Naming my space

Topics/tags: Autobiographical, academia, short

I’ve moved to a new office at 1127 Park Street. The building I’m in used to be home to the Center for Careers, Life, and Service [1]. For the near future, it will be home to the Office for Analytic Support and Institutional Research [2] and to a few faculty on sabbatical who have had to give up their offices for their leave replacements.

Of course, all of the signage around the building still says Center for Careers, Life, and Service [3]. CLS has put up some signs that say We’ve moved to 1103 Park Street, but they don’t really say what’s in the building now.

From what I know of the College, they won’t replace the signs for some time [4]. So I decided to put up my own signs, for the time being. I knew what to put for OASIR. But I thought it would be useful to put something for the floor with the faculty on sabbatical. The question was what to call it. I wanted something slightly humorous, but not something that would offend the administrators in the neighboring building, who would probably walk by it regularly. I thought about it for awhile, but the best I could come up with was Faculty Sabbatical Digs or perhaps Sabbatical Faculty Retreat.

I tried asking a few colleagues, but they were much too serious, and came up with things like Faculty Sabbatical Offices. I also thought about something like Sabbatical Faculty in Exile, but I didn’t think that would fly with the administrators. It’s also not all that appropriate.

So I asked my family. My children wanted to try names that had acronyms. One was Sabbatical Professor Annex. Another was something like Replacement Annex (for) Yearly Knowledge (generation). I suggested Faculty On Official Leave/Sabbatical. They also tossed around words like Displaced Faculty and Faculty Re-education [5]. I considered those word choices even more inappropriate than mine.

I ended up with Relocated Faculty on Sabbatical. We’ll see how that works. If anyone has a better suggestion, I’ll put it up.

Postscript: I have considered naming it Mason House because it houses OASIR. But I don’t think I’m allowed to do that.

[1] CLS, for those who like TLAs.

[2] OASIR, which has a few extra letters.

[3] I’m not sure about the placement of the commas.

[4] I’ve heard rumors that they plan to upgrade all the signage on Park Street in summer 2020. If that’s the case, I expect that all of the changes will wait until then. But even if it’s not the case, I expect that it will take time to update signage.

[5] After all, one of the purposes of sabbatical is to learn new things.

Version 1.0 of 2019-07-12.