Some faculty members in Monroe Hall who feel at home in their offices are packing their bags.

Due to the ongoing construction on Monroe Hall, faculty in the departments of political science, math and sociology will have to relocate from their current offices to temporary modular offices in the Mercy Hall parking lot.

According to vice provost of information technology, Bret Jacobs, the modular offices will be used for about two years as the construction on Monroe works from the top floor down.

“It’s kind of a moving target,” Jacobs said. “Some of those departments will take a little longer for their floors to be ready in Monroe, but I envision the modular office will be in use for about two years.”

Jacobs said he has been working closely with the effected departments and hasn’t been experiencing any resistance from faculty members about moving into the modular offices. But as faculty members get ready for the move, they’re still concerned about the limited space they’ll be working with after the move.

“The challenge is we don’t know what the size of the new offices are going to be,” said professor and associate political science director Gerardo Lopez. “I literally brought about a quarter of my books to my office. The rest are actually in my home office.”

Lopez considered himself lucky to not have accumulated too much in his office since he just recently moved in, but the difficulty of moving can be higher for professors who have become settled into their current environment.

“We’ve got faculty who have been here for 25 years that have acquired a lot of books,” administrative assistant to the sociology department Joy David said. “We won’t have any available storage space on campus, so we’ll be seeing boxes back to people’s houses of books they don’t want to get rid of.”

David said that even though the task of packing can be daunting, the department makes a weekly effort to get things squared away.

“Every Friday about two o’clock is when we have our little purge party,” she said. David said the purge party is when all available faculties help pack or throw away items in the office.

Much of the faculty on the fifth floor are looking to be in the modular offices by Dec. 7. The faculty may have to deal with a smaller working space, but Jacobs pointed out that they won’t have to deal with heavy machinery being used right outside their office windows.

“It’s been a little bit noisy. There’s been some things we’ve had to move around within the building,” he said. “So I think that to some degree several of our faculty are happy to be out of the construction zone.”

Hasani Grayson can be reached at [email protected]