Imagine if the above was true. It is absurd to think that just because an instructor does not have tenure they should not be given something as essential as textbooks. Yet, part-time instructors are often denied an equally vital resource: an office.

I don’t have an office. I work at three different districts, but not one of them is willing to provide me a space, shared or otherwise, in which I can meet with students, grade papers, . Despite this, each and every one of those three districts requires me to keep office hours. How I am expected to do this when I have no office in which to hold these office hours is beyond me. When students ask where my office is, I simply point to a nearby bench.

Why is an office such a rare commodity? The classic line from those who sit above us is that there simply is not enough office space to go around. The fact that I often find 2-3 tenured faculty sharing a tiny office would seem to collaborate this. Yet just the other day, during a department meeting, when the issue of finding some office space for adjuncts was raised, our chair raised his hands in frustration and revealed that an entire floor of our massive administration building was completely vacant; on this floor were offices, most already with desks and other furniture, enough to provide every adjunct professor on campus with his or her own space, provided they were willing to share. Why was this floor vacant? No idea, but it turns out that it has been empty for years now. When would we be allowed to claim some of this unused space? “Don’t hold your breath,” was our chair’s pessimistic reply. “Moving on, we’ve run out of money for paper.”

There’s another reason that I don’t buy the old “not enough space on campus” song and dance. I don’t want to start an academic class war here, but every time I do pass through upper echelons of our administration building, at every campus, I see door after door of spacious offices. These offices are huge, with clean carpeting, and plush couches which face giant oak desks. Whose offices are these? Why, they belong to the Vice Chancellor of Planning, or the Dean of Student Affairs, or the Dean of Student Development (different from the Dean of Student Affairs), or maybe even Vice President of Instruction. These mighty people all have their own enormous office. These gods among men do not need to share. In fact, as I stroll through the hallways, peeking inside to see how the other half lives, I often find these people not only have their own private offices of luxury, but they have personal secretaries who have their own little office as well. Meanwhile, I have a bench, and tenured faculty are packed like sardines inside of offices the size of my bedroom.

So I don’t buy it.

The first thing that we must accomplish is to prove that having an office is as vital a teaching resource as textbooks and chalk. On this note, I would say that college professors need to be available to meet with students to go over their grades, help students with key concepts or lessons that they might not be fully grasping, and just generally be available to answer students questions and address student concerns. This is not something that can be accomplished ten minutes before class. Students have the right to meet with their teacher privately, and one-on-one. Denying a college professor an office thus denies all of their students this right. On the teacher side of things, having a place on campus where you sit down and grade papers is essential to performing the full job. What do I mean by the full job? Well, the work doesn’t end when class does. Teachers have a ridiculous and intensive amount of work that they must do outside of the classroom: preparing lectures, writing lesson plans, and grading student papers. We need a place besides our homes to be able to do this part of our job. These requirements don’t go away if you are an adjunct.

Once we’ve established that having a desk, even a desk you share with 2-3 other people, is a necessary part of being a teacher, then we need to demand equal allocation of this resource. I don’t just mean equal allocation between tenure and adjunct, but equality of office allocation for both administration and instruction. I see no reason why the Vice Chancellor of Blippity Bloop needs a giant, CEO-like office, while it can be justified that 2-3 tenured professors can just share a tiny office. We need to demand equal accommodations, and if there isn’t enough space to give everyone these Vice President-sized offices of space and luxury, then I am afraid that the higher ups and going to need to learn how to share.

Not to compare apples to oranges, but the Screen Actor’s Guild has a great rule: on the set of a film or television show, everyone eats what the director and movie star eats. They decided that Tom Hanks gets lobster for lunch, then so do the extras; everyone eats the same. We need a similar rule for resources such as offices.