GMU-AAUP believes that all full-time faculty members -- tenure-line and term alike -- need private offices to do their jobs. This is not about vanity. This is not about pride. This is about the work we do, and it's about our relationships with students. When students come to discuss their work with us, they need quiet and privacy. When students need to disclose personal information related to Title IX or Disability Services, they need quiet and privacy. When CHSS faculty are doing their research, this often requires extended periods of intense reading and writing. To do this work, we need quiet and privacy. And not every CHSS faculty member -- and particularly not our Assistant Professors -- has a space in their home suitable for this kind of work. To be a faculty member, to be scholar and a teacher, requires a room of one's own. The University should not take this away from us.

But, to our astonishment, Mason is poised to do so. From what we learned in early March 2020, the new CHSS building--and we emphasize new--was designed to force 75% of CHSS full-time faculty to share offices. This is not what we were promised in previous meetings, none of which suggested that most faculty would be sharing offices. And so we have a ton of questions for CHSS leadership and the University administration: What happened? When was it decided that 75% of full-time faculty would be forced to share office space? Who made this decision, and why? And what can be done to find more office space for CHSS faculty, if not in this building, then across the university as a whole?

Our campaign is about pressing the administration for answers on these questions.

To learn more about the campaign for private offices in the new CHSS building, sign up on this page to join our mailing list. Also, please read these important resources as well:

1. Privacy is not a luxury (CHSS faculty survey on shared office plan) -- This report details the results of a GMU-AAUP survey of CHSS faculty. We found that (1) most CHSS faculty use their private offices frequently – at least three days a week or more; (2) nearly one-third of faculty have no private workspace at home; (3) when faculty conduct research, they use their private office space; and, most importantly, (4) faculty believe shared offices discourage students from seeking help with coursework and make it more difficult for students to share sensitive information (like Title IX concerns). In short, CHSS faculty want private offices not for selfish reasons, but because they believe private offices help build stronger mentoring and advising relationships with their undergraduate and graduate students.

2.Dr. Zachary Schrag's website and report -- Dr. Schrag has conducted rigorous historical research on the planning process leading up to Horizon Hall and the shared office plan. His research can be found on this website.

3. GMU-AAUP resolution -- This resolution calls on the Faculty Senate to take action to protect the principle that all full-time faculty need private offices to do their jobs, including building strong relationships with students and advisees, preparing for classes, and conducting research requiring sustained concentration.

4. Faculty Senate resolution -- This was approved at the Faculty Senate meeting on April 22, 2020. It calls on the Administration to adhere to their own office space guidelines by ensuring that all CHSS full-time faculty members are assigned a private office of at least 120 square feet.

5. Background on Faculty Senate resolution-- This document offers a one-page background on how the plans for the new CHSS building violate the University's own standards for full-time faculty office space, and how this move presents a harmful precedent for faculty in other colleges in the future.