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There¡¯s nothing like an office door for making a statement. It can be blandly impersonal, welcoming or offputting, crisply corporate or cheerfully anarchic.

So when Hugh McKenna, pro vice-chancellor for research and innovation at Ulster University, suggested the idea of a feature on what academics put on their doors, we knew we were on to a winner.
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Once we¡¯d tweeted about it, we got loads of responses ¨C all gratefully received (and many thanks to those who retweeted). The furthest afield came from Mexico City, where Raul Pacheco-Vega, an assistant professor in the public administration division at the Centro de Investigaci¨®n y Docencia Econ¨®micas, puts comics on his doors ¡°to remind myself and others that academia is and can be fun, and to not take myself and others too seriously¡±.

I¡¯ve been able to use a fair selection of these door stories in my feature, which appears in this week¡¯s issue (and some more of them appear in this blog).

What can one say about the ¡°Nietzschean¡± lecturer whose door declared ¡°I am not a man; I am dynamite!¡±, or the person who used ¡°a string of fabric elephants as a locating device¡±? ?One academic couldn¡¯t remember the origins of the plastic stick-on lizard, though it may have had something to do with a discussion he once had with a student about ¡°royal zoos and bizarre pets mentioned in medieval chronicles¡±.

Can it really be true that the statement ¡°The first rule of Thermodynamics is that you don¡¯t talk about Thermodynamics¡± comes from ¡°a 100% authentic photocopy of an exam script¡±? And it¡¯s hard not to warm to the wry humour of a sign saying ¡°Have a nice day, but hey, no pressure¡±.

As with almost any topic, there were also academics on hand to provide an expert perspective. I remembered that I¡¯d once interviewed ¡°supersnooper¡± social psychologist Sam Gosling, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, whose research explores how people reveal their personalities in the environments they create around them. I also recalled Rachel Hurdley, a research fellow in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Cardiff University, who I interviewed a while back about her work on an even more surprising topic, ¡°the power of corridors¡±.
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So what were her thoughts on the ways academics use doors? She offered a cast of typical characters who give themselves away on their doors: ¡°There is the professor who offers only the short message: email for appointments, and haunts the building only during the student vacations. Then there¡¯s the keen new lecturer with her photo on the door, which is always open, and festooned with flyers for staff-student events.

"Lecturers who fancy themselves as creative types adorn their doors, any available pinboards and wall space with exhibition posters, their own artwork and a studio-standard black and white image of themselves. Or the very, very important scholars, who advertise their books, provide copies of their journal articles in a special door-pocket, and may find a moustache has been drawn on their impressive visage glowering full-size from a finely framed photo.¡±

There¡¯s a moral in there somewhere, as Dr Hurdley points out: ¡°Do door art at your peril.¡±

Read Matthew Reisz's feature on academics' doors