The empty chair

While I was finishing a paper at home, a colleague from the administrative staff posted a photo on the internal network:

an empty corridor, with the caption,
“The summer silence on campus… where is everyone?”

The reactions were predictable: 😊 🏖️ 😎
Light-hearted, no doubt.

And yet beneath the jokes ran something more persistent: a quiet undercurrent of suspicion.
“You must be at the pool every day, right?”
Or, to my students:
“You must be left to fend for yourself, your supervisor is never around.”

It made me wonder:
when did being present become the ultimate proof of working?

If I really had spent all that time by the pool, I would probably have an Olympic medal by now – not a pile of unfinished articles, reviewer comments, and looming deadlines.

In academia, two worlds quietly coexist.
For support staff, the campus is the workplace. Work has fixed hours, fixed locations, and above all: visibility. If you are there, you are working. If you are not, apparently you are not.

Academic work, by contrast, increasingly happens elsewhere: at home on a laptop, in digital archives, at conferences abroad. Its outputs – articles, data, grant proposals – are largely invisible to those not directly involved.

What is visible is an empty chair.
And that chair rarely sparks curiosity; more often, it provokes distrust.

The comments are seldom openly hostile.
They come wrapped as humour or casual concern:
“Oh, I haven’t seen you in ages.”
“Do you have yet another sabbatical? And has that been approved?”

The insinuation is clear: I am perpetually on holiday, with the university inexplicably indulging me while they have to work.

Conferences fit neatly into this frame. What are, for academics, long and intense working days – presenting, networking, planning – are easily reframed from the outside as a free holiday. That these days routinely spill into evenings and weekends, without overtime or compensation, barely registers. As if international collaboration were mainly about hotels and sunshine, rather than jet lag and performance pressure.

It is in this gap between perception and reality that things quietly shift. Support turns out to be conditional. Those who are visibly “there”, who follow the expected rhythm, tend to be helped; those who work structurally out of sight encounter commentary, monitoring – or, more effectively, delay. Not helping, after all, is also a way of shaping outcomes.

Summer amplifies this logic. The campus is quiet, so “no one is working”. What goes unseen is that these weeks are often the most productive: uninterrupted writing, analysis, preparation. The assumption that academic time is flexible – and therefore optional – clashes with work that unfolds in cycles of sustained concentration rather than nine-to-five routines.

The empty chair licenses a role reversal. Support staff – whose job is to assist, not to audit – start checking timetables, flagging schedule conflicts, wondering aloud whether that absence has been properly accounted for. The insinuation is clear: if you were here, we wouldn’t need to ask. Proximity turns out to be the condition not for productivity, but for being left alone.