Manic Expression and Procrastiblogging in a Virtual Faculty Lounge

Thanks, of course, to Dan and my friends over here for the invitation (and for using a picture that shows me with hair).  With blogging and Facebook, we can all now accomplish easily what somebody once said to me about Richard Posner (and he was doing it in the days of legal pads, dictaphones and IBM Selectrics):  never having an unpublished thought.  My problem is that I've been diagnosed as a manic expressive, and it doesn't help that I'm doing a new prep for contracts (which I adore teaching, by the way; a student just told me in the hallway that I have them terrified "but in a good way") which means that ANYTHING is an excuse to procrastinate.

Some time later in the month (maybe even tomorrow), I will have you rolling your eyes (or quickly scrolling to the next post) with some of the random things I think about, but for right now I have a really practical question about faculty lounges.  We don't have one.  Apparently we had one before I got here, but it didn't get used, so it got turned into a classroom.  I really wanted there to be one - with some big cushy chairs and footrests and a television that gets Turner Classic Movies - because on Mondays I teach from 2:00-3:15 pm and then not again until 8:25-9:40 pm (that's at least an hour and a half past my normal bedtime), and I didn't want to go home and experience the sauna that was undoubtedly the Park Street T station in 95 degree heat.

What are the conditions under which there exists a good and vibrant faculty lounge (assuming there are any)?  At Tulane, the bagels, donuts, fruit, and coffee in the morning (plus the cushy chairs and television set) helped, as did the "guillotine-style" bagel cutter Ed Sherman ceremoniously contributed in the first and only Tulane faculty meeting I ever attended.

Comments

[Jacqueline Lipton]

I have to say that donuts and fruit certainly help - this was my experience when I visited UF last spring.

[Matt Lister]

At Penn, during the school year, the faculty lounge gets used at least for the following things:

1) faculty breakfast most days. I don't know much about this as I don't come in early enough and eat breakfast at home, but I know there is such a thing

2) workshops and talks several times a week, at different times of the day, usually w/ lunch or snacks. It's a pretty good place for talks, though the set-up encourages people to sit further back from the speaker than is optional.

3) Faculty lunches, once or so a week in addition to talks. Sometimes these include business discussions for the law school, though often they are just social.

4) Faculty "round-table" discussion lunches, sometimes w/ lunch provided, where interested people meet and discuss a news article, recent case, or something like that.

There may be other events, too, and there is also a coffee machine and fridge, as well as newspapers, law reviews, etc. but these are the main events I've noticed.

Finally, I'm opposed to those sorts of bagel cutters, as they tend to smash as much as cut. Much more rarer, but better, is the device that holds the bagel in a manner similar to that above but where a normal bread knife can then be used to cut it, giving a much happier split to the bagel.

[Michael Kang]

At Emory, we basically no longer have a faculty lounge. We have a big room that used to be a lounge, and is still called the "faculty library," but now is little more than a big conference room. It is used as such for workshops, events, and even classes. I do miss having a private lounge for faculty, to say nothing of my envy for the lounge at USC stocked full of soft drinks and snacks.

[Matt Bodie]

NYU has the mother of all faculty lounges. But Jeff, tell us more about Contracts -- are you using a new book?

[Tulane 2L]

Did you know the Tulane faculty lounge refreshments are procured and set up by students? I find that hilariously absurd. We also genuflect in the hallways when Sherman wanders by.