When I was an undergraduate I walked into the coffee
area of our zoology building and was informed that “some of the most important
papers on animal behavior were written here”.
It was a somewhat ugly coffee area in an ugly concrete building, with
vinyl covered plywood tables and bright orange upholstered bucket chairs that
looked like they had escaped from Austin Power’s 1960s love pad. The coffee
wasn’t even good, in fact the zoologists were highly envious of the botany
department who had a tea trolley with excellent tea and chocolate covered
cookies, but I digress… The coffee area was the place to be as that was where
everyone in the department congregated, talked about what they were reading or
working on, and most importantly, brain-stormed ideas. Sure there was a certain amount of
procrastination going on, with faculty avoiding having to go back to grading,
hiding from sheets of data that had to be entered onto excel spread sheets, or
balking at yet another hundred samples to analyze back in the labs. But the
collegiality that there was in that coffee area: with undergrads chatting to
the “silverbacks” of the faculty, sharing their innovative ideas, and getting
mentoring advice in return; or scientists from different disciplines advising
on different or new techniques to colleagues that had encountered a brick wall
in their research progress; was quite frankly more valuable than many lectures,
and worth the price of a disgusting cup of instant coffee. Our department was
not alone. At the famous big science facility CERN, home of the large hadron
collider, there are whiteboards in the lunchrooms because when the scientists
there get together they can’t but help brainstorm ideas, and this is encouraged
as some of these lunch time collaborations have yielded important scientific
fruit.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that
conferences are a necessity for the growth of an academic. They give you a
chance to share your ideas with other academics to receive support, or possibly
criticism, so that you can strengthen and refine your analysis and your
interpretation of your data. They are important events to find out the methods
and results of peers in your field, information that could be incorporated into
your own studies. Informal places where you can get advice, share ideas and
develop research and writing partnerships. Rare is the conference where I don’t
come home with a note book full of contacts to email, studies to cite and
methods to try out. You can travel around the world to find a venue to discuss and
debate with your peers. Sadly there is no such place within my university.
There is a laughingly called “faculty lounge” but it is basically a converted
storage room, with a couple of arm chairs, that has basically been taken over
by senior administrators as a meeting room anyway.
According to its website and mission statement, my
university department supposed to be interdisciplinary - where science meets social
science and policy analysis - with practitioners in multiple fields being
brought together. But most researchers at the university work in isolation,
locked away in their offices or labs. Despite its supposedly inter-disciplinary
nature, my department isn’t great at getting together. There are some faculty
in the same department that I see maybe once a month at a faculty meeting, some
I never see for semesters at a time. This is just within the department, let
alone with faculty in other departments in the college of science, or
university as a whole.
There was recently an idea to have joint lunches in
departmental conference room, so faculty (and possibly graduate students) could
get together and chat/share. This was a great idea, but it was also pretty much
a disaster with only one or two faculty at best turning up. Which is fair
enough, who wants to relax or hang out in what is ostensibly a classroom and/or
a place of examinations.
What we dearly need is some sort of lounge. A place
where faculty, staff and ideally graduate students, can get together and chat,
sip coffee and hang out in a relaxed and informal atmosphere, where academic
news can be shared and ideas exchanged. Somewhere with a comfy chair where you
can read the latest issue of science or nature in comfort and then chat and
debate about the articles with colleagues. This could be at a university level,
or ideally a department level. Other departments have spaces for meeting and
getting together that are not classrooms or conference rooms. Our neighbouring
psychology department has many, and even <horror> offices for graduate
students. Such a place would greatly aid the spread of ideas, mentoring and
collegiality. I’ve worked with several universities and institutions and this
is the only one that has not had some sort of faculty and/or graduate student
lounge or club, such an absence is to the universities detriment in terms of
promoting productivity, intellectual development, innovation and also for
general morale.
Nobel and
Pulitzer prize winner Saul Bellow once said “Goodness is achieved not in a vacuum, but in the company
of other men”. The same could be said
about ideas and innovation. Meeting in a relax atmosphere leads to the forming
of academic relationships and exchanges of ideas, that is the power of coffee.
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