PENALIZED FOR BEING COOPERATIVE. Reassigned Time questions the utility of office hours, conventionally understood.

In other words, scheduling those four hours, clearly listed on the syllabus, will not necessarily get students in to see us, nor will it necessarily make us available for individual consulation. I'll admit freely that when I scheduled the four hours I was a person who would try to make some office hours times when I knew it was unlikely that students would show. Why? Because I knew that I'd end up scheduling meetings outside of office hours with students, and I'm totally not a fan of uncompensated and unrecognized labor. Scheduling inconvenient office hours was a way of protecting my time, at a time when I felt like I needed to follow the letter of the law even if not the spirit of it. As I got more comfortable in my job, I realized that what mattered most was the spirit, and not the letter.

The post lays out a number of trade-offs a faculty member makes in scheduling office hours, particularly where university rules require faculty to declare and keep a set schedule.

Measure inputs, not outputs, anyone? It does no good for the real mission of the university if the professor complies with the letter of the law by publishing office hours strategically chosen to inconvenience students. It also does no good for the real mission of the university to treat by-appointment-at-other times as uncompensated and unrecognized labor. (Under that kind of time accounting, I've probably accumulated enough evening and weekend and informal chats at the coffee house and late night electronic mail checking before exams to mark off for an entire semester.)

The posts that inspired and were inspired by the Reassigned Time post are more instructive. Historiann deals with the more general issue of how-much-of-collegiality-is-helping-colleagues-raise-their-kids. (My position: it's unreasonable for people with kids, or people with longer commutes, to use either of those criteria as reasons to beg off duties or reject proposed meeting times. Such stunts deprive the people without kids, or sometimes partners, of the opportunities to, well, have a life also.)

Where we live, and whether we choose to reproduce, is a choice, not an unavoidable obligation or accident, and we all have to arrange our personal lives around our work responsibilities. That, it seems to me, is a minimum qualification for retaining one’s job. So it’s not that your colleagues’ families “prevent them from performing some of their duties;” your colleagues are choosing not to perform some of their duties. It’s reasonable, in my opinion, to want to restrict on-campus days to one’s teaching days, especially if your department is one that expects a certain level of research productivity, but having a 2- or 3-day a week schedule is a privilege, not an entitlement. We all should understand that if department meetings, job talks, special guest lectures, and the like are scheduled on a non-teaching day, we need to make the schlep. (And, by the way: it’s really uncool for people who are on Tuesday-Thursday schedules to complain about having to come to campus a burdensome THIRD DAY of the whole week! Besides: by the time you’re an Associate Prof., you’re on campus 3 days a week, no matter what your teaching schedule is.)

It is unacceptable and unfair to use one’s family life–or any other chronic excuse–to duck out of work, regardless of the sex of the ducker. (I hear you when you say you fear that your female colleague is reinforcing all sorts of stereotypes about mothers in academia–but the problem really is gender-neutral, and should be addressed in that fashion.) Somehow, your colleagues manage to find child care when they need to teach their classes or to get some research and writing done–and if they can find child care to do the parts of their jobs they find pleasurable and interesting, then they can find day care, babysitters, or neighbors to help out when they need to attend meetings and meet with advisees.

That second paragraph also applies to living at a distance. That was a sore point with many faculty members, particularly in administration at Wayne State, which was close enough to Ann Arbor that a substantial number of faculty would live there rather than in Detroit or one of the closer suburbs. Ann Arbor is a better choice on aesthetic grounds, but it's not a gated community with limited access to Detroit. It's also a sore point at Northern Illinois, which is close enough to Chicago that a substantial number of faculty live in the Fox Valley. Those suburbs are generally reverse-commute to DeKalb.

The dean at Anonymous Community suggests the sore point is endemic to higher education.

In theory, of course, there's nothing stopping professors from coming to campus on days when they don't have classes or scheduled office hours, and some do. But experience has taught me that a non-trivial number of people will minimize their number of days on campus per week, then used jam-packed days as excuses to avoid any and all college service. I've seen it happen enough times to appreciate the value in just ensuring that people are physically present a certain amount of time. When half the department shirks service, the other half typically picks up (most of) the slack, completely uncompensated. And I've heard "I'm not driving to campus just for a meeting" enough times not to discount it. There's a reason that the phrase 'full-time' specifically references 'time.' Some elements of the job can't be done from afar, so a too-quick abandonment of office hours would dump those elements entirely on an unlucky few.

The additional service doesn't have to be uncompensated, although a department has to write cumbersome rules to ensure some sort of compensation while not inducing inefficient substitution toward committee work rather than scholarship of some kind.