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My office hours are Tuesday 1-3 in Evans 601. When people come to my office hours, they are enjoyable and fun.
When people don't come to my office hours, an unhealthy dynamic starts: First, I start accomplishing other tasks during them. Second, I start mentally slotting other tasks as things I can do during my (empty) office hours. Third, I start resenting students who come to my office hours and getting grouchy.
Nip this vicious spiral in the bud!
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"I now know it is a rising, not a setting, sun" --Benjamin Franklin, 1787
J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at U.C Berkeley, a Research Associate of the NBER, a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Chair of Berkeley's Political Economy major.
Among his best works are: "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare," "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style," "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression," "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."
The Eighteen-Year-Old is going to college next year, which means that I need to think about making more money. (The idea that one might write checks to rather than receive checks from universities is now strange to me.) So I have signed up with the Leigh Speakers' Bureau which also handles, among many others: Chris Anderson; Suzanne Berger; Michael Boskin; Kenneth Courtis; Clive Crook; Bill Emmott; Robert H. Frank; William Goetzmann; Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin; Paul Krugman; Bill McKibben; Paul Romer; Jeffrey Sachs; Robert Shiller;James Surowiecki; Martin Wolf; Adrian Wooldridge.
It's a mixed bag. Had even one of my professors at Flagship Public University not scowled at me in my dozen or so attempts of coming to office hours I might have liked college more and might have gone to grad school. It didn't stop me from getting A's but sure didn't make me want to become a professor. Those people are testy!
So instead I made millions in the dotcom bubble. Thanks grouchy professors!
Posted by: Chris | October 09, 2007 at 01:46 PM
Damn. I wish you'd been a prof back when I was in school; most of mine didn't even bother to show up to their own office hours at the beginning of term, presumably in an attempt to make sure we didn't get in the habit of dropping in. And here you are encouraging it!
Posted by: Jannia | October 09, 2007 at 01:49 PM
The cycle DeLong describes is widespread in academia. If students do not regularly come to OHs, we start doing other things, and we begin to plan on doing them.
Posted by: c.l. ball | October 09, 2007 at 02:13 PM
They should rename your chair the Stakhanov Chair of Universal Economics. You are giving the rest of us layabouts a bad name.
Posted by: James Wimberley | October 09, 2007 at 02:29 PM
I spent that time driving through Metro Detroit rush hour traffic (six lanes, 20-40 MPH). If only you had told me earlier :)
Posted by: Barry | October 09, 2007 at 06:55 PM
Aside from the small matter of living in Colorado and not being a registered student, I would greatly like to take you up on that offer. I might not get answers to my questions, but I'm sure that with time, the quality of my questions would improve.
Posted by: Michael Cain | October 09, 2007 at 08:22 PM
what michael cain said, except I live even further away ;-).
Posted by: supersaurus | October 10, 2007 at 02:51 AM
Be thankful for small favors. At least you're not Eugene Fama. He's got all sorts of people coming by to talk, get autographs and pose for pictures.
It got to the point that he was said to have "see me for office hours" posted next to his door.
I think he slipped away to work from another office nobody knew about.
Posted by: Auto | October 10, 2007 at 05:04 AM
An opportunity to chat with Prof DeLong for 20 minutes or so and no one takes him up on it? College is wasted on the young.
Posted by: Bloix | October 10, 2007 at 08:30 AM
You do realize that a professor's office hours are a utility-providing good as well as one whose provision entails opportunity costs, right? The most efficient outcome is therefore to charge for student use of office hours, including the judicious use of price discrimination, i.e., bigger fees for use of office hours just before an exam or paper due date. And there's the added benefit that the extra revenue would reduce your grump factor ;-)
Posted by: andres | October 10, 2007 at 12:05 PM
So, Brad, should we non-students come visit you during office hours if we happen to visit Berkeley, and save you from the grouchy spiral?
Posted by: Emma Anne | October 10, 2007 at 01:12 PM
As perhaps the only UCB student in the thread here, I will dutifully take up the office hours and save us all.
Posted by: Jason | October 11, 2007 at 10:54 PM