Door Stoppers EXTERIOR DECORATION OPENS THE DOOR TO AN INTELLECTUAL COMMUNITY by Sean Koenig photo by Jill Nussbaum Like many formative events, it started with casual nudity. I stood on the fifth floor of New Cabell, perusing hallway literature while waiting for a professor to return for office hours. This was the Sociology Department; I expected garrulous liberal sloganeering, or at least a culled selection from Larson or Trudeau. To my disappointment, scanning the hallway brought only the specter of Old Mother Hubbard ... until I spied the door of new faculty member Debra Schleef. Sprawled out above the 1984esque standard issue office hours card was a nude photograph, a rotund plastic Barbie in the flesh; the caption attacked the psychological damage of unrealistically proportioned role models. The door also boasted family photos, post cards, and flyers in stark contrast to the bleak homogeneity whence it burst. The first president of our university, E. A. Alderman, inscribed on the entrance arch to the medical school, "Enter by this gateway and seek the way of honor, the light of truth, the will to work for men." Schleef's door echoed this -- but how many professors' office gateways conjure a more classic refrain from Dante, "Abandon all hope, Ye who enter here"? Every student can lay claim to a door as well, and the way in which we utilize this unique space speaks volumes about who we are and how we relate to the community around us. The door may seem at first a most unusual and mundane location to judge the tenor of our university. Actually, the door is a structural-functionalist battleground -- the boundary that delimits public and private space, the operculum that wards off the vulgar herds, the portal that ushers the chaotic world into an inner sanctum. At U.Va., it represents the one public space that individuals can control. Bulletin boards are cleared off and papered over unceasingly, rain reclaims our chalked sidewalks, and posting in non-designated areas can lead to judicial charges. I sampled the halls and doorways of U.Va., discovering en route a bounty of humor, practical information, and (just maybe) a path to the Holy Grail of a thriving intellectual village. In Civics we discussed the liberal manifestations of college; in Government arose the tenured radicals. If professors at U.Va. have a political agenda, it sure doesn't register on their doors. In every department, less than 10 percent of the faculty displayed any "activist" material, loosely defined as anything religious, political, or relating to a cause. Of all the crusades to which our instructors could pay lip-service -- environmentalism, human rights, literacy, rape awareness, funding for the arts -- what I found after examining over one hundred doors were some muted racial and gender equality plugs, a couple rainbow stickers, and one anti-nuclear cartoon. This phenomenon can be explained in two mindsets: why should they, or why don't they. Besides the obvious reason of supporting a cause, posting controversial material spurs debate and reflection, establishes the professor as a moral actor, not a didactic automaton, and celebrates the intellectual freedom we afford our instructors. From observing the doors of students and TAs we know that professors once must have gleefully hung their opinions out to season. So why do professors no longer appropriate this space to express their opinions? The answer seems to be a depressing concoction of apathy and coercion. I discussed this matter with a sociology professor, knowing him to be a man of outspoken opinions and an austere door. His response: "Nobody wants to foist his agenda on other people, especially since it's all the same liberal hogwash." Speaking to those who choose the ornamented path, the benefits waxed lucid. Take Kyra Gaunt in the Music Department, for example. As a new faculty member, the signs and clippings on Betty Shabazz, Rita Dove, the Fugees, and "Hip-Hop 101" establish her identity as a proud African-American female musician to those in her department and passing students. Gaunt also uses her door to critique attacks on black popular music, point out her concerns with lower minority retention for students and faculty, and promote cultural events. She described the Music Department as "provocative and forward looking"; ubiquitous decoration and touting of musical events on the doors of the department matched her commentary. Most professors do not match half her effort to promote change and culture at the university -- and it shows. Whereas activist propaganda was uniformly scarce, decoration and event promotion, serving aesthetic and practical ends, seemed to follow departmental trends. Posting activity varied less with the ontology of the department than the spatial configuration of the offices. Departments that have their own buildings (such as Anthropology in Brooks Hall and Biology in Gilmer) had more decorated doors than those that shared a cluster of rooms in a multipurpose building (such as Classics in New Cabell). Greater separation between classrooms and offices also increased adornment (compare isolated Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian in Wilson with Government in the back hall of New Cabell; or Chemistry, where classes and offices are separate, with Economics, where rooms are intermixed). A final factor seemed to be the proximity of the offices to one another: the closer together the faculty worked, the more they displayed on their doors (compare the nearly claustrophobic Music Department offices clustered together on one hallway with the dispersed offices in the physical sciences). If the motivation for professors to express and humanize themselves to students and other faculty does represent a positive step toward approaching the ever elusive academical village ideal, these insights offer important signposts to where open dialogue is flourishing and floundering. Putting departments into large multipurpose buildings may be fiscally sound and allow Carruthers to gorge itself with more students, but may not be the best way to create an academic environment and attract superior professors. Kyra Gaunt was quick to identify the trade-off -- that isolating offices can decrease faculty-student interaction. Relocating offices need not be the only method of fostering departmental cohesion: a more pragmatic solution may be efforts to bolster the sense of department identity, which predicates a more open and comfortable environment for professors. The Chemistry Department has annual picnics, a strong graduate student council, and professors sharing ideas to further research. Combined with communal physical structures -- its own building, parking lot, a common supply room, and non-classroom meeting rooms -- Chemistry harbors a tangible sense of community, made visible by cartoons posted on doors. The day U.Va. ceases to be an educational facility and morphs into a research institute, Mr. Jefferson will further soil himself. I found a disparaging paucity of "welcome" and "stop on by" signs, the mass produced office hour cards seeming more like warnings to go away (save for a meager hour or two a week) rather than a hearty invite. If U.Va. is truly ready to blossom into an intellectual melting pot and grow ivy wings, professors must undergo a concurrent punctuated equilibrium from clam to anemone, pulling in students to the siren of knowledge, not barricading them out in the arrogance of its generation. 

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