Outing the Elephant (on commuters)

One of the more vexatious issues confronting small 21st century universities, ones that happen to be located close to a metropolitan centre, is the issue of commuters. Certainly "commuting" is an elephant in the room for many universities just outside the GTA--one thinks of WLU, Guelph, Waterloo, Brock, and Trent--and it's time to out the elephant before putting it to rest once and for all.

On one hand there are clearly good reasons to live in the same city as your place of University employment. You can easily attend guest lectures, run back to the office if you've forgotten your notes, regularly enjoy college food (!), save on gas, and participate in the politics of everyday life around the coffee maker more than once a week. Most importantly you can have spontaneous face time with students and colleagues and actually be a part of a culture of presence. I reckon these are some of the reasons that some European universities (like Zurich) actually have residency requirements for employees.

On the other hand there are also sound reasons why some individuals choose to live in a different city than where they are employed. They may well have family obligations, may need proximity to research intensive libraries like the Robarts, or may well simply prefer, in our case, Toronto or Ottawa or Kingston (or somewhere else) to Peterborough. As one colleague remarked to me last week, gone are the days of a family packing up the house to follow the main breadwinner to wherever the job may be. And of course there is always Skype, telephones, email, WebCT, and so on. We live in a global village and there's no need to insist on an old-fashioned physical presence. Moreover, many so-called commuters actually show up regularly for everything; many absentee colleagues live around the corner and/or have darn good reasons for staying at home in the evenings and on weekends.

I've thought a lot about these two options and have heard arguments on both sides. I've been taken to task for using the word "commuter" as short hand for absenteeism; I've also been reminded that where one lives is irrelevant so long as one fulfills the terms of ones employment. Fair enough. If the shoe fits and so on.

In the end I reckon the real issue is not really about physical face time or spontaneity or the politics of hallway presence. The real issues, I think, are about the quality of education provided, about the accessibility of professors to their students in ways that both parties are satisfied, and finally about workload equity, fairness, and collegiality. So long as every student is educated well, every professor provides access to students and has access to what she or he needs to do the job, and so long as no one member consistently gets the peach teaching times or meetings are not consistently and tediously scheduled around one individual's timetable, then what we need to do is think about, not what constitutes a "culture of presence," but rather about what we need to do to cultivate and foster a Collegium of engagement, be it physical or virtual.