To that end, we have developed a research design based on tabulation of the number of humorous versus serious postings on office doors. We define the following statistical function, which we call the Humor/Pedagogy Index (?): ? = h/p, where h is the number of humorous items affixed to the door, and p is the number of pedagogical items affixed to the door.
A value for ? > 1 indicates that the professor has (and seeks to broadcast the fact that he or she has) a good sense of humor, while a value for ? < 1 suggests that he or she has a passion for inspiring students, is a classroom overachiever, or is some combination of the two. Alternatively, R. S. Schiavo, a psychology professor at Wellesley College, argued simply at the 1999 annual meeting of the American Psychological Association that “people do it to signal to students that they are accessible.”3
The fieldwork for this study was conducted at a large public university located in a metropolitan area of a really big southwestern state that shall not be named. The decision was made to focus on one academic unit at this anonymous institution, namely its College of Liberal Arts, since
a. liberal arts faculty are generally believed to be more intellectually engaged and much less dull than, say, professors of science, engineering, and business administration (although we readily acknowledge that this common belief should be tested); and
b. most of the relevant faculty offices are in the author’s building, which yielded great economies of time and effort in carrying out the necessary fieldwork for the project.
We included only the doors of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty in the study, anticipating that this focus would provide the most representative and accurate zeitgeist for the college. Our sample comprised all 157 faculty members, coded by department, rank, and gender, who teach in the college. We collected data in November and December 2004, when we probably ought to have been doing something more productive. Only items that could be characterized using the two descriptors above (humorous or pedagogical) were counted; others (such as “art,” postings of office hours, course-related announcements, and so on) were ignored. We also overlooked items taped to the walls adjacent to faculty office doors (even really awesome ones) in the interest of maintaining the rigorous sampling method. Results by Academic Discipline The ? values by discipline (see table 1) yield some fascinating and often unexpected insights, the most noteworthy of which follow. Philosophy The discipline of philosophy appears— surprisingly enough, for those who happen to know any actual philosophers—to produce the most well-adjusted members of the professoriate, at least as measured by what would seem to be their ample reserve of good humor. Their ? value of 3.857 is off the charts, as it were, relative to other disciplines. Further research is needed before we can propose a credible explanation for this curious phenomenon. The philosophers also nearly led the league in sheer number of postings per person, zany as well as nonzany. Sociology and AnthropologyThese disciplines are very much in the running, which doubtless reflects the traditional level of positive and upbeat engagement with their human subjects that these disciplines demand. ArtThe art faculty is somewhat anomalous. Although the department’s y value is relatively high, the small number of items per door calls for explanation. English professor James M. Lang, in his seminal 2004 essay on faculty office doors, had predicted that “surely the art and music departments—known for their creative expression— would feature the most varied, creative, and interesting doors. Not so. With one minor exception, the doors of the art and music faculty members were bare.”4
Our own study confirms the results obtained by Lang at his small eastern private university: the mean number of items affixed to the faculty doors of the art and music departments at the institution in our study is a whelming 1.0. Lang cited one art professor who offered a possible explanation for this counterintuitive phenomenon: “Too much pressure. . . . Whatever they put on their doors, people will think they’re showcasing it as great art. If it’s not an original Picasso, they’re not hanging it.”
This hypothesis struck us as perfectly idiotic, so we decided to probe the matter with a randomly selected member of the art department faculty at our subject university. When asked why she and her colleagues kept their office doors so bare, the professor of painting noted, “We communicate about visual ideas all day.” In any event, she added, “The door is not a big enough canvas” for what she wants to communicate. HistoryHistory requires special comment. Its ? index of 1.217 requires an asterisk—kind of like what will probably happen to Barry Bonds’s lifetime home run total on account of the whole performance-enhancing drug thing—because of the one faculty door that is tricked out with forty-seven cartoons and absolutely nothing of a serious pedagogical nature. The grand total of humorous items for all other members of this, the largest department in the college, is twenty-six. If we were to ignore the portal postings of this outlying, anomalously zany professor, the history faculty’s ? would be a dismal 0.433, which would consign the department—and, by association, the discipline—to the depths of humorlessness. Political ScienceThe discipline of political science floats significantly below the salt, with a ? value of 0.903. Doubtless, this low value reflects a fundamental earnestness and dourness in the discipline—exacerbated, no doubt, by the conservative domination of all three branches of the federal government in effect at this writing. English The dangerously anemic ? value of 0.467 for English, which places it well south of humor territory, comes as something of a surprise, inasmuch as this discipline long ago hijacked irony as its exclusive intellectual property. It might be noted in this connection that the most successful and hilarious send-ups of academic life have been written by English professors or deal with dysfunctional English departments. This matter is clearly complex, ripe for further investigation. Criminology and Criminal JusticeBut it is this discipline that really buries the needle. It is not immediately obvious how one can even accurately express this department’s y value since, among its six faculty members, we observe a grand total of one humorous item and zero serious items. Despite our repeated attempts to “crunch the numbers” (as we social science quant jocks say) using Microsoft’s powerful and reliable Excel™ software, the disconcerting result “#DIV/0!” kept appearing in the relevant spreadsheet cell. This message is shorthand for “dividing by zero is illegal.” We cannot avoid the conclusion that these professors are almost entirely lacking in both humor and fire in the belly. Perhaps their dean should have the lot of them attend a human resources workshop or something. Communication Finally, we must confront the peculiar status of the faculty in communication. The sum total of pertinent items on the doors of these professors is precisely zero. How fascinating it is to note that these are instructors whose special area of interest and research is communicating— but, to a person, they seem to have nothing to communicate to the wider world, of either a humorous or a serious nature. Maybe human resources can workshop this problem, too. Results by RankWe might expect that the stressful process of moving up the academic ladder would mellow one out. Alternatively, it might make one crankier and less flexible. Let’s do the numbers (that is, see table 2). The data are unequivocal: they offer perhaps the first solid, objective evidence in the history of scholarship on American higher education that puckishness correlates directly with academic rank.
Our study also demonstrates clearly that untenured faculty are the most timid members of the professoriate. Moreover, as the values plotted above show, the climb up the assertiveness slope from assistant to associate professor is both gradual and tentative. Upon achieving tenure, our population becomes only 1.25 times more willing to sticker its bumper, metaphorically speaking. Thereafter, though, the trendline takes off. Full professors are twice as likely to exhibit a sense of humor as associate professors, suggesting perhaps that by that point in their careers, they feel they have nothing to lose.
It might well be relevant in this connection that one professor (in the theater arts department), when queried about the total lack of postings on his door, paused thoughtfully for a moment, knitted his brow, and replied, “I used to put things on my door. Then I became chair.” As a group, administrators are of course known to be quite humorless (although we once knew a dean who had a “Question Authority” bumper sticker on his Lexus). Results by GenderAcross the disciplines in our subject population, male faculty at all ranks are 1.7 times more inclined to wear their sense of humor on their doors than are female faculty (see table 3). We submit this observation without comment, gingerly leaving to other researchers the opportunity to consider its ramifications. Summary and ConclusionsThe several essays about faculty door postings published to date have been insufferably cute, pointlessly anecdotal, or— let us be candid—too pedantic and jam-packed with “educationese” for all but the most resilient scientific researcher to slog through in their entirety. The present study seeks to put this emerging area of research on a quantitative footing once and for all. The development of the ? index will, it is hoped, inspire other researchers to expand upon our results.
Many questions raised by our study call out to be investigated. Herewith but a small sample: (a) What’s the deal with professors of communication? (b) Has anybody ever actually met a philosopher with a sense of humor? (c) Are administrators who rise through the faculty ranks more or less zany than those who do not? (d) Why can’t you divide by zero, anyway? Is this just another exasperating bug in a Microsoft application? Notes1. Karl Petruso is an archaeologist specializing in Mediterranean prehistory. This paper is his first foray into scholarly territory that involves actual living anthropological informants. This is his excuse for not filing any human subjects paperwork with his university’s institutional review board. Also, he is just kidding when he suggests that university administrators are a humorless bunch. The author would like to thank his current wife, Nancy, for her unflagging support and encouragement during the many minutes required to prepare the final manuscript of this paper. He also acknowledges with gratitude the efforts of John Madden, Al Michaels, and the production crew of Monday Night Football on ABC for providing welcome and appropriate background blather and visuals that sort of facilitated his concentration. Three colleagues assisted with the fieldwork for this project. The author would normally acknowledge them by name, but it’s probably in their best interests professionally to remain anonymous. Back to text 2. The article is available online at http://ijea.asu.edu/v4n8/. Back to text 3. See Catherine E. Shoichet, “Professorial Pinups,” Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 September 2002. Back to text 4. Lang’s essay, titled “Flamboyant Features of the Academic Habitat,” is available online at http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/ 06/2004060701c.htm. Back to text Karl Petruso is professor of anthropology and associate dean of the Honors College at the University of Texas at Arlington.
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