No Camping in Faculty Offices

(Photo: Vernon Fowler)

A student appears to have enclosed the commons: for the last two weeks, he has camped in a small public area in the vestibule of a suite of faculty offices, making it unusable for other students to meet in groups (its use in all previous years).  Believing that this is a public area, and absent my colleagues saying anything, I asked the chap to vacate the place to allow others to use it.  This is a classic case of the difficulty of maintaining property rights in a public setting with no way of enforcing public ownership other than moral suasion. This may be more of a problem in universities than in businesses, given what I find as the self-selection into faculty jobs of people who want to avoid confrontation.