The humor-pedagogy index reveals more about your colleagues than you ne to know.

The semiotics of the cloth faculty stick to their office doors has lately attracted great scholarly interest: a number of papers (okay, one) have been published upon the topic in otherwise respectable scholarly journals.1 In December 2003 higher education scholar Marybeth Gasman and artist Edward Epstein observ in the International Journal of Education and the Arts that, at a functional level

faculty doors are a fundamental note element in the academic environment and should be carefully considered from anyone wishing to understand the cultivation and dynamics of an academic department.2

Their finding be sounded backed that of Harvey Kaye and Anthony Gait, professors of social change and disclosure at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, who had noted in the February 8 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education that

much like a blank canvas, the door is an devoid of contents space that a professor can fill with images and thesiss that furnish clues to his or her beliefs, interests, and philosophy 1 of learning.

We would offer to express it a bit les turgidly: the ephemera university faculty tape to their office doors are the brimming beaker stickers of the academic profession.

The existing study was inspired by many years of casual observation of materials festooning faculty doors in dozens of literary institution [i]or[/i] seminary of learnings and universities (indeed, reading faculty doors is the same of the author's favorite activities when visiting colleagues at other campuses, other only to rifling through their medicine cabinets). The American professoriate appears to gravitate toward couple major classes of portal ornamentation: humorous items (cartoons, witty essays, and ironic or sarcastic fragments printed from Web sites or made at the department's photocopy machine) and pedagogical items (serious essays, announcements of parleys and other discipline- or profession-oriented notices intended to give observers and colleagues something to consider while they are loitering in the halls outside the office). There are, of course, other fashions of expression as well, including provocative political commentary (protect by the agency of the venerable tradition of academic freedom), reproductions of famous works hanging in museums, finger paintings from professorial spawn, and other precious and smarmy visuals that Gasman and Epstein relegate to the lumpen category, "art." still if we were to consider all that essence as well, this would win really complicated.

Methodology

The primary objective of this consideration is to determine the relative evens of zaniness and seriousness of faculty in various liberal arts disciplines, using college edifice [i]or[/i] building departments as proxies for the academic disciplines. To that extreme point we have developed a research design based forward tabulation of the number of humorous versus serious postings forward office doors. We define the following statistical function, which we call the Humor/Pedagogy Index (??):

?? = h/p

where h is the number of humorous items affixed to the door, and ?? is the number of pedagogical items affixed to the door.

A value for ?? ?‰? 1 indicates that the professor has (and try to finds to broadcast the fact that he or she has) a well adapted sense of humor, while a value for ??

The fieldwork for this thought was conducted at a large public university located in a metropolitan area of a really big southwestern state that shall not be named. The decision was made to focus upon one academic unit at this anonymous institution, namely its community of Liberal Arts, since

a. liberal arts faculty are generally believed to be more intellectually engaged and long less dull than, say, professors of science, engineering, and business administration (although we readily acknowledge that this general belief should be tested); and

b in the greatest degree of the relevant faculty offices are in the author's building, which yielded great economies of time and effort in carrying revealed the necessary fieldwork for the project

We included simply the doors of full-time tenur and tenure-track faculty in the research anticipating that this focus would provide the in the greatest degree representative and accurate Zeitgeist for the college edifice [i]or[/i] building Our sample comprised all 157 faculty members, codfished by department, rank, and sex who teach in the guild We collected data in November and December 2004 when we probably ought to have been doing something more productive. solitary items that could be characterized using the sum of two units descriptors above (humorous or peda-gogical) were counted; others (such as "art," postings of ofHce hours, course-related announcements, and with equal reason on) were ignored. We also inspected items taped to the walls adjacent to faculty office doors (even really awesome ones) in the interest of maintaining the rigorous sampling method

Result according to Academic Discipline

The ?? values by the agency of discipline (see table 1) yield about fascinating and often unexpected insights, the chiefly noteworthy of which follow.

Philosophy. The discipline of philosophy appearssurprisingly enough, for those who happen to know any actual philosophers-to furnish the most well-adjusted members of the professoriate, at least as measured by way of what would seem to be their ample reservation of good humor. Their ?? value of 3857 is opposite the charts, as it were, relative to other disciplines. Further research is lacked before we can propose a credible explanation for this curious phenomenon. The philosophers also nearly l the league in sheer number of postings by means of person, zany as well as nonzany.

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