N.U.'S SPACE PROGRAM
Office Politics at Their Most Concrete.
By Bill Kirtz
Is your office half empty or half full? Do you
overlook the dumpster or the Marino Center, tread on carpet or linoleum,
toil beneath a steam pipe or a caribou head? In Northeastern's own space
program, all this depends on planning, politicking, and happenstance.
With tact and databases, Director of Space Planning
and Analysis David Flynn manages every square foot of the fifty-eight-acre
campus. With foresight and an occasional paint job, Director of University
Planning/Research Edna Seaman allocates scarce resources. After they've
decided which program gets what facilities, professors scuffle for a room
of their own.
Don't blame those office problems on Flynn, Seaman,
and their cohorts. They're saddled with a campus that just grew.
Sitting in his cozy first-floor office in the
Fenway's Cushing Hall, Flynn notes that as the university expanded in response
to market demand, "a lot of allocation of space has just evolved.
We're not laid out in a natural way. We never sat back, like Harvard or
Columbia, and said that this building should be science, this humanities."
That's why, for instance, the biology department
is scattered from Leon Street to Saint Botolph Street and criminal
justice from Leon to Columbus Avenue-a problem
planners are working to correct. The Behrakis Health Sciences Center, which
will open next fall on the west campus, will free up Mugar Hall space and,
if things go right, let science departments come together under one roof.
Flynn and Seaman find the toughest part of their
job is reducing the size of existing programs. "Edna and I are trying,"
says Flynn, who has worked here since he graduated with an education degree
in 1980. "We need to take some low-use space and reallocate it to
growth areas. But there's a tremendous amount of pain" in doing that.
"It's a whole lot easier to deal with budgets, which are liquid, than
with space, which isn't. We try to shuffle people, but sometimes the political
costs aren't worth it."
Indeed. Veteran faculty watchers recall a senior
professor's space war against his venerable chairman. The two were allocated
new offices of equal size. Equal, that is, until a construction pal carved
the prof a space two feet wider than the chairman's. The chairman promptly
switched offices, triggering the professor's grievance proceeding-committees,
hearings, the whole bit-over twenty square feet. (He lost.)
Seaman says she doesn't handle such squabbles,
"thank God." Although she's seen "some sense of entitlement"
among space-threatened teachers and administrators, she says she's found
N.U.ers quite reasonable about their needs.
Flynn agrees. He thinks people here aren't as
imbued with corner-office syndrome as their business-world counterparts.
He says that "the deans have done a great job with the ebb and flow
of their departments." He's as happy as Seaman that he doesn't have
to determine just who goes where. "How to decide? By seniority? By
rank? I don't, and I shouldn't. It could be seen as Big Brother."
Well, then. Who decides who gets what space? Deans,
chairs, secretaries-and sometimes the clash of their competing interests.
As director of interdisciplinary studies, history professor Gerald Herman
holds title to a Holmes Hall basement office. How he got it tells you a
lot about academic intrigue. "Education and geology were fighting
over it, so the simplest thing was to give it to a third party," he
says.
Sometimes, the fight is mano a mano. A few years
ago, an administrative assistant awarded a just-acquired larger office
to a junior teacher, overlooking a ranking scholar on the grounds that
his long history of slovenly office-keeping did not warrant nicer digs.
The veteran threatened to go out in the garden and eat worms until he finally
got his space-which came with a magnificent view of the dumpster.
There are other considerations in space planning
besides ego and departmental fiefdoms, of course. As N.U. moves to raise
its standing among research institutions, science departments, in particular,
are hard-pressed to find enough space. Or even to figure out how much space
they really need. Some departments "ooze like amoebae," Seaman
notes, with their needs expanding and contracting according to the number
of research grants they get. She's tried to solve this problem by making
research proposals include space needs, so that the university isn't surprised
by a huge grant that carries similarly huge lab requirements.
The space race isn't limited to science. Research-unintensive
departments in the College of Arts and Sciences feel the pinch. Full-time
history teachers share offices. Four graduate assistants crowd one room.
There's no place for a new hire, forcing even incoming history department
chair Tom Havens to camp in temporary quarters for a while last fall. Faculty
tote maps around campus to find classrooms because there's no teaching
space around their offices.
These problems go beyond mere inconvenience. Herman
points out that as teaching becomes more computer-driven, adequate facilities
become a more pressing need. He and others also note that so many arts
and sciences faculty sharing space in the same building defeats a sense
of departmental identity. At Boston University, he observes, departments
tend to have their own brownstones on Commonwealth Avenue.
Seaman and Flynn acknowledge that there's too
much fragmentation, that departments and student services alike would be
better served if placed together. For example, Seaman knows "we need
to establish one-stop shopping for students"-addressing their housing,
tuition, and registration concerns in the same area-but adds that she has
yet to solve the puzzle of where that space will come from. Financial constraints
are the sticking point, not surprisingly.
With savvy and persistence, however, some even
manage to wind up with multiple offices. In addition to his interdisciplinary
studies space in Holmes Hall, the ubiquitous Herman can choose from the
Churchill Hall office he inhabits as assistant to the university counsel
or his home-base history-department lair in Meserve Hall. Not that any
of these could be called roomy. In the Meserve locale, wedged behind a
small wooden desk, facing bookcases crammed with more than 2,000 volumes,
the thirty-two-year veteran is barely visible over clumps of manila folders.
"Things just pile up," he shrugs.
Space-race losers can relieve the drab with the
wonky. In one of the biology department's Holmes havens, a combined graduate
student hangout/storage room sports a massive wooden table and a caribou
head salvaged from the Vermont statehouse. And occasionally, grunge seems
good. Mathematics professor Anthony Iarrobino shares a large, dingy Nightingale
Hall office with two others, but feels he won a round by successfully battling
to save the steam pipes renovators wanted to hide.
He's in the minority. N.U.'s space planners call
cosmetic improvements a relatively easy way to soothe the troubled professor
or director. Seaman, who gets high praise for fairness even from people
whose space she's cut, says she can renovate offices to make the trims
less painful.
Although administrators claim they scan every
building for unused space, some programs seem more equal than others. In
Dodge Hall, for example, many rooms in the downsized College of Business
Administration stand vacant. On Meserve's third floor, spiffy offices and
a glassed-in conference room make up the new Center for Urban and Regional
Policy. The sixth floor of Columbus Place sits empty, while another unit
in the building has its space halved.
Meanwhile, others like Phyllis Strauss make do.
Though honored as a Matthews Distinguished University Professor, she's
inhabited the same Lake Hall cubicle ever since she joined the biology
department in 1973. "In allocating space, nobody cares" about
the Matthews distinction, she says. "I'm in the boonies." She
has to walk across campus to Mugar Hall to get her mail. When she needs
conference space, she asks people to vacate the lunchroom down the chemical-fragrant
corridor.
Other departments have it worse, she acknowledges.
"Chemistry professors race around like chickens between their Hurtig
offices and their Egan Research Center labs."
Will this ever change? Saying she's been complaining
about disjointed departmental space for twenty years, Strauss is pessimistic:
"the university has no concern" with the problem.
Do Northeastern professors protest too much? After
all, in some professions, cramped quarters are standard. Washington Post
media critic Howard Kurtz points out that White House correspondents, some
of the most senior people in their field, huddle in dank cells "far
smaller than Fifth Avenue walk-in closets." And at least N.U.'s space
prevents the rabbit-warren effect of some large corporations, where rank
is measured in exact square feet and where you can't get so much as a coatrack
unless you move up a notch on the corporate ladder.
At Northeastern, you may not have a room of your
own. But you can always dream of a view of the dumpster.
Bill Kirtz is an associate professor in the
School of Journalism. His opinions appear regularly in "Talk of the
Gown."
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